Preface

When I first started to work with Azure, the number of available services was almost overwhelming. I knew I should pay attention to security, performance, redundancy, and scale, but I didn’t know how to apply over a decade of large-scale server administration to the world of cloud computing. Over time, I began to learn about the various Azure services that provide those key components; these services rarely work in isolation, but I didn’t know the best way to integrate them or how to decide which service to use for each task. This book is a way to explain to my past self, and many others I’ve spoken to over the years, how to quickly understand the core services in Azure and make them work together.

This book is over 350 pages long, yet it barely scratches the surface of what you can do in Azure! To help give you a solid understanding of the concepts needed to be successful as you build solutions in Azure, I had to choose which topics to write about. The book doesn’t cover all 100 or more Azure services, and it doesn’t go into exhaustive detail about the services that are included. Instead, I focus on the core areas in some of the primary services, show examples of how to securely connect everything, and introduce the possibilities of what you can build in Azure.

Cloud computing is constantly changing. There are no three- or four-year release cycles and large update deployments. I think it’s a great time to be building solutions and writing code; there’s always an opportunity to learn something new and improve yourself. I hope you learn to run great applications in Azure and enjoy exploring all the available services.