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.