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Discover the power of Microsoft Azure: what is it and how does it work?

The world never stops evolving, especially in the dynamic realm of an ISV (Independent Software Vendor). A critical question for any software company is: how do I stay up-to-date? Microsoft Azure, the robust cloud computing platform by Microsoft, provides the answer.

Reading time 20 minutes Published: 15 November 2018 Latest update: 23 December 2024

What is Microsoft Azure?

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform that assists you in building, deploying, and managing applications. Leveraging Microsoft's globally managed data centres, you can easily scale your operations internationally. Instead of purchasing, managing, and maintaining a local server, you can host your application in the cloud.

However, Azure is much more than just a distributed data centre, covering a wide range of services and access to computing resources over the internet. These resources include serverless computing, virtual machines (VMs), storage, etc.

Example: you can store your data using Microsoft's services. But there are much more services, which we'll touch upon later.

How does Microsoft Azure work?

But how does Microsoft Azure actually work? What happens when you migrate your current services to the cloud, and what about governance? The following video explains:

Why Azure?

There are several key reasons to utilize Microsoft Azure, including speed, scalability, high availability and cost reduction. Azure flexible infrastructure allows you to scale up and down in minutes. This enables you to easily adapt your application to your business needs.

Whether your company experiences unexpected growth or contraction, Azure seamlessly scales with you, and you can immediately observe the financial impact. This makes it the perfect solution for the fast-evolving economy and the dynamics of modern businesses.

With Azure, you pay only for what you use, and costs are always transparent, eliminating any surprises.

Microsoft Azure Benefits

Azure has long been at the forefront of hybrid cloud solutions (supporting on-prem customers for more than 40 years). As IaaS, you can easily connect on-premises systems to cloud services within Microsoft’s cloud platform.

As if that weren’t enough, no other cloud provider can bring as many compliance offerings to the table as Azure does, which are 100 in total.

Did you know Azure has a 99.99% uptime guarantee?

Will Azure be the biggest cloud platform worldwide?

Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud computing platforms worldwide, with a stunning market share of 25%, surpassing Google Cloud.

However, Azure is far from reaching its limit:

Experts predict Azure might claim the top spot in the cloud market from 2026, overtaking AWS.
Azure’s customer base grew 14.2% from 2023 to 2024 alone.
Approx. 350,000 businesses leveraging Azure for their cloud computing needs.

Also, more than 90% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft Cloud.

If this doesn't prove the reliability and popularity of Microsoft Azure, what will?

How to use Azure?

Moreover, Azure grants access to both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), as well as Software as a Service (SaaS), enabling you to deliver new and innovative features to your users quickly.

You can use them for services such as AI, Machine Learning (ML), virtual computing, storage, networking, disaster recovery and backup, analytics, and many more.

What is Microsoft Azure used for?

Azure can be used for various purposes, catering to various needs of businesses and developers. To name a few use cases:

Application development: while the options are almost endless, this includes building web applications, mobile apps, APIs, and even complex enterprise-grade software.
Testing: After developing one, you can test applications to see how well they work.
Hosting apps: You can host applications on the Internet and create virtual machines with your desired size and RAM specifications once you’ve gone beyond the testing phase.
Data integration and monitoring: within the cloud environment, you can integrate and synchronise service features while collecting and storing performance metrics, which can be used to optimise app performances.
Storage solutions: you have strong storage options, like virtual hard drives for VMs, scalable cloud storage for data, and advanced solutions like Blob Storage for unstructured data.
Networking: Azure supports secure, high-performance networking options, enabling seamless communication between services and users.
Hybrid and multi-cloud: Azure connects on-premises systems with cloud environments.

Who uses Microsoft Azure?

Azure customers by region

All kinds of organisations worldwide use Microsoft Azure, from small-sized to large enterprises, new to old. The UK accounts for the second-greatest country using Azure, with approximately 50 million users, who account for 7% of all Azure users.

