In the last chapter, I tried to give you a first insight into the Azure platform with a comprehensive introduction. Now, the question arises is how is it going? At least from the viewpoint of the software architect, the question is easy to answer: first, we must make decisions about the technologies used.

OK, now I have to be honest. There is no simple answer. The reasons for this are:

• The large number of available technologies
• The ability to combine offered technologies (typical example: Azure Service Fabric - also known as Azure microservices with Azure Container Services)

But let us return to the keyword decisions now. The decisions that we have to make as a software architect are usually in two areas:

• Compute: Compute is the area in which you deploy (host) your applications. This can, for example, be done as an Azure VM, but it is also conceivable within a microservices architecture.
• Data storing and processing: This area is quickly explained. No application is today possible without the possibility of storing and, if necessary, processing data. This can, for example, be done by Azure Storage, but also by a more complex solution such as Azure Data Lake.

In this chapter, we will deal with the area compute (or at least a selection thereof). However, the selection I made covered at least 90% of all Azure solutions. The area data storing and processing follows in the next chapter.

You will learn all about the basic architectures (sometimes also called architecture styles) behind the offers. In the places where it is useful, I will also introduce the common design patterns.

In detail, we will explore the following topics in this chapter:

• IaaS I (Azure VMs)
• IaaS II (Azure Container Services)
• PaaS I (Azure App Services)
• PaaS II (Azure Service Fabric, also known as Azure microservices)