Microsoft Azure 101

Azure is one of the leading public cloud service providers. Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that helps you build, deploy, and manage applications to overcome your business challenges. This journey starts with the fundamentals of cloud computing and moves on to explaining the configuration of Azure infrastructure, exploring Azure services, and working on virtual memory systems (VMS) and deployment models in Azure. You will also see how to secure and troubleshoot your Azure cloud environment and many more exciting features, in order to be fully aware of best practices for Azure cloud administration. Let's cut to the chase and see what we have in this introductory chapter, Microsoft Azure 101. This chapter will introduce cloud computing to you and describe its evolution, the types of cloud deployment models, and the cloud services that Azure provides. After that, we'll walk through the Azure portal, introducing its components. Then, we'll discuss the Azure Resource Manager model used by Azure. Finally, you will learn about the different tools you can use to automate your tasks with Azure.

Briefly, the following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Microsoft Azure overview
• Cloud service types
• Azure portal experience
• Azure Resource Manager model
• Azure automation tools