For startups and scale-ups, Azure is interesting because it offers flexibility (by spinning up and down resources on the fly) while also allowing cost savings. However, large enterprises also take advantage of all the perks of Microsoft's cloud platform.

Where is my data stored with Azure?

Azure datacentres worldwide 100 across 36 regions

Azure has data centres strategically placed around the globe, from North America, Central US, and the south of Brazil to Europe, Asia, and Australia. In total, there are more than 60 regions globally.

Each area has multiple data centres connected by a fast network, so users get high availability and low latency. This allows you to deploy applications and services closer to your users for better performance and user experience.

If that’s not enough, each region contains one or more data centres and availability zones, including one or multiple data centres with independent networking and power.

Practically speaking: your applications can stay up and running with minimal disruption, even during a hardware failure or power outage.

With 160+ data centres worldwide, Microsoft offers data residency options to meet compliance and performance needs. This extensive network is designed to be secure, reliable, and scalable, catering to the needs of many of the world’s largest and most successful companies.

You can choose where your data is stored and the regions that meet your regulatory and compliance requirements. Azure has features and tools to help you manage and deploy resources across multiple areas.

For example: Azure Traffic Manager lets you distribute traffic across different regions for better performance and availability. Azure Storage has solutions for storing and managing data across multiple regions so you have data redundancy and compliance with local regulations.

The History of Azure

While starting off as “Project Red-Dog”, Azure was first announced on October 28, 2008, and launched commercially on February 1, 2010, under the name “Windows Azure.”

In 2012, it expanded with Linux VMs and locally redundant storage and was renamed from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure in April 2014. In that year, it introduced the Azure Portal and embraced open-source tools.
Another big update was the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in 2017, which made container orchestration available, as well as Azure Cosmos DB in 2017 and Azure IoT Central in 2018.
Also, the arrival of Azure Arc (now called Azure Local) in 2020 was another milestone that enabled unified management across multiple cloud platforms.

In 2023, Azure launched Azure OpenAI Service. Microsoft's current portfolio includes now over 600+ services.

That said, let’s get into all the perks the cloud provider has to offer.

Benefits of Azure

Benefits of Microsoft Azure

Cost-efficient

Azure is the go-to cloud service provider if you are trying to cut down costs due to its cost-efficiency. With Azure, you don’t need big upfront investments.

Through Azure’s scalable infrastructure and pay-for-what-you-use pricing model you can achieve significant savings. However, you must plan carefully and understand the platform to get there, as simply moving a load of VMs to Azure might result in higher costs. It’s all about architecting for Azure.

(The Azure Pricing Calculator can get you an idea of the costs of moving workloads the cloud service provider).

Azure pricing also offers:

Reserved Instances
Azure saving plans
VM Spot instances
Azure Hybrid Benefit

Scalability and Elasticity

With Azure, businesses can start small and expand resources as needed, or contract when demand decreases (without the need for major infrastructure investments). You can resize and conform to your needs, so you always have the right number of resources at your disposal.

Imagine: you have a traffic spike or the opposite; you must scale down. In Azure, you can adjust resources to fit your needs. This scalability means optimal performance and cost savings.

Azure uses these main principles to build its scalability and adaptability:

Vertical scaling (scale up or down): Increase or decrease resources as your workload changes, such as upgrading a VM with more CPU or memory.
Horizontal scaling (scale in and out): Adding more instances (scaling out) when traffic spikes and reducing them when demand drops (scaling in).
Automatic scaling: Set up automatic adjustments based on predefined rules.
Load balancing: Distribute traffic evenly among resources to achieve greatest efficiency.

vertaling scaling

Simple data storage

Azure’s scalable and secure cloud storage solutions make managing data straightforward. They make it easy to store, access, and handle large volumes of data.

Faster time-to-market

Azure’s development tools and pre-built services speed up application creation and deployment, helping businesses bring products to market quicker and more easily.

Easy to use

Azure is designed to be user-friendly, with a well-thought-out user interface that simplifies management. Microsoft provides extensive learning resources to help users quickly familiarise themselves with Azure services.

Accessibility of resources

One of Azure's biggest benefits is the availability of resources. As the only cloud provider with over 60 data centres worldwide, Azure allows you to bring your applications closer to your users, wherever they are.

This reduces latency and improves performance, making it ideal for businesses with their sights set worldwide. Its extensive network of data centres also ensures compliance with the specific legal requirements for cloud computing in various countries.

What’s more, you can access a wide range of services and resources from anywhere, anytime.

Integration & Innovation

If you're already using Microsoft tools like Microsoft 365, Azure seamlessly integrates with them immediately. Besides, Microsoft is always evolving with the latest services in AI and IoT.

Hybrid capabilities

One of Azure's biggest standouts is its hybrid capabilities. Using tools like Azure Local and ExpressRoute, you can easily connect your on-prem infrastructure with the cloud.

Also, with Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can save big by bringing and using existing on-premises (Windows Server and SQL Server licences) in the cloud.

Loads of Development tools

Are you a developer looking to streamline your workflow? Then, you rely on developer tools. Azure supports a variety of programming languages and development tools to make your life easier:

.NET
Java
Python
Node.js,

Azure has IDEs like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Additionally, Azure integrates seamlessly with developer tools and frameworks:

GitHub: For version control, CI/CD, and collaborative coding.
Azure DevOps: For agile project management, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Terraform and Bicep: For Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate resource deployment.
Docker and Kubernetes (AKS): For containerized application development and deployment.

Security and Compliance

Last but not least, Microsoft invests heavily in protecting your data from cyberthreats (investing $1 billion per year). But that’s not all. They also have strong SLAs around services.

In addition, it has great security accreditation, so you know you've got a secure and dependable platform on which to build your applications. Having that certainty that solid, robust processes and services back you are a restful thought.

Azure Disaster recovery (DR)

You always need a disaster recovery plan. It’s for when something unexpected happens. Without one, your business can suffer downtime, data loss or financial loss.

Do you know the true cost of downtime?

The average cost of downtime for large organisations can be even $9000 per minute.
In higher-risk sectors like finance and healthcare, downtime costs can reach up to $5 million per hour.

(Source: Forbes)

Azure has you covered with disaster recovery solutions so your business can recover quickly and keep running smoothly.

These include geo-redundant storage and automatic backups, so you have safe and recoverable data, no matter what.

Azure Disaster Recovery

Let’s have a look at the features:

Azure Site Recovery: With Azure Site Recovery, you can replicate your applications and data to secondary locations. If a failure happens, your applications can go over to these secondary locations. This will ensure that business continues with little downtime.
Backup Services: With Back up services you can automatically back up your data to protect against accidental deletion or corruption.
Infrastructure as code (IaC): IaC lets you deploy the same environment to another region if needed. Deploy your entire setup (from VMs to networking) by using scripts so you don’t need to start all over again.
Geo-Redundancy: Store copies of your data in multiple regions to ensure accessibility even in the event of a regional failure.

Azure Services

Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure comes with an extensive offering of services, in total more than 200 services of which some prominent categories:

Compute
Storage
Networking
AI + Machine Learning (ML)
Databases
DevOps
Hybrid + Multicloud
Identity
Integration
Internet of Things (IoT)

But there is much more. Azure covers nearly every domain you might need. Since there’s so much, we cover the most prominent categories.

Compute Services

In Azure, you’ve got many options for hosting your apps.

Virtual Machines (VMs)	Azure VMs let you deploy and manage VMs instantly within an Azure virtual network with either Linux or Windows operating systems. They are best when you need more control over the computing environment.
Cloud Services	A platform to build, host, and scale web applications, APIs, and backend services with automatic OS updates and load balancing for high availability.
Service Fabric	Makes it easier to develop, deploy, run and manage microservices. Designed for scalable, low-latency, stateful applications running anywhere. Use any language or framework and scale to thousands of machines.
Container Apps	Enables containerised application deployment in a serverless environment (microservices).
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)	AKS is a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies deploying, managing, and scaling containerised apps.
Azure Functions	A serverless, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) solution that lets you develop applications in any language without worrying about hardware and frees you from infrastructure management.
Azure App Service	Build and deploy web, mobile and API applications easier using virtually any framework. Run the app in containers or the OS of your choice.

Storage Services

Azure provides a wide range of storage tools including:

Azure Backup	If you work with Virtual Machines or in a hybrid environment, you can use Azure Backup to secure your environment and back up your chosen data in just a few clicks.
Disk Storage	Offers cost-effective storage options, including HDDs and SSDs, for use with VMs.
Blob Storage	Blob storage stores things in objects and is ideal for storing massive amounts of unstructured data such as text, binary data, videos, images, large files or logs.
Table Storage	Being cost-effective, table storage is great for storing table-like data for apps. This type of storage is most used for NOSQL data.
File Storage (Azure Files)	Fully managed file shares are accessible via SMB and NFS protocols. You can mount file shares on Windows, Linux, or Mac machines. Great for migration (lift and shift) and file-based applications.
Queue Storage	This Azure messaging service saves and retrieves messages; a queue may even hold millions of messages.

Networking Services

Within Microsoft’s cloud platform, there are many networking services to connect your resources, to name some:

Content Delivery Network (CDN)	Azure CDN provides content to users worldwide by using high bandwidth. It speeds up content delivery by caching data at strategic locations worldwide.
Azure DNS	A hosting service for DNS domains that resolves domain names to IP addresses using Azure's global infrastructure.
VPN Gateway	A virtual network gateway that allows secure connections (encrypts data in private tunnels) to your Azure virtual networks over the internet.
Virtual Network	With the private network you can securely connect or isolate your Azure resources.
ExpressRoute	It brings your on-premises network to Microsoft Cloud via private connections that bypass the public internet. Connecting virtual networks via a VNet Gateway gives you fast and secure access to Azure and Microsoft 365.
Azure Application Gateway	A web traffic load balancer that routes traffic to your web applications, layer 7 routing, SSL termination and web application firewall (WAF).
Azure Frontdoor	Microsoft’s CDN and smart traffic manager for fast, secure and global access.

Hybrid + Multicloud

Extend Azure capabilities to other clouds and on-premises environments:

Azure SQL Database	A managed service to run, manage and scale highly available MySQL servers in the cloud. High availability for free, scalability on demand, automatic backups and point in time restores.
Azure Local	A single platform to manage on-premises, multi-cloud and non-Azure resources as if they were Azure native, using familiar tools and services.
Azure IoT Edge	Run cloud intelligence on IoT devices at the edge for offline and faster processing.

Identity Services

Azure identity solutions secure access for users and applications:

Microsoft Entra External ID	As part of Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Entra External ID lets people outside your organisation securely access your applications using their own logins, whether from email, social media, or business accounts.
Microsoft Entra Domain Services	Provides managed domain services like LDAP and Kerberos for legacy applications in Azure.

Integration Services

Azure makes connecting your systems and services straightforward with multiple integration services, such as:

Azure Service Bus	The Service Bus is a cloud messaging service for reliable asynchronous communication. It offers features like message queues, publish/subscribe, and advanced tools like dead-lettering and duplicate detection.
Azure Logic Apps	Logic Apps let you automate workflows by linking apps, data, and services with minimal coding. With plenty of pre-built connectors for popular SaaS solutions and the option to customise when needed, you can create workflows in no time by simply clicking the steps together.

Database Services

There are several databases to support diverse application needs such as:

Data Factory	Data Factory is a fully managed, serverless data integration service for orchestrating and automating data workflows.
Azure SQL	A fully managed, cloud-based relational database solution offering scalability, high availability, and features like geo-replication
Azure Cosmos DB	A globally distributed, multi-model NoSQL database designed for low-latency, high-throughput applications that support multiple APIs.
Azure SQL Managed Instance	Combines the power of SQL Server with the flexibility of a managed service. This fully managed relational database solution, provides nearly 100% compatibility with SQL Server while reducing administrative overhead.
Microsoft Fabric	A unified analytics platform that integrates data engineering, data science and business intelligence. It brings together various data tools such as Data Factory, Synapse and Power BI.

Recommended read: Select the right SQL databases and learn how to choose between the Azure SQL options.

Security Services

In Azure, security is built into everything. Here are key services that help secure your applications and data:

Application Gateway	A load balancer that fronts your applications and routes traffic to appropriate instances while mitigating common web exploits and vulnerabilities.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud	The defender helps you secure your Azure resources by identifying vulnerabilities and providing recommendations to strengthen security.
Azure DDoS Protection	A protection platform that shields your applications from the increasing threats of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Azure Bastion	Allows RDP/SSH into your virtual machines over the internet, while keeping them hidden from the public internet.
Azure Firewall	Azure Firewall is a fully managed firewall that provides centralised control and network traffic monitoring.
Key Vault	Provides secure storage, encryption, and access to important items you'd rather keep under wraps.

DevOps

Azure DevOps is an umbrella service that streamlines software development and delivery. It integrates tools for version control, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). It brings together a range of tools for different development services.

It allows you to build, test and deploy applications efficiently while also fostering collaboration among dev, ops and testing teams.

Azure Services vary by region

Azure's global infrastructure spans numerous regions, but services don’t roll out to all regions at once, and not all services are available in all locations.

For instance, some special services might launch in specific regions where there's higher demand or where infrastructure supports their deployment. But also regulatory considerations can influence service availability, ensuring that offerings align with local laws and standards.

Example: Azure AI Studio (for building and deploying AI-generated apps and APIs), is available in the South Central US region but not in West Central US.

But no need to worry: Most regions have most of the services of Microsoft’s offerings.

Microsoft lists which services are available in each region in its documentation: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/products-by-region/

Azure IaaS vs SaaS vs PaaS

Azure provides three main cloud service models:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Software-as-a-Service (Saas)

IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS

The image above shows your (users) responsibilities per model versus what the cloud provider takes on its hurdle.

Being on-prem means you manage every part of the data centre. But by moving towards the cloud, like Azure, you can hand over responsibility to the cloud provider; it all depends on the model you pick. Let’s explain.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS offloads you of all traditional hardware you had in on-prem environments. You’re left with managing the OS, runtime and apps, as the service provider handles the rest of your infrastructure (like networking, storage, etc.). Azure IaaS allows you to scale up new VMs in minutes, not weeks. And there’s no more need to buy expensive servers upfront.

The building blocks for your architecture in Azure from IaaS services are Azure VMs, Azure VDI, Azure Disc Storage and Azure Virtual Network. This model is ideal for applications requiring high customisation or legacy workloads.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

PaaS shifts responsibility (such as the OS, Runtime, and VMs) towards the service provider. It removes the hassle of infrastructure management so you can focus on building and deploying web apps with hardly any hassle, such as with Azure App Service.

Azure SQL serves your relational database needs. Even so, other PaaS offerings include Azure Functions, which runs event-driven code on demand, and Logic Apps, which automate workflows with pre-built connectors.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

SaaS takes it even further by taking care of everything, leaving you to manage only the data and software you use. Here, you don’t need to install or maintain the software; you access it via a web browser. SaaS is easy to use and maintain, and the service provider manages the updates and patches.

Examples of SaaS (Software as a Service) include Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. Switch to SaaS if your app is highly automated and web-based. (like when it doesn’t require specific Operating Sytems or middleware).

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