As of 2021,
it is one of the largest cloud computing platforms offering over 600
services and serving millions of applications, integrations, and customers.
But what is Azure cloud? Hi,
I'm Lars Klint ACG training architect, and part time Llama Wrangler.
And I'll answer that very question now.
Announced in 2008, as project red dog,
Microsoft Azure has grown to become a major cloud computing player.
As of 2021.
Azure has a 20% market share with AWS at 31% and Google
cloud platform sitting at 9% while those numbers won't mean a lot in
how you use Azure and what it can do, these numbers will,
at least in a minute, they will.
Azure has at time of recording 67 available and announced regions
globally more than 160 physical data centers,
numerous availability zones and millions of users.
How does it all work together though?
When talking about cloud infrastructure, Azure has a global network of regions,
availability zones and data centers.
Azure regions are placed strategically all over the world to cover as large a
percentage of the potential cloud customer base as possible regions include
central us, norway West, Brazil South,
West India, South Africa North, Australia East and everywhere in between.
Each region consists of one or more data centers.
An availability zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with
independent power cooling and networking.
This means that a service in an availability zone will keep running.
If one of the parts of the zone becomes unavailable, nifty.
Azure also has geographies.
These usually contain more than a single region and allow customers with
specific data,
residency and compliance needs to keep the data and applications close.
Geography is defined a discreet market for doing just that and what are
rules and dependencies without some exceptions, yay.
Azure has government regions,
which are only accessible to US government bodies and their contractors.
These regions are more stringent when it comes to compliance with government
guidelines and their locations are not disclosed but they're all in the us.
Azure services Aren't all created equal either.
Some requires more resources than others and some just aren't as popular for
this reason, Not all services are offered in all regions. However,
apart from aforementioned government regions,
as well as newly established regions,
most regions will have most of the Azure service catalog on offer.
A few exotic services like Azure machine learning are sometimes only offered
in one region within each geography. Yeah, of course,
infrastructure on Azure. Isn't just a bunch of services.
You need to understand the basic compute network and storage.
Everything on Azure is built on top of those pillars and they form a foundation
for your cloud infrastructure too.
You can build your own architecture from infrastructure as a service products,
such as Azure, virtual networks, Azure VMs, and Azure disc storage.
Or you can take advantage of the platform as a service offerings,
such as Azure SQL and Azure app services or built on top of the
pillars,
but offer different layers of abstraction for you to build your business
applications. Comparing Azure to the other cloud providers,
it falls in the top three of most popular with AWS and GCP.
AWS has the most market share,
but Azure has the most regions and GCP is growing rapidly.
The documentation for Azure to learn from is decent.
Documenting a whole cloud computing platform is a large task and
maintaining it, a constant exercise.
Having said that there is a very stable and expansive body of docs for Azure,
which I've found easy to navigate and follow.
And they've helped me out countless times.
We've got to talk strengths and weaknesses because how else can you know which
one will work best for you? I mean, which platform of course,
while cloud computing as a concept is a way to offer various levels of
abstraction through IaaS, PaaS and SaaS,
each cloud vendor is better at some things and less so at others.
For Azure I'll tackle the main strengths first.
There are a lot of data centers and they keep expanding.
This means services and your applications will be closer to your users.
It also means specific legal requirements for certain countries when it comes to
cloud computing, I'm more likely to be met.
Because Microsoft have been supporting on-prem customers for like 40 plus
years. They have an extensive hybrid cloud offering to get all of the existing
customers into cloud.
Very good integration with existing tools and technologies such as visual
studio, active directory and file storage.
If you have applications written in the dotnet framework,
Azure's almost a no brainer as well.
Azure has the most industry certifications of any cloud provider,
And this can be useful for certain countries or industries when having to adhere
to these and Azure space is the thing. Rockets.
While the aren't many drawbacks or areas of improvement for Azure,
there are a couple.
Because Azure is trying to be all things to all cloud computing crowds.
At times some services just don't get enough attention.
This can mean that that new data analytics service you have made that uses a
certain Azure feature might fall behind a bit as the feature disappears.
Now, Azure will try and keep up with every single trend in cloud computing.
So the number of new services and renamed services, thank you Microsoft,
can be overwhelming key is to focus on just the ones you need for your
project.
Let's look at a couple of well-suited real-world use cases for Azure,
something to whet your appetite. And I start with the wonderful world of hybrid.
Microsoft has a long history of supplying on premises, compute systems,
and a ton of those customers are still around.
Are they going to throw all that they have away and buy it again because
someone's written cloud on it, of course not,
but there is value in some of the Azure services for most companies,
Azure is making it increasingly easy to implement a hybrid cloud strategy.
For example, using Azure Sentinel,
you can monitor both your cloud assets and your on-prem services.
Inadequate security is often a concern with hybrid setups,
but with Sentinel express route and VPN gateways,
this is just not an issue.
I can't talk about Azure and not mentioned cosmos DB.
One of the most impressive services on Azure,
this single digit millisecond latency,
automatic and instantly scalable global secure no SQL database
is as about as cloudy as you can get it.
A company that is looking to scale globally or to several regions can provide an
exceptional experience for the end-user five plugging cosmos DB into their front
end application. You are guaranteed speed at any scale.
It's super easy to plug into your application. It's fully managed,
so no servers or maintenance to do,
and it's cost effective when used correctly.
It's plug time. Yes, of course, here at a cloud guru,
we can teach you the ways of the Azure.
If you haven't started your Azure journey yet,
how about taking the AZ-900 Azure fundamentals certification costs a bit of a
mouthful, but it will teach you the basics of cloud computing with Azure.
And as an added bonus, prepare you for the AZ 900 exam.
I also hear the instructor is pretty darn good. Now,
if you want to stay up to date with Azure,
check out Azure this week here on A Cloud Guru,
it is a weekly show with the latest news from Azure.
And if you are further along in your Azure learning path,
we have a ton of certification causes, really fun quirky projects,
additional Azure courses and hands-on labs.
So see you later right here on ACG.
Thanks for watching keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.