As the name suggests, Microsoft Azure is a public cloud platform owned by Microsoft, which provides different PaaS and IaaS services for their customers. Some of the popular services are virtual machine, app service, SQL database, Resource Manager, and so on.

The Azure services fall mainly into these two categories:

• Platform services: These are the services where customers are provided with an environment to build, manage, and execute their applications while taking care of the infrastructure themselves. The following are some of the Azure services by its various categories:
  • Management services: These provide a management portal and marketplace services, which provide galleries and tools for automation in Azure.
  • Compute: These are services such as fabric, functions, and so on, which help the developer to develop and deploy highly scalable applications.
  • CDN and media: These provides secure and reliable content delivery around the globe and  real-time streaming respectively.
  • Web + Mobile: These are services related to apps such as web apps and API apps, mostly for web and mobile applications.
  • Analytics: These are big-data-related services, which can help a machine learning developer to perform real-time data processing, and give you insights into data such as HDInsight, Machine learning, Stream Analytics, Bot service, and so on.
  • Development tools: These services are used for version control, collaboration, and others. It includes SDKs as well.
  • AI and Cognitive Service: These are artificial-intelligence-based services, such as for speech, vision, and so on. A few of the services which do so are Text Analytics API, Cognitive, and others.
• Infrastructure Services: These are services where the service provider is responsible for the hardware failures. Customization of the servers is the customer's responsibility. Also, the customer manages its specifications as well:
  • Server compute and containers: These are services such as virtual machine and containers, which provide computing power to the customer application with variants.
  • Storage: These are of two types--BLOB and file storage. It has varying storage capabilities available based on latency and speed.
  • Networking: These provide a couple of network-related services such as load balancer and virtual network, which help you to secure your network, and make it efficient for customer response.

The following diagram will give more understanding about the Azure platform:

You can review all the Microsoft Azure product offerings in detail at the following link:

 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/

To get started with Microsoft Azure, you are required to have an account. Since this chapter is concerned with implementing our application on Azure, we won't get into how to create an account. If you do need help, you could read the article given at the following link, which will definitely help you out:

https://medium.com/appliedcode/setup-microsoft-azure-account-cbd635ebf14b

Azure provides some SaaS-based services, which you can review at https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us.