Some examples of compute services in Azure
| Service name | Service function |
|---|---|
| Azure Virtual Machines Windows or Linux virtual machines | (VMs) hosted in Azure |
| Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets | Scaling for Windows or Linux VMs hosted in Azure |
| Azure Kubernetes Service | Enables management of a cluster of VMs that run containerized services |
| Azure Service Fabric | Distributed systems platform. Runs in Azure or on-premises |
| Azure Batch | Managed service for parallel and high-performance computing applications |
| Azure Container Instances | Run containerized apps on Azure without provisioning servers or VMs |
| Azure Functions | An event-driven, serverless compute service |
Azure networking facilities have the following features:
| Service name | Service function |
|---|---|
| Azure Virtual Network | Connects VMs to incoming Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections |
| Azure Load Balancer | Balances inbound and outbound connections to applications or service endpoints |
| Azure Application Gateway | Optimizes app server farm delivery while increasing application security |
| Azure VPN Gateway | Accesses Azure Virtual Networks through high-performance VPN gateways |
| Azure DNS | Provides ultra-fast DNS responses and ultra-high domain availability |
| Azure Content Delivery Network | Delivers high-bandwidth content to customers globally |
| Azure DDoS Protection | Protects Azure-hosted applications from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks |
| Azure Traffic Manager | Distributes network traffic across Azure regions worldwide |
| Azure ExpressRoute | Connects to Azure over high-bandwidth dedicated secure connections |
| Azure Network Watcher | Monitors and diagnoses network issues using scenario-based analysis |
| Azure Firewall | Implements high-security, high-availability firewall with unlimited scalability |
| Azure Virtual WAN | Creates a unified wide area network (WAN), connecting local and remote sites |
Azure provides four main types of storage services. These services are:
| Service name | Service function |
|---|---|
| Azure Blob storage | Storage service for very large objects, such as video files or bitmaps |
| Azure File storage | File shares that you can access and manage like a file server |
| Azure Queue storage | A data store for queuing and reliably delivering messages between applications |
| Azure Table storage | A NoSQL store that hosts unstructured data independent of any schema |
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.
Azure enables developers to create mobile backend 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 include:
Offline data synchronization
Connectivity to on-premises data
Broadcasting push notifications
Autoscaling to match business needs
Azure provides multiple database services to store a wide variety of data types and volumes.
| Service name | Service function |
|---|---|
| Azure Cosmos DB | Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL options |
| Azure SQL Database | Fully managed relational database with auto-scale, integral intelligence, and robust security |
| Azure Database for MySQL | 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 VMs | Host enterprise SQL Server apps in the cloud |
| Azure Synapse Analytics | Fully managed data warehouse with integral security at every level of scale at no extra cost |
| Azure Database Migration Service | Migrates your databases to the cloud with no application code changes |
| Azure Cache for Redis | 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 |
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 Azure services focused on web hosting include:
| Service Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Azure App Service | Quickly create powerful cloud web-based apps |
| Azure Notification Hubs | Send push notifications to any platform from any back end. |
| Azure API Management | Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at scale. |
| Azure Cognitive Search | Fully managed search as a service. |
| Web Apps feature of Azure App Service | Create and deploy mission-critical web apps at scale. |
| Azure SignalR Service | Add real-time web functionalities easily. |
| Service Name | Description |
|---|---|
| IoT Central | Fully-managed global IoT software as a service (SaaS) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage your IoT assets at scale |
| Azure IoT Hub | Messaging hub that provides secure communications between and monitoring of millions of IoT devices |
| IoT Edge | Push your data analysis models directly onto your IoT devices, allowing them to react quickly to state changes without needing to consult cloud-based AI models. |
| Service Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Azure Synapse Analytics | Run analytics at a massive scale using a cloud-based Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) that leverages massive parallel processing (MPP) to run complex queries quickly across petabytes of data |
| Azure HDInsight | Process massive amounts of data with managed clusters of Hadoop clusters in the cloud |
| Azure Databricks | Collaborative Apache Spark–based analytics service that can be integrated with other Big Data services in Azure. |
| Service Name | Description |
|---|---|
| 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 |
| Azure Machine Learning Studio | Collaborative, drag-and-drop visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy machine learning solutions |
A closely related set of products are the cognitive services. These are pre-built APIs you can leverage in your applications to solve complex problems.
| Service Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Vision | Image-processing algorithms to smartly identify, caption, index, and moderate your pictures and videos. |
| Speech Convert | spoken audio into text, use voice for verification, or add speaker recognition to your app. |
| Knowledge mapping | Map complex information and data in order to solve tasks such as intelligent recommendations and semantic search. |
| Bing 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 pre-built scripts, evaluate sentiment and learn how to recognize what users want. |
DevOps (Development and Operations) brings together people, processes, and technology, automating software delivery to provide continuous value to your users. Azure DevOps Services allows you to create build and release pipelines that provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your applications.
Some of the main DevOps services available with Azure are Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevTest Labs.
| Service Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Azure DevOps | Azure DevOps Services (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services, or VSTS), provides development collaboration tools including high-performance pipelines, free private Git repositories, configurable Kanban boards, and extensive automated and cloud-based load testing |
| Azure DevTest Labs | Quickly create on-demand Windows and Linux environments you can use to test or demo your applications directly from your deployment pipelines |