What is an Azure Cloud Service: An Introduction to the Leading Cloud Platform
Before cloud computing, organizations had to store all their business assets such as data and software on their own on-premises servers and hard drives. The more the business the more storage it required. This way of storing data is not scalable at speed. It means that good business would probably result in a server crash.
But today, with the cloud, organizations have gained the ability to scale their storage capabilities as per their business requirements. Moreover, the cloud empowered businesses to streamline operations, reduce costs, drive agility, and accelerate innovation. And the credit goes to the leading cloud service providers (CSPs) like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In the previous blogs, we learned the complete details of AWS and GCP. In this blog, let’s understand what Azure Cloud is, its services, applications, and pricing details.
What is an Azure Cloud Service?
Azure is a cloud computing platform launched by the tech giant Microsoft in 2010. It offers more than 200 cloud products and services that enable businesses to leverage data, storage, analytics, networking, and many more IT solutions at a flexible scale.
Launched in February 2010, significantly later than its competitor AWS, Microsoft Azure has grown to become the second-leading cloud platform within a short period. In the first quarter of 2022, Azure accounted for 21% of the global cloud services market share, while AWS and Google Cloud covered 33% and 8% share, respectively.
As of now, Azure has 67+ regions globally, more than any cloud provider. There are over 160 physical data centers spread across the world, empowering Azure customers to stay close to their applications and data for enhanced performance.
Its hybrid cloud capabilities fuel innovation and great business outcomes have made Azure the trusted cloud platform for 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
“Microsoft understands enterprises better than anyone. And they’ve been true partners with us on this journey,” says Victoria Harris, Public Cloud Manager at Chevron.
“Microsoft didn’t ask us to bend to their vision of a cloud. It was Microsoft meeting us where we are today,” says J.B. Hunt.
Some key features of Microsoft Azure are:
- 100+ compliance offerings, the highest in the cloud ecosystem
- High-speed connectivity from the cloud to your datacenter at 100 Gbps via Azure ExpressRoute
- 1 billion USD annual investment in security R&D with 3500 cybersecurity experts to protect your cloud
- 99.95% availability SLA and 24×7 tech support
- Tool- and language-agnostic
Cloud Azure Services
Azure offers over 200 cloud services, which are segregated into 21+ categories. Some of the main categories include computing, storage, networking, security, IoTs, containers, analytics, DevOps, AI & machine learning, database, and web services.
Let’s have a look at the most sought-after Azure services:
1. Virtual Machines
This Azure service enables you to create and provision Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) in a matter of seconds and save significant costs. It is an on-demand, scalable computing resource offering the flexibility of virtualization, so there’s no need for any physical hardware. Azure gives you the freedom to choose the right virtual machine on par with your business- and mission-critical workload needs. You can easily run high-performance computing applications and SQL Server, SAP, or Oracle software on Azure VMs.
With Azure, you can deploy VMs with a computing capacity of up to 416 vCPUs and storage of 12 TB. You can also enjoy up to 3.7 million local storage IOPS per VM. Moreover, Azure customers can leverage up to 30 Gbps Ethernet and the cloud’s first deployment of 200 Gbps InfiniBand.
2. Azure Virtual Desktop
Azure Virtual Desktop, formerly known as Windows Virtual Desktop, empowers you to set up a secure, remote desktop in a few minutes. Now, you can access your desktop and applications virtually from anywhere. You can use your existing Windows license and deploy Azure Virtual Desktop to provide the best-virtualized experience with the familiarity and compatibility of Windows 10 and 11. With the Azure portal, you can easily manage your end-to-end Azure Virtual Desktop deployment operations and other Azure services.
3. Azure SQL
Azure SQL database services enable the Azure users to migrate their entire SQL workloads to the cloud while ensuring complete SQL Server compatibility and OS-level access. With Azure SQL Managed Instance, you can modernize your existing SQL Server applications with ease, at the required pace. The SQL service also supports modern cloud applications.
Azure is the only cloud service that automatically rolls out the latest updates and patches and offers the latest SQL Server features and functionality. So, you are now relieved from end-of-support hassles as the databases are patched, updated, and backed up automatically. Even complex operations like high availability configuration, performance tuning, and disaster recovery are automated, empowering your teams to focus on innovation.
4. Azure Cosmos DB
One of the most popular Azure services, Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database service. It is a fully managed, serverless, distributed database service for developing and modernizing high-performance applications of any size and scale. For NoSQL database services like MongoDB and Cassandra, the users can enjoy 99.999% availability while ensuring performance to a single-digit millisecond. The service gained immense popularity due to its automatic scalability, enterprise-grade security, continuous backup, open-source APIs, robust SLAs, and no-ETL analytics over real-time data. Azure Cosmos DB also empowers users to write and read latencies at a fast pace with multi-region writes from anywhere in the world.
5. Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) empowers users to easily develop and deploy cloud-native, containerized applications, with built-in CI/CD pipelines and security guardrails. You can seamlessly lift and shift your existing applications to containers with this fully managed Kubernetes service. Users can also deploy and manage the microservices-based architecture with ease. The service facilitates horizontal scaling, load balancing, self-healing, and secret management. Moreover, the Kubernetes on Azure allows cloud customers to strike the right balance between speed and security for code delivery by implementing secure DevOps. Along with the above-said use cases, AKS gains in-depth observability into your on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters.
