Azure Basics

• Azure is Microsoft’s private & public cloud computing platform
• Provides developers & IT admins tools to provide, build, manage, and deploy applications.
  • on a massive global network
  • freedom to choose tools and frameworks
• More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies run on the Microsoft Cloud [source]

Azure services

• More than 100 services..
• Compute services such as VMs and containers that can run your applications
• Database services that provide both relational and NoSQL choices
• Identity services that help you authenticate and protect your users
• Networking services that connect your datacenter to the cloud, provide high availability or host your DNS domain
• Storage solutions that can accommodate massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data
• AI and machine-learning services can analyze data, text, images, comprehend speech, and make predictions using data
• See also list of Azure services

How Azure works

• It uses virtualization
  • Uses an abstraction layer called hypervisor.
    • Separates tight coupling between hardware (CPU, RAM, GPU..) and its operating system
    • Emulates a real computer in a virtual machine
      • Can run multiple virtual machines in same time
      • Optimizes capacity of abstracted hardware
      • Can run any OS such as Windows, Linux & macOS
• Azure repeats virtualization in massive scale
  • Each data center has many racks filled with servers
  • Each server includes a hypervisor to run multiple virtual machines.
  • A network switch provides connectivity to all those servers
  • One server in each rack runs a special software called fabric controller
    • Each fabric controller is connected to another software called as orchestrator
      • Orchastrator manages everything in Azure, including responding user requests
        • Users requests using Azure API
          • Azure API can be reached in many ways including Azure Portal
        • Orchestrator packages everything it’s needed and sends to package & request to fabric controller.