Overview of Microsoft Azure - Cloud
Microsoft Azure is an expanding set of cloud services to help user’s organisation meet your business challenges. It has freedom to build, manage and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.
Introducing Microsoft Azure
Microsoft has created a cloud computing service, which is known as Azure.
Azure was announced in October 2008, started with code "Project Red Dog", and released on February 1, 2010, as "Windows Azure" before being renamed "Microsoft Azure" on March 25, 2014.
It is used for building, deploying, testing & managing applications services through Microsoft data centers.
It supports many different programming languages, tools, frameworks & provides software, including Microsoft tools and third-party software.
Features
Very easy to deploy applications on the cloud
If you are .NET developer and you are using Visual Studio, you can just right-click on your project file in the IDE and publish it to the cloud.
With the help of Azure, you are just a few clicks away from launching your application on the cloud.
Low cost
Azure also provides a “pay-as-you-go” pricing model which enables a business to lower its costs by only paying for what has been used.
You only have to pay for the active services. If you have 10 services which are stopped and one running, you have to pay only for that one service.
Security
Azure provides the infrastructure and platform to run your application securely.
It also provides a multi-factor authentication in its app services which makes the authorization and authentication more secure.
Autoscaling & High Availability
If you need more servers for your application due to its traffic increase on some days then you can provide certain rules of scaling up or down. It will scale up or down according to the rules you have mentioned.
Services
Compute services - Virtual machines, infrastructure as a service allowing users to launch general-purpose Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, as well as preconfigured machine images for popular software packages.
Mobile services - Mobile engagement collects real-time analytics that highlight users' behavior. It also provides push notifications to mobile devices. HockeyApp can be used to develop, distribute and test mobile apps.
Storage services - Storage services provide REST and SDK APIs for storing and accessing data on the cloud.
Data management - Azure Search provides a text search and a subset of OData's structured filters using REST or SDK APIs.
Machine learning - Microsoft Azure Machine Learning service is part of the Cortana Intelligence Suite that enables predictive analytics and interaction with data using language and speech through Cortana.
Privacy
Microsoft has created a Microsoft Azure Trust Center for managing privacy and security related concerns.
Microsoft Azure has several services compliant with compliance programs including ISO 27001:2005 and HIPAA.
Microsoft has stated that, per the USA Patriot Act, the US government could have access to the data even if the hosted company is not American and the data resides outside the USA.
