What is the Microsoft Azure cloud platform?

These days, you will hear a lot of buzz around cloud computing. There are many competing cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud. Today, it is very likely that you are already using some kind of cloud platform at home. For example, in the past, there was Blockbuster, where you had to walk into the store to rent and return movies. However, walking into a store and renting and returning movies could be very time consuming. Nowadays, you can simply pay a monthly flat fee to Netflix and watch as many movies as you like, in the comfort of your home. Similarly, in order to deploy a web service like the Fortune Cookie webhook, you would need to build a physical server, place the server in a data center, and route a network cable to the server. Obviously, I simplified the server...