Microsoft Azure is a Huge place to explore. So I will try to learn all about it by blogging.
This is very first post in the series will just be a shallow view on some of the services/products on Azure that is of interest for me.
In the old days of the cloud -which is not so old- cloud services were usually categorized in one of three layers, namely Infrastructure (IaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Software (SaaS).
IaaS when you use a cloud platform to give you infrastructure capabilities which used to all about virtual machines, virtual networks and gateways and others. This is usually tied to the person who will be responsible for using and maintaining the infrastructure which is usually an IT Pro guy.
PaaS is about buying or actually renting a platform ready to be used by you as a developer who wants to deploy his code and doesn’t want to worry about creating or maintaining a VM or connecting it or any other low-level information. This guy is usually a developer.
SaaS the last delivery model, where you just buy a specific service that some other guy/company already developed and is already deployed on some infrastructure that is already setup and maintained by another.
Now in the current time, Cloud providers mostly the public ones (Azure, AWS, and GCP) offer way more services that get you puzzled, and don’t know where it fits in the old pyramid of services, sometimes it spans two or maybe three or none. Just a standalone service over there.
Many terms have come out like:
DBaaS database as a service, where the provider sets a database server and then rents databases based on the I/O and size and other criteria.
Storage is also out there as a service, which can be used in many spectrums whether to be used to host the VM HDD, or as a Service for holding your application files, or even might be used to save your blog images in it and more.
IDaaS identity as a service, for authentication and authorization, this is a service where you outsource the responsibility for validating the credentials and setting the appropriate permissions to a Cloud provider.
There are more other specialized services the span from Compute, Networking, Databases, Analytics, Media services, Machine Learning algorithms and much much more.
This post is just an introduction to a series of posts that will be related to exploring some of these services and how to use them.
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