The public cloud provides services such as virtual private servers and databases hosted as a service to the general public on a subscription basis. Some platforms, such as Amazon, charge an hourly subscription or offer pay-as-you use (Lambda) services, while others charge a fixed amount for a month, such as DigitalOcean, and so on. The Windows Azure public cloud platform is one of the important pillars of Microsoft's Cloud OS vision that is transforming the traditional data center environment, helping businesses unlock insights in data stored anywhere, enabling the development of a wide range of modern business applications, and empowering IT to support users who work anywhere on any device while being able to manage these devices in a secure and consistent way.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following points related to Microsoft Azure Cloud and Cosmos DB:

• Azure features
• Azure as a service, platform, and infrastructure (SPI)
• Azure components
• Getting started with Azure
• Azure Cosmos DB
• Azure Cosmos DB features
• Azure Cosmos DB use cases

Let's get started by explaining the topics one by one.