Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

 

What is Azure?

Azure is a complete cloud platform that can host your existing applications and streamline new application development. Azure can even enhance on-premises applications. Azure integrates the cloud services that you need to develop, test, deploy, and manage your applications, all while taking advantage of the efficiencies of cloud computing.

By hosting your applications in Azure, you can start small and easily scale your application as your customer demand grows. Azure also offers the reliability that’s needed for high-availability applications, even including failover between different regions. The Azure portal lets you easily manage all your Azure services. You can also manage your services programmatically by using service-specific APIs and templates.

This guide is an introduction to the Azure platform for application developers. It provides guidance and direction that you need to start building new applications in Azure or migrating existing applications to Azure. Read more
 

Application hosting

Azure provides several cloud-based compute offerings to run your application so that you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure details. You can easily scale up or scale out your resources as your application usage grows.

Azure offers services that support your application development and hosting needs. Azure provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to give you full control over your application hosting. Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings provide the fully managed services needed to power your apps. There’s even true serverless hosting in Azure where all you need to do is write your code.

Azure Virtual Machines

As an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, Azure lets you deploy to or migrate your application to either Windows or Linux VMs. Together with Azure Virtual Network, Azure Virtual Machines supports the deployment of Windows or Linux VMs to Azure. With VMs, you have total control over the configuration of the machine. When using VMs, you’re responsible for all server software installation, configuration, maintenance, and operating system patches.

Because of the level of control that you have with VMs, you can run a wide range of server workloads on Azure that don’t fit into a PaaS model. These workloads include database servers, Windows Server Active Directory, and Microsoft SharePoint. For more information, see the Virtual Machines documentation for either Linux or Windows.

Manage your subscriptions

A subscription is a logical grouping of Azure services that is linked to an Azure account. A single Azure account can contain multiple subscriptions. Billing for Azure services is done on a per-subscription basis. For a list of the available subscription offers by type, see Microsoft Azure Offer Details. Azure subscriptions have an Account Administrator who has full control over the subscription. They also have a Service Administrator who has control over all services in the subscription. For information about classic subscription administrators, see Add or change Azure subscription administrators. Individual accounts can be granted detailed control of Azure resources using Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC).