What is Azure?
Let's take a closer look at the most commonly used categories:
- Compute
- Networking
- Storage
- Mobile
- Databases
- Web
- Internet of Things
- Big Data
- Artificial Intelligence
- DevOps
Compute
Compute services are often one of the primary reasons why companies move to the Azure platform. Azure provides a range of options for hosting applications and services. Here are some examples of compute services in Azure:
Networking
Linking compute resources and providing access to applications is the key function of Azure networking. Networking functionality in Azure includes a range of options to connect the outside world to services and features in the global Microsoft Azure datacenters.
Azure networking facilities have the following features:
Storage
Azure provides four main types of storage services. These services are:
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.
Mobile
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 of this service include:
- Offline data synchronization.
- Connectivity to on-premises data.
- Broadcasting push notifications.
- Autoscaling to match business needs.
Databases
Azure provides multiple database services to store a wide variety of data types and volumes. And with global connectivity, this data is available to users instantly.
Web
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:
Internet of Things
People are able to access more information than ever before. It began with personal digital assistants (PDAs), then morphed into smartphones. Now there are smart watches, smart thermostats, even smart refrigerators. Personal computers used to be the norm. Now the internet allows any item that's online-capable to access valuable information. This ability for devices to garner and then relay information for data analysis is referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT).
There are a number of services that can assist and drive end-to-end solutions for IoT on Azure.
Big Data
Data comes in all formats and sizes. When we talk about Big Data, we're referring to large volumes of data. Data from weather systems, communications systems, genomic research, imaging platforms, and many other scenarios generate hundreds of gigabytes of data. This amount of data makes it hard to analyze and make decisions. It's often so large that traditional forms of processing and analysis are no longer appropriate.
Open source cluster technologies have been developed to deal with these large data sets. Microsoft Azure supports a broad range of technologies and services to provide big data and analytic solutions.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, in the context of cloud computing, is based around a broad range of services, the core of which is Machine Learning. Machine Learning is a data science technique that allows computers to use existing data to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends. Using machine learning, computers learn without being explicitly programmed.
Forecasts or predictions from machine learning can make apps and devices smarter. For example, when you shop online, machine learning helps recommend other products you might like based on what you've purchased. Or when your credit card is swiped, machine learning compares the transaction to a database of transactions and helps detect fraud. And when your robot vacuum cleaner vacuums a room, machine learning helps it decide whether the job is done.
Some of the most common Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning service types in Azure are:
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.
DevOps
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. You can integrate repositories and application tests, perform application monitoring, and work with build artifacts. You can also work with and backlog items for tracking, automate infrastructure deployment and integrate a range of third-party tools and services such as Jenkins and Chef. All of these functions and many more are closely integrated with Azure to allow for consistent, repeatable deployments for your applications to provide streamlined build and release processes.
Some of the main DevOps services available with Azure are Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevTest Labs.
What is an App Service?
Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service that enables you to build and host many types of web-based solutions without managing infrastructure.
What is scale?
Scale refers to adding network bandwidth, memory, storage, or compute power to achieve better performance.
You may have heard the terms scaling up and scaling out.
Scaling up, or vertical scaling means to increase the memory, storage, or compute power on an existing virtual machine. For example, you can add additional memory to a web or database server to make it run faster.
Scaling out, or horizontal scaling means to add extra virtual machines to power your application. For example, you might create many virtual machines configured in exactly the same way and use a load balancer to distribute work across them.
What is Azure Cloud Shell?
Cloud Shell provides two experiences to choose from, Bash and PowerShell. Both include access to the Azure command-line interface called Azure CLI and to Azure PowerShell.
You can use any Azure management interface, including the Azure portal, Azure CLI, and Azure PowerShell, to manage Azure resources. For learning purposes, here you'll use the Azure CLI to start and stop the WordPress site we created earlier.
Suppose you have several websites deployed and want to stop or start each of these websites without accessing each App service individually using the portal. This effort is an easy task that you can convert into a script using Cloud Shell and Azure CLI.
In this exercise, you'll use the Cloud Shell window shown side by side with the exercise instructions. When normally accessing the Cloud Shell from within the Azure portal, you'll click the Cloud Shell icon from the top navigation bar. This icon is sometimes within the ellipsis (...) menu icon next to your profile.
For this exercise, we'll use the Cloud Shell experience as part of our sandbox implementation.
Tip
You can use the Copy button to copy commands to the clipboard. To paste, right-click on a new line in the Cloud Shell window and select Paste or use the Shift+Insert keyboard shortcut (⌘+V on macOS).
Our first step is to make sure that we work with the correct Azure subscription before we change any settings. We'll use the
az account listlist command. By default, the command returns a JSON string. However, we'll format the output as a table to make the information easier to work with. Run the following command.Azure CLIaz account list --output tableRecall that we used a pre-created resource group called learn-3674fdff-676c-4af6-8791-a54fe3641801 when we created our website. However, if you ever need to list all the resource groups in a subscription, then you'll run the
az group listcommand.Azure CLIaz group list --output tableNext, we'll list all the resources in the learn-3674fdff-676c-4af6-8791-a54fe3641801 using the
az resource listcommand. The command will return a list of resources. By specifying,--resource-typewe can filter the result to include only the resource information related to websites.Run the following command.
Azure CLIaz resource list \ --resource-grouplearn-3674fdff-676c-4af6-8791-a54fe3641801 \ --resource-type Microsoft.Web/sitesHere an example of the command's output:
JSON{ "id": "/subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/learn-3674fdff-676c-4af6-8791-a54fe3641801 /providers/Microsoft.Web/sites/BlogFor", "identity": null, "kind": "app", "location": "centralus", "managedBy": null, "name": "MyWebApp", "plan": null, "properties": null, "resourceGroup": "learn-3674fdff-676c-4af6-8791-a54fe3641801 ", "sku": null, "tags": null, "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites" }Copy the value of
name. We'll use it in the next steps to first stop and then start our website.We'll use the
az webapp stopcommand to stop the web application running in our app service. Replace<web app name>with the name of your web app you copied, then run this command to stop your web app.Azure CLIaz webapp stop \ --resource-grouplearn-3674fdff-676c-4af6-8791-a54fe3641801 \ --name <web app name>Open the website in a new browser tab. You'll find the URL to the site in the overview of the App service in the portal. You'll see a message in your browser that reads:
Finally, let's start the web app by running the
az webapp startcommand. Replace<web app name>with the name of your web app you copied, then run this command to start your web app.Azure CLIaz webapp start \ --resource-grouplearn-3674fdff-676c-4af6-8791-a54fe3641801 \ --name <web app name>Switch back to the tab for your website and refresh the page. Your website will be available after a couple of seconds.
