Chapter 1: Introducing Azure Basics
With all the initial formalities now behind us, let's start our journey in Azure. Our journey starts here: https://azure.microsoft.com.
Azure is one of the most important cloud platform providers in the market today. It provides several cloud, hybrid, and on-premises services such as VMs, networks, compute, databases, messaging, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and many more services while focusing on security and compliance. You could use these services to build anything from web pages to mobile apps, from data analytics solutions to IoT solutions and more.
In Azure, users have the flexibility to choose from completely hosted no-code solutions to completely build-your-own solutions ground up using the basic building blocks like VMs and VNets, where the users have full control over each and every aspect of the system. And most of these technologies come prebaked with the cloud advantages, such as geo-replication, high availability, data redundancy, scalability, and elasticity.
Let's quickly review the basics of Azure. The following sections will focus on brushing up on the fundamentals of Azure. If you already have a working knowledge of Azure and know how to spin up resources in Azure, then you can safely skip this chapter and go directly to the next one.
In this first chapter, we'll provide an overview of Azure, including introducing some common Azure services. We'll get a good grounding in the basics, such as accounts, virtual machines (VMs), storage, compute, and networking. We'll also walk through how to spin up services using both the Azure portal and the CLI.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Introducing the Azure portal
- Exploring Azure accounts, subscriptions, and resource groups
- Introducing Azure services
- Exploring Azure VMs
- Exploring Azure storage
- Exploring Azure networking (VNet)
- Exploring Azure compute
Let's get started!
