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Summary
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Description

Microsoft Azure is a collection of online services that organisations can use to build, host, and deliver applications. You don’t need to have your own data center because Azure runs in Microsoft’s data centers around the world. Not only does this approach save you the trouble of having to build and maintain your own on-premises IT infrastructure, but it can also save you money, because you only have to pay for what you use, and you can scale your Azure resources up and down as needed.

In this course, you will not only get an overview of the Azure services available in various categories, such as compute, storage, and networking, but you will also follow hands-on examples showing you how to create virtual machines and web apps using the Azure Portal and Azure command-line interface.

Learning Objectives

  • Describe some of the Azure services available in various categories
  • Use the Azure Portal
  • Use the Azure command line

Intended Audience

  • Anyone who would like to learn more about Azure

Prerequisites

  • General technical knowledge
  • A Microsoft Azure account is recommended (sign up for a free trial at https://azure.microsoft.com/free if you don’t have an account)

Resources

The GitHub repository for this course is at https://github.com/cloudacademy/azure-overview 

 

Transcript

I hope you enjoyed learning about Azure. Let's do a quick review of what you learned.

Azure is a collection of online services that organizations can use to build, host, and deliver applications, and it runs in Microsoft's data centers around the world.

Azure's primary compute offerings are virtual machines, App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Functions.

In the raw storage area, Microsoft provides Blob storage for unstructured objects, File Storage for traditional file sharing, and Data Lake Storage Gen2 for Hadoop-compatible data analytics.

Azure's relational database offerings are SQL Database, which is similar to SQL Server, and Azure Database for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL for people who need those particular open source alternatives.

Microsoft's main NoSQL offering is Cosmos DB. Another NoSQL service is Azure Cache for Redis, which is typically used to speed up applications by caching frequently requested data. 

Azure's equivalent of an on-premises network is a virtual network, or Vnet. You can connect VNets together using VNet peering. To create a secure connection between a VNet and an on-premises network, you can either use a VPN, which stands for Virtual Private Network, or Azure ExpressRoute, which is a dedicated, private connection.

Azure Migrate will help you move applications from your on-premises environment to Azure.

Azure Active Directory is a managed identity service that takes care of authentication and integrates with on-premises Active Directory servers.

Azure DevOps can help you automate large portions of the building, testing, and releasing of application updates. Azure DevTest Labs makes it easy to spin up non-production environments.

Azure Content Delivery Network caches your most frequently accessed content in locations around the world so your end-users will retrieve it from the closest point on the network.

Azure IoT Central lets you create Internet of Things applications without writing any code. If you need something more customized, then you can integrate your applications with Azure IoT Hub. Azure Sphere provides extra layers of protection for your IoT devices.

Some of Microsoft's data analytics services include Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, and HDInsight. All of these services can run Apache Spark.

Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of pre-built artificial intelligence tools. Azure Bot Service is a framework for creating chatbots. Azure Machine Learning Studio lets you train and deploy machine learning models without any coding. Azure Machine Learning Services is more sophisticated and gives you full control over every stage of the machine learning process. 

Azure Logic Apps lets you automate integration tasks using a drag-and-drop interface.

Azure Monitor is a centralized place for keeping track of what's happening with your Azure resources. Azure Security Center is a dashboard that gathers security information from your resources and assesses your vulnerabilities.

You can automate your deployments using Azure Resource Manager templates and Azure Blueprints.

You can access Azure using the Azure Portal, the command-line interface, PowerShell, the Azure Software Development Kit, or the Azure Mobile App. You can run CLI or PowerShell commands in a browser by using Cloud Shell in the Azure Portal.

When you sign up for an Azure account, Microsoft creates both a billing account and a subscription. A billing account can contain multiple subscriptions, each of which contains its own isolated set of resources. Within a subscription, each resource is part of a resource group.

Azure has many regions around the world, and each region contains multiple data centers. You can provide high availability by distributing virtual machines across availability zones, which are in separate data centers.

Whew! I think that's by far the most times I've said the word Azure in one video. Okay, now I'm going to say it just a few more times.

To learn more about Azure, please look through our Azure Library. We have courses, labs, and practice exams on nearly every Azure topic, and we have more content coming out all the time.

Please give this course a rating, and if you have any questions or comments, please let us know. Thanks and have fun with Microsoft Azure!

About the Author
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Guy launched his first training website in 1995 and he's been helping people learn IT technologies ever since. He has been a sysadmin, instructor, sales engineer, IT manager, and entrepreneur. In his most recent venture, he founded and led a cloud-based training infrastructure company that provided virtual labs for some of the largest software vendors in the world. Guy’s passion is making complex technology easy to understand. His activities outside of work have included riding an elephant and skydiving (although not at the same time).

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