Tour of Azure services: Azure can help you tackle tough business challenges. You bring your requirements, creativity, and favorite software development tools. Azure brings a massive global infrastructure that's always available for you to build your applications on.
The most commonly used categories:
- Compute
- Web
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Big data
- AI
- DevOps
- Networking
- Storage
- Mobile
- Databases
Compute
Compute services are often one of the primary reasons why companies move to the Azure platform. Azure provides a range of options for hosting applications and services. Here are some examples of compute services in Azure.
Service name Service function
Windows or Linux virtual machines (VMs) hosted in Azure.
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Scaling for Windows or Linux VMs hosted in Azure.
Cluster management for VMs that run containerized services.
Distributed systems platform that runs in Azure or on-premises.
Managed service for parallel and high-performance computing applications.
Azure Container Instances
Containerized apps run on Azure without provisioning servers or VMs.
An event-driven, serverless compute service.
Networking
Linking compute resources and providing access to applications is the key function of Azure networking. Networking functionality in Azure includes a range of options to connect the outside world to services and features in the global Azure datacenters.
Here are some examples of networking services in Azure.
Connects VMs to incoming virtual private network (VPN) connections.
Balances inbound and outbound connections to applications or service endpoints.
Azure Application Gateway
Optimizes app server farm delivery while increasing application security.
Accesses Azure Virtual Networks through high-performance VPN gateways.
Provides ultra-fast DNS responses and ultra-high domain availability.
Azure Content Delivery Network
Delivers high-bandwidth content to customers globally.
Protects Azure-hosted applications from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
Distributes network traffic across Azure regions worldwide.
Connects to Azure over high-bandwidth dedicated secure connections.
Monitors and diagnoses network issues by using scenario-based analysis.
Implements high-security, high-availability firewall with unlimited scalability.
Creates a unified wide area network (WAN) that connects local and remote sites.
Storage
Azure provides four main types of storage services.
Storage service for very large objects, such as video files or bitmaps.
File shares that can be accessed and managed like a file server.
A data store for queuing and reliably delivering messages between applications.
Table storage is a service that stores non-relational structured data (also known as structured NoSQL data) in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a schemaless design.
These services all share several common characteristics:
- Durable and highly available with redundancy and replication.
- Secure through automatic encryption and role-based access control.
- Scalable with virtually unlimited storage.
- Managed, handling maintenance and any critical problems for you.
- Accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.
Mobile
With Azure, developers can create mobile back-end services for iOS, Android, and Windows apps quickly and easily. Features that used to take time and increase project risks, such as adding corporate sign-in and then connecting to on-premises resources such as SAP, Oracle, SQL Server, and SharePoint, are now simple to include.
Other features of this service include:
- Offline data synchronization.
- Connectivity to on-premises data.
- Broadcasting push notifications.
- Autoscaling to match business needs.
Databases
Azure provides multiple database services to store a wide variety of data types and volumes. And with global connectivity, this data is available to users instantly.
Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL options.
Fully managed relational database with auto-scale, integral intelligence, and robust security.
Fully managed and scalable MySQL relational database with high availability and security.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Fully managed and scalable PostgreSQL relational database with high availability and security.
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
Service that hosts enterprise SQL Server apps in the cloud.
Fully managed data warehouse with integral security at every level of scale at no extra cost.
Azure Database Migration Service
Service that migrates databases to the cloud with no application code changes.
Fully managed service caches frequently used and static data to reduce data and application latency.
Azure Database for MariaDB
Fully managed and scalable MariaDB relational database with high availability and security.
Web
Having a great web experience is critical in today's business world. Azure includes first-class support to build and host web apps and HTTP-based web services. The following Azure services are focused on web hosting.
Quickly create powerful cloud web-based apps.
Send push notifications to any platform from any back end.
Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at scale.
Deploy this fully managed search as a service.
Web Apps feature of Azure App Service
Create and deploy mission-critical web apps at scale.
Add real-time web functionalities easily.
IoT
People are able to access more information than ever before. Personal digital assistants led to smartphones, and now there are smart watches, smart thermostats, and even smart refrigerators. Personal computers used to be the norm. Now the internet allows any item that's online-capable to access valuable information. This ability for devices to garner and then relay information for data analysis is referred to as IoT.
Many services can assist and drive end-to-end solutions for IoT on Azure.
Fully managed global IoT software as a service (SaaS) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale.
Messaging hub that provides secure communications between and monitoring of millions of IoT devices.
Fully managed service that allows data analysis models to be pushed directly onto IoT devices, which allows them to react quickly to state changes without needing to consult cloud-based AI models.
Big data
Data comes in all formats and sizes. When we talk about big data, we're referring to large volumes of data. Data from weather systems, communications systems, genomic research, imaging platforms, and many other scenarios generate hundreds of gigabytes of data. This amount of data makes it hard to analyze and make decisions. It's often so large that traditional forms of processing and analysis are no longer appropriate.
Open-source cluster technologies have been developed to deal with these large data sets. Azure supports a broad range of technologies and services to provide big data and analytic solutions.
Run analytics at a massive scale by using a cloud-based enterprise data warehouse that takes advantage of massively parallel processing to run complex queries quickly across petabytes of data.
Process massive amounts of data with managed clusters of Hadoop clusters in the cloud.
Integrate this collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics service with other big data services in Azure.
AI
AI, in the context of cloud computing, is based around a broad range of services, the core of which is machine learning. Machine learning is a data science technique that allows computers to use existing data to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends. Using machine learning, computers learn without being explicitly programmed.
Forecasts or predictions from machine learning can make apps and devices smarter. For example, when you shop online, machine learning helps recommend other products you might like based on what you've purchased. Or when your credit card is swiped, machine learning compares the transaction to a database of transactions and helps detect fraud. And when your robot vacuum cleaner vacuums a room, machine learning helps it decide whether the job is done.
Here are some of the most common AI and machine learning service types in Azure.
Azure Machine Learning Service
Cloud-based environment you can use to develop, train, test, deploy, manage, and track machine learning models. It can auto-generate a model and auto-tune it for you. It will let you start training on your local machine, and then scale out to the cloud.
Collaborative visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy machine learning solutions by using prebuilt machine learning algorithms and data-handling modules.
A closely related set of products are the cognitive services. You can use these prebuilt APIs in your applications to solve complex problems.
Use image-processing algorithms to smartly identify, caption, index, and moderate your pictures and videos.
Convert spoken audio into text, use voice for verification, or add speaker recognition to your app.
Map complex information and data to solve tasks such as intelligent recommendations and semantic search.
Add Bing Search APIs to your apps and harness the ability to comb billions of webpages, images, videos, and news with a single API call.
Natural Language processing
Allow your apps to process natural language with prebuilt scripts, evaluate sentiment, and learn how to recognize what users want.
DevOps
DevOps brings together people, processes, and technology by automating software delivery to provide continuous value to your users. With Azure DevOps, you can create build and release pipelines that provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your applications. You can integrate repositories and application tests, perform application monitoring, and work with build artifacts. You can also work with and backlog items for tracking, automate infrastructure deployment, and integrate a range of third-party tools and services such as Jenkins and Chef. All of these functions and many more are closely integrated with Azure to allow for consistent, repeatable deployments for your applications to provide streamlined build and release processes.
Use development collaboration tools such as high-performance pipelines, free private Git repositories, configurable Kanban boards, and extensive automated and cloud-based load testing. Formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services.
Quickly create on-demand Windows and Linux environments to test or demo applications directly from deployment pipelines.
