Azure and Cloud Fundamentals
With the prevalence of cloud technologies and DevOps ways of working, the industry demands developers that can develop and deploy cloud solutions and monitor them throughout the application life cycle. Becoming a Microsoft-certified Azure developer can differentiate developers from the competition, but with such a plethora of information out there, it can be difficult to structure learning in an effective way to obtain the certification. This book aims to make the process of gaining the required knowledge to pass the AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure exam less of a challenge.
If you didn’t already know, then I’m sorry to break it to you, but there is no mystical cloud floating around providing IT resources to organizations; there are some incredibly powerful machines in your cloud provider’s data centers from which you can use resources, configurable through a web portal (often, other options are available as well).
With cloud computing, you can quickly create servers, web applications, storage, and virtual machines – to name just a few – within seconds. When you need more resources, you can get them; when you no longer need them, you can scale back and save money – you pay only for what you use. The cloud provider looks after the hardware, maintenance, and underlying infrastructure.
During this chapter, we will take a moment to recap the different cloud deployment and service models, benefits, and considerations, before going into some Azure specifics. By the end of this chapter, we will have discussed the most fundamental concepts that will be referenced throughout this book, ensuring that we start with the same fundamental understanding before going deeper into our topics.
In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:
- Understanding the benefits of cloud computing
- Reviewing cloud deployment models
- Examining cloud service models
- Exploring the core concepts of Azure
