Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the history of virtualization and the concept of the cloud, and we explained the terminology used in cloud environments.

Some people think that Microsoft was a little bit late entering the cloud world, but actually, they started researching and developing techniques in 2006, and many parts of that work survived in Azure. Some of the projects died, because they were too early, and many people were skeptical about the cloud in those days.

We also covered the architecture of the Azure cloud and the services that Azure can offer your organization.

In the last part of this chapter, we saw that Azure is a very open source–friendly environment and that Microsoft puts in a lot of effort to make Azure an open, standard cloud solution with interoperability in mind.

In the next chapter, we'll start using Azure and learn how to deploy and use Linux in Azure.