Introducing Azure Services
Azure provides a wide array of services and technologies that can easily fulfill most real-world use cases. The services provided by Azure are categorized and detailed in the following sections.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
In IaaS, you get the bare infrastructure (that is, VMs, VNets, and the storage provided by the disks mounted on VMs), and you need to build the rest of the application stack yourself. This option gives the most flexibility for developers in terms of OS versions, library versions, custom patches, and so on.
For example, if you want to run SQL Server on Azure while maintaining control of which version of SQL Server to run, the only option is to create an Azure VM and install SQL Server on it. This makes IaaS the ideal solution for so-called “lift-and-shift” scenarios, where an existing on-premises application needs to be moved to the cloud with minimal changes. However, the trade-off is that IaaS still requires...
