Introduction

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform and is a competitor to Amazon's Amazon Web Services and other public cloud providers, Azure provides you with access to a huge range of features. Organizations can literally move their entire on-premises infrastructure into the cloud.

Azure features come from three levels:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

• Software as a Service (SaaS)

IaaS is, in effect, an instant computing infrastructure that you can provision, manage, and use over the internet or via a private network connection. IaaS includes the basic computing infrastructure components (servers, storage, networking, firewalls, and security), plus the physical plant that's required to run these components (power, air conditioning, and so on). In an IaaS environment, the servers are all Azure virtual machines (effectively Hyper-V VMs) and interact with the networking, security, and storage components.

PaaS is a complete deployment environment in the...