6. Azure Cognitive Services
Azure Cognitive services allow developers and data scientists of all expertise levels to integrate AI capabilities into their applications with ease. You can embed the ability to speak, hear, see, search, understand, and make advanced decisions into your apps. Azure gives you the freedom to deploy Cognitive services from the cloud to the edge. You can build and deploy your own Azure AI solutions for various use cases by leveraging the programming languages you already know.
7. App Service
Azure App service allows you to develop enterprise-ready web and mobile applications for any platform and device quickly and simply. This fully managed service allows you to create apps with CI/CD pipelines and deploy them on a scalable and reliable cloud infra with zero downtime. It also facilitates enterprise-grade performance, rigorous security and compliance standards, and high availability with an SLA-backed uptime of 99.95%. The automatic infrastructure maintenance and security patching simplify the operations.
8. Azure Functions
As one of the top Azure services, Azure Functions enables developers to simplify and accelerate application development using the languages they are already familiar with. This event-driven, serverless compute platform helps you realize an end-to-end serverless application development experience. It means that you can easily develop and debug locally without any additional setup, deploy and monitor in the cloud at scale and get intelligent and proactive insights.
9. Azure Quantum
Azure Quantum service assembles and integrates some of the most innovative and compelling quantum computing and optimization solutions available today into a single cloud service. This service facilitates an open ecosystem to write code once and run it on multiple quantum hardware architectures of your choice. You also get the flexibility to leverage the development tools of your preference with support for the popular quantum SDKs like Cirq, Q#, and Qiskit. Azure Quantum also enables you to develop applications durable for present-day quantum hardware and scalable for future hardware.
10. Azure Arc
Azure Arc gives you the ability to extend your Azure platform to develop infrastructure, applications, and services and operate them across data centers, in multi-cloud environments, and at the edge. You can consistently develop, deploy, and configure cloud-native applications and clusters at scale from source control. Azure Arc also enables users to centrally organize and manage a wide range of resources including SQL server, Windows server, Linux server, and Kubernetes clusters from anywhere.
11. Azure Backup
Azure Backup is a centralized, one-click backup solution that helps you to protect your infrastructure, databases, and workloads (including Azure VMs, SQL and SAP databases, and Azure Files) against ransomware. This service is cost-effective, scalable, and secure. The centralized interface makes it easy to monitor, operate, manage, and optimize your entire backup estate in a unified and consistent manner. With Azure Backup, you get durable storage options such as locally redundant storage (LRS), geo-redundant storage (GRS), and zone-redundant storage (ZRS).
Micosoft Azure Prices
Whether you are migrating your first workload to the cloud or fine-tuning complex deployments, Azure cloud service helps you realize cost savings with competitive pricing models. Microsoft Azure prices depends on many factors, including the service type, capacity requirements, location, and level of management. The main azure cloud service price models are as follows:
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Free tier
Azure offers a free tier that allows companies to use a variety of cloud services for free for the first 12 months after creating an Azure free account. You will also get USD 200 credit for additional services in the first 30 days. Moreover, Azure offers 25+ services that are available for free always.
Azure Services free for 12 months
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Azure Services always-free
| Some Azure services that are free always | |
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Pay-as-you-go
With the Azure pay-as-you-go model, you only need to pay for what you use. There are no upfront commitments, and you can cancel the services anytime. Along with the services you purchase under this model, you can take advantage of the always-free products up to the specified amounts. This pricing model is ideal for users who prefer flexibility, trying to convert CapEx to OpEx, and using applications with a short-term use case.
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Reserved Instance
In addition to the free tier and pay-as-you-go model, Azure offers significant discounts for Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (RVMI). It means that you need to purchase virtual machines with a commitment of 1 or 3 years in a specific region. This pre-commitment gives you a discount of up to 72% as compared with pay-as-you-go expenses. You can save up to 80% when you combine the cost savings from reserved instances with Azure hybrid benefits. Moreover, the users can cancel or exchange the reserved instances at any time as per their needs. This RIs pricing model also gives you the Instance Size Flexibility to simplify the management of reserved cases and reduce costs.
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Spot Instances
With Spot Virtual Machines, Azure allows its users to buy unused compute capacity at significant discounts of up to 90 percent compared with pay-as-you-go expenses. These instances are suitable for running interruptible workloads for development, testing, quality assurance, batch jobs, visual rendering, big data, advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI.
Conclusion
With over 200 secure cloud services, numerous business benefits, and cost savings, Microsoft Azure is undoubtedly the fast-growing cloud platform among businesses of all sizes. Whether you are planning to migrate to the Azure cloud or already leveraging Cloud Azure Services, we are here to help you exploit the full potential of Azure.
As an Azure expert, Continuum Innovations offers end-to-end Azure cloud managed services to help you enjoy a seamless cloud experience. From Azure cloud strategy and migration to management and monitoring, we deliver everything you need to leverage Azure to the fullest. We offer 24/7 support and consulting to ensure zero business disruption.
Partner with Continuum Innovations to Accelerate your Azure Journey Today!