Azure – What is Azure and Where to start – Getting started with Azure
Starting with Azure
Hi All,
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂 I hope we all are safe:) STAY SAFE, STAY HEALTHY 🙂 STAY HOME 🙂
Background: Reason behind this article, there are couple of things happened –
- Comment on one of my previous Azure article in one of the Azure Facebook group asking about what is Azure and where to start
- Other is, one my friend who is senior technical person and want to learn the Azure, so he was discussing me – how he can start the Azure
- And then my self, since last 15 Years I am SharePoint / M365 guy and tempting to make my hands dirty in Azure 🙂 Even I am bit confused where to start Azure
NOTE : I am also newbie to Azure. I’ll try to discuss here at my best. But if you have any suggestions / concerns / issue / feedback / better ideas to start with Azure, please share in comment section so the all readers will also get those.
Here, I will try to add references wherever required. My main purpose here to understand What is Azure, Why I should consider Microsoft Azure as cloud platform and how I can start with Azure.
Take Away from this article: At the end of this article we will got to know
- What is Microsoft Azure
- Why Microsoft Azure
- Skills requires for me to get my hand dirty with Azure
- Starting with Microsoft Azure
So lets begin the FUN 🙂
Prerequisites to know before getting into Azure :
- Understand the concept of Cloud / Cloud Computing well. We have very good couple of articles on cloud computing, please have a look once –
- M365 – Certification : Preparing MS-900 (Microsoft 365 Fundamentals) – study material – Understanding cloud concepts for beginners
- M365 – Certification : Preparing MS-900 (Microsoft 365 Fundamentals) – study material – Benefits of cloud computing
- M365 – Certification : Preparing MS-900 (Microsoft 365 Fundamentals) – study material – Cloud deployment models – Understand cloud concepts(15%-20%)
What is Microsoft Azure :
- Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform
- Microsoft defines Azure => Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business challenges. It is the freedom to build, manage and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.
- Azure is public cloud service. Which delivers ever-expanding cloud services to any size of organizations.
- We are saying its set of cloud services, so what kind of service Microsoft Azure includes? Following are example of few but not limited, this list is ever-expanding 🙂
- Analytics
- Computing
- Database
- Mobile
- Networking
- Storage
- Web
- Internet Of Things
- Big Data
- DevOps
- Artificial Intelligence
- Azure integrates Tools, Templates and services. These all works together.
- In layman terms to understand –
- Microsoft Azure is public cloud which provides set of ever growing services, tools, templates, platform to host / implement our application and for all sizes of organization to develop / upgrade / maintain / test / deploy our all kind of applications.
- These services, tools, templates works together very well. Integration among those happens very smoothly.
- It provides all the things which our organization / business requires to run its computing operations virtually – servers, storage, databases, networking, logs, statistics / analytics, speed, high availability and last but least cost-effective and many more
Few statistics related to Azure: Data from Microsoft site
- 90+ compliance offerings (more than 90 compliance certifications) – the largest portfolio in the industry – to start Azure Compliance – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/trusted-cloud/compliance/
- 1B+ USD investment per year in security R&D and 3500 cyber security experts – Security is foundational for Azure – to start with Azure Security – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/security/
- 95% of Fortune 500 companies trust their business on Azure
Why Microsoft Azure? All cloud computing features
- Maintenance: Our organizations no need to maintain the hardware (so no purchase / repairing / configuration of servers, no electricity, space required to host servers 🙂 )
- Scalable : We can start with small applications (hosting our application) and easily scale as our requirement get increased or even we can decrease the resources or services
- High – Availability : Azure offers data backup, disaster recovery, data replication services. 99.95% availability SLA and 24×7 tech support
- Easy Management : Azure portal https://portal.azure.com allows us to easily manage all our Azure services. We have other options also available like Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI (Command-Line interface), Templates or even we can manage programmatically as well
- Secured :
- Azure provides physical as well digital security.
