What is Azure—Microsoft Cloud Services | Microsoft Azure (2024)

FAQs

What is Microsoft Azure Cloud Service? ›

The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life—to solve today's challenges and create the future. Build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.

Azure Function is a serverless compute service that enables user to run event-triggered code without having to provision or manage infrastructure. Being as a trigger-based service, it runs a script or piece of code in response to a variety of events.

Most cloud computing services fall into four broad categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), serverless, and software as a service (SaaS).

The core services of Azure include computing, storage, databases, and networking. It also offers some additional services such as AI and ML, analytics, IoT, migration, data management, governance, security, development, and integration.

Azure, also known as Microsoft Azure, is a cloud computing platform and a suite of cloud services offered by Microsoft. It provides a wide range of cloud-based services and solutions that enable organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications and services through Microsoft's global network of data centers.

Azure components: Compute—runs cloud applications; Storage—uses blobs, tables, and queues to store data; Fabric Controller—deploys, manages, and monitors applications; CDN—maintains cache copies of data; and Connect—allows IP connections between the user systems and applications running on Windows Azure.

Azure Cloud Service is the first PaaS offering to come out of the Microsoft Azure Lab and is a step ahead of Azure app service. In addition to all the features and capabilities of the latter, Azure cloud service gives greater control over the Azure VMs.

Azure doesn't charge you unless you exceed 750 hours. For example, a customer in the U.S. can provision a B1S Windows virtual machine in West Europe and use it for 750 hours for free. To learn about Azure service availability by region, see Products available by region.

What is the most used service on Azure? ›

Azure is Microsoft's public cloud platform. Azure offers a large collection of services, which includes platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and managed database service capabilities.

Azure Functions is a serverless solution that allows you to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and save on costs. Instead of worrying about deploying and maintaining servers, the cloud infrastructure provides all the up-to-date resources needed to keep your applications running.

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed database service—Microsoft operates SQL Server for you and ensures its availability and performance.

How Can Azure Services Benefit My Organization? Azure services provide scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency, enabling businesses to leverage advanced cloud capabilities for innovation and growth.

Try free Azure services today

Create your Azure free account and get popular services free for 12 months and 55+ other services free always. Plus, get USD 200 credit to use in your first 30 days.

One of the main differences between Azure and AWS is the scope of services they offer. Azure has a more extensive range of services that cover a wide range of scenarios, including artificial intelligence, internet of things, and blockchain, while AWS services are more focused on infrastructure, storage, and databases.