Microsoft Azure - popular services and solutions for business

Content:
1 . An overview of the Microsoft Azure platform and its infrastructure
2 . History of origin and development of Microsoft Azure
3 . Microsoft Azure Core Services
4 . Microsoft Azure out-of-the-box solutions
5 . Conclusion

The Microsoft cloud platform has a significant 20% market share. And it is about it that we will tell you in our article. You will learn about what infrastructure and capabilities the Microsoft Azure platform provides, how it originated and developed, and what services are available to its users.

The Microsoft Azure cloud platform includes a rich set of services in different formats: SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service). The capabilities of the software allow you to deploy additional resources to scale, perform synchronous data replication in an automatic mode, provide infrastructure fault tolerance, etc.

Having a REST API helps keep MA cloud services in sync with any external platform, device, and operating system. Using the Azure visual interface, users can develop their own services, configure and monitor infrastructure and operations, manage access rights, and process online payments. The platform includes sets of libraries for popular programming languages such as .NET, Java, PHP, or Python applications in containers or directly on Windows or Linux

The global market for cloud services in recent years has been growing at a truly explosive pace, for example, in 2020 it grew by almost a third and reached $40 billion. Top positions in this area are traditionally occupied by the products of three IT giants - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Services and Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure products are available in more than 60 geographic regions and 140 countries around the world, and more than 160 data center (DPC) platforms are located in 15 countries.

The backstory of the platform began in 2005, when Microsoft bought Groove Networks, and Bill Gates appointed its founder, Ray Ozzy, as one of three CTOs. In turn, Ozzy persuaded the famous Dave Cutler (developer of Windows NT) to postpone his retirement, and together with another famous programmer Amitahb Srivastava, they began a new project - a cloud operating system.

The first announcement of this service was released in 2008, when it was codenamed Red Dog. In fact, at that time it was an extension for Windows NT, designed to work in the cloud. In 2009, Microsoft announced the Azure Relational SQL Database. On February 1, 2010, the official release of the cloud services platform, which was named Windows Azure, took place. It immediately began to position itself as a full-fledged alternative to the then already well-known Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine.

The first version of Azure provided a very limited set of services, namely a cloud computing service for developing and running ASP.NET web applications, Azure Blob data warehouse, Azure SQL cloud database, and Azure Service Bus. Back then, it was not exactly an enterprise-friendly cloud platform and was suitable only for a narrow audience of developers who created certain categories of web applications. In the same 2010, the platform was updated, after that it began to support .NET Framework 4, OS versioning and CDN, and was also supplemented by the Windows Azure Connect extension.

A year later, Microsoft again expanded its service with a number of innovations, including a traffic manager, a reporting engine for SQL Azure, and a high performance computing scheduler (HPC scheduler).

Meanwhile, the rise in popularity of open source applications and the development of Amazon EC2 have forced Microsoft to rethink its approach to the cloud. The corporation took into account two trends that were relevant at that time: increased user control of cloud applications through IaaS and the introduction of support for open source software for developers (especially based on Linux). In 2012, the platform received another set of updates, including Azure Websites, virtual machines for Windows and Linux, Python SDK, local backup, etc.

In 2014, Windows Azure was renamed Microsoft Azure, shortly thereafter, the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) was added to its product line, designed to manage application resources (deployment, organization, access control, etc.). That same year, Microsoft turned its attention to big data, following competitors like Amazon with its EMR and Google with BigQuery. As a result, it launched a range of services (Azure HDInsight, Azure Data Lake Store, and Azure Data Lake Analytics) that allowed it to fully realize the Big Data direction at the scale of the cloud platform. It also released a preview version of the Azure Machine Learning service.

In 2015, Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics, which allowed it to add support for the R language, which is in demand in statistical computing and graphics, to its platform interface. Subsequently, the corporation began to develop the IoT direction. Azure has become one of the few public cloud platforms to provide end-to-end connectivity to a stack of devices powered by the Event Hub, IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, SQL Database, and Power BI.

Today, Microsoft is providing an IoT System Development (PaaS) option and a ready-to-use IoT SaaS module in Azure IoT Central, which was launched in 2018. At the same time, it released a cross-platform Linux distribution called Azure Cloud Switch, which is now called SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) and is an open source network operating system based on Linux.

In 2016, the corporation introduced the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), designed to manage containerized applications based on the Kubernetes system. In addition, it has developed a number of other products in this area: Windows Containers, Virtual Kubelet, Service Mesh Interface, Open Application Model, and Distributed Application Runtime (DAPR). In 2017, new versions of the Microsoft Azure logo was created.

Starting in 2018, Microsoft begins to actively develop the AI&ML direction. Azure was one of the first cloud platforms to use graphic design to create and train machine learning models in Azure ML Studio. The corporation soon released Azure ML Services with even more capabilities, including advanced ML model training, support for NVIDIA GPUs, Intel FPGA, MLOps, and a drag-and-drop neural network builder.

At the same time, company developed the Azure IoT Edge service in collaboration with Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. It offers users ample opportunities to integrate the Internet of Things (IoT) network, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and other Azure cloud services. The site allows you to create and train AI models in the cloud, offloading workloads to the cloud infrastructure, and then running them on-premises.

In 2019, the company introduced the Azure Front Door service, a cloud service for delivering content and protecting sites, applications and web interfaces from cyber threats. Starting in 2020, Microsoft began to develop two new trends - support for applications on the Kubernetes platform and multi-cloud infrastructure. Following them, the corporation launched an updated hybrid cloud strategy based on Kubernetes and introduced the new Azure Arc platform to the audience.

It gives users the ability to manage virtual and physical machines, as well as containerized applications on the Kubernetes system through a single dashboard. Azure Arc supports integration with a range of Azure cloud services within on-premises data centers. Going forward, Microsoft plans to transform Azure Arc into a universal computing fabric for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud platforms.

Microsoft's Azur Cloud Services Catalog includes over 200 services that are categorized into a number of thematic topics: analytics, security, databases, DevOps, computing, AI&ML, IoT, containers, mobile apps, storage, and more. The most famous and popular among them are:

Microsoft Azure has been among the most popular and largest cloud service platforms for several years, second only to Amazon Web Services. It provides users with more than 200 services and products in SaaS, PaaS and IaaS formats, which are available in 60 geographic regions and more than 140 countries around the world.

The most popular among them are the web and mobile application development service, virtual machines, virtual desktop, serverless computing service, as well as services Azure Quantum, SQL Azure, Azure Arc, Azure Kubernetes. Also Microsoft Azur offers a number of ready-made solutions for many industries, technologies and areas of activity.

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