- Azure provides a huge set of compliance offerings like HIPAA, ITAR, ISO. Please have a look at complete list here – Microsoft compliance offerings
- Azure provides “Azure Security Center” – tool which allows us to monitor our Azure Resources for security vulnerabilities and threats. We have very good article on “Azure Security Center”, please have a look once – Cloud Security- Introduction to Azure Security and Azure Security Center
- Supports many programming languages, framework including third-party systems / software’s
- Consumption based model : We pay only the service we opt for. Even for Azure Function pricing is based on number of call.
Few Terminologies require to understand: There are many terminologies, here trying few 🙂
- Data Center :
- A data center is a building or space within the building or multiple buildings used for computer systems and related components like storage systems
- Azure data centers are spread across the world
- Till the date Microsoft has the highest number of data centers for any cloud platform
- Our data is stored in these data centers
- Region :
- Region represents a specific data center (set of data centers) where our data is stored or our application get executed
- We have an option to specify the region where our data should be stored
- For more details please have a look once – Azure global infrastructure
- Azure Resource : As per Microsoft – Resource is a any manageable item through Azure. For example – Virtual Machine, Database
- Replication : This is the process to manage our data at multiple locations so that high availability is maintained
Knowledge / skills Required to work on Azure:
- Here, rather more in depth technical knowledge, more adaptive approach towards technology is required.
- In cloud era, things are changing fast. New services are continuously coming up, services are deprecating.
- We need to keep ourselves up-to date, keep continuously updating our customers, and keep up to date our environments or code. Learning attitude is most important skill required.
- At technical front,
- It really dosent matter from which background we came, since Azure supports all languages, frameworks and platforms :). There are various roles like Azure Admin, Azure Architect, Azure Security, Azure Networking, Azure Databases, Azure Developer and so on, this list is ever growing
- We need to identify the role for our-self.
- For example –
- If you are from Administration, then Azure Administrator role is there and very vast scope / big role for Azure Administrator.
- If you are from Database background, Azure have database services.
- if you are from web / mobile / app development background then there is huge support for web / mobile / app development across the different languages, frameworks and platforms. Its like Azure Developer.
- For security guys, Azure security is important thing to know / understand / implement for any organization. There is huge demand for Azure security resources.
- Please go through various services / platform provided by Azure, we can easily match our skills 🙂
- Most important is to understand Cloud computing concepts. Study different cloud platform and try to solve our customers business problems.
Starting with Azure: Creating a Virtual Machine (VM) and migrating our any small existing application to the VM is good start for starting with Azure.
Microsoft Azure Training Library – Getting Started with Microsoft Azure – https://cloudacademy.com/library/azure/ . Please have a look once, lots of learning and for all roles.
Starting with Certifications: Its also good idea to start with Azure certifications. Microsoft provides roles based certification. Here are all the details – Microsoft Certifications. Few are listed below :
- For beginners – Azure Fundamentals – Exam AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
- For Administrators: AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator
- For Developers: AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure
- For Security Guys: AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies
- For Architects: Azure Solutions Architect Expert – AZ-303 AZ-304
Starting with free Account:
- Microsoft provides option to create free account
- Please log in to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/ , here we will get an option to create few account.
- Click on “Start free” button as shown in above fig
- We need to sign in with our Microsoft account as
- After signing we will be redirected to following form where we need to submit the details as in below Fig
- Please give credit card details – no issues there at all. Automatic charges wont be get applied 🙂
- Once we submitted the details successfully, we will be redirected to Azure portal – https://portal.azure.com
- Once we are in Azure Portal we can start with respective Azure Services 🙂
- We will get notifications as well – how much amount is remaining or when new amount will be credited and so on, as shown in above Fig
Bit History 🙂 :
- In Oct 2008, Azure was announced with name – “Project Red Dog”
- Released on Feb 1, 2010 as Windows Azure
- Renamed to Microsoft Azure on March 25, 2014
References:
We have very good series on Azure, lots of discussion on Azure, please visit – https://knowledge-junction.in/?s=azure
Thanks for reading 🙂 If its worth at least reading once, kindly please like and share. SHARING IS CARING 🙂
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