Chapter 1: Azure Platform and Architecture Overview
The Azure cloud is Microsoft's public cloud computing platform. The platform consists of multiple services that customers can use to develop, host, and enhance their applications and services. Like many other cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and so on), it is constantly growing and evolving by frequently adding new services and features to the ecosystem. Given the availability of all of these cloud services, and the flexibility of Microsoft 365 licensing, many organizations are moving their operations up into the Azure cloud.
In our first chapter, we will focus on providing an overview of the Azure platform, its architecture, the core services, and how those services are managed.
In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
- The basics of Microsoft's Azure infrastructure
- An overview of Azure services
- Understanding the Azure role-based access control (RBAC) structure
- Accessing the Azure cloud
By the end of the chapter, we will have a good understanding of how organizations use Azure and how to approach an Azure environment as a penetration tester.
