Up until now, we have only discussed the development side of your application, but have hardly touched anything related to its hosting and deployment. In this chapter, you'll be introduced to the concept of the cloud and the value it brings when deploying your application. There are a few known players in the world of cloud computing—Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google GCP, to name just a few. For the purposes of this book, we will only concentrate on one of them, and since we are already working with Microsoft technology, we will choose to look at another Microsoft product—Microsoft Azure. At the end of this chapter, you will have a Microsoft Azure account that we will use later to create an environment where we can leverage the different services that the Azure cloud has to offer to make your application production-ready in a short amount of time.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• What is cloud computing?
• Creating a Microsoft Azure account 
• Getting familiar with the portal and with the command line
• Understanding the basic terms: subscription, account, and ARM
• Cost and billing