Introduction to Azure Cloud

Cloud Services

Rental of software and hardware resources on-demand.

Total Cost of Ownership

Cost Type Examples
🖥️ Hardware Server, server room
👥 Personnel Admin & developer salaries
⚡ Variable Energy, maintenance

Benefits: No Software to Manage

  • ✅ Installation and configuration is much easier
  • ✅ Backups and redundancy are automatic
  • ✅ Shorter time to market
  • ✅ "Rental" of know-how — lower personnel expenses
  • ✅ Higher security

Benefits: No Servers to Manage

  • 📉 Optimization of fixed costs
  • ⚡ Flexibility — quick service start
  • 🔧 No maintenance required

Serverless

The cloud provider automatically provisions, scales, and manages infrastructure.

  • No need to allocate specific disks or compute nodes
  • Highly scalable and event-driven
  • Resources used only when a trigger occurs

Shared Responsibility Model

Managed by Azure Managed by You
Physical datacenters Data
Networking & hypervisor Identity & access
Core platform services Code, config, secrets

In practice: RBAC (least privilege), patching, backups, monitoring.

Disadvantages of Cloud Services

  • 💸 Complicated fee tracking and optimization
  • 🔗 Integration with existing infrastructure
  • 🔒 Lock-in to a specific provider's services
  • 🕵️ Partial loss of control over data
  • 🎓 Need for trained personnel

Costs: What to Watch

  • Pay-as-you-go — you pay for usage (compute, storage, egress)
  • Set budgets + alerts and tag resources (project/course/team)
  • Shut down unused VMs and services when not needed

Cloud Deployment Models

Model Description
☁️ Public Your workload runs in a shared foreign datacenter
🏢 Private Applications run in your own or rented datacenter
🔀 Hybrid Managed uniformly using cloud provider tools

Distribution of Cloud Services

Anything As a Service — Pay as You Go

Layer Model Example
Infrastructure IaaS VMs, disks, network
Platform PaaS Kubernetes, Heroku
Applications SaaS Gmail, Office 365
IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS

IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service

Virtualization of hardware and network infrastructure:

  • 🖥️ Virtual servers and networks
  • 💾 Disks and block devices
  • ⚖️ Load balancers

PaaS — Platform as a Service

Rental of "cloud" operating system services:

  • 🐳 Docker, Docker Compose
  • ☸️ Kubernetes
  • 🚀 Heroku

SaaS — Software as a Service

Ready-made applications or components:

  • 📦 Container registry
  • 🗄️ Database
  • 🤖 Machine learning systems
  • 🔍 Translation, search engine

Cloud Service Providers

Market Share

Provider Share
Amazon AWS 32%
Microsoft Azure 21%
Google Cloud 8%
Others 39%

Others: Heroku, IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, DigitalOcean

What is Azure Cloud?

  • 🌐 Connected public services of Microsoft data centers
  • 🖱️ Control via web portal or command line (az)
  • 🎓 Accessible with a student account

The Most Important Azure Services

Storage

Azure Storage Accounts:

Type Description
File File system (SMB/NFS)
Disk Block device
Blob Object storage

Special: Data Lake, Archive, HPC Cache

Virtual Machines

Linux distributions:

  • CentOS, RHEL, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu

Windows:

  • Windows Server

Or bring your own custom image.

Web Apps

Without a container — managed runtimes:

  • Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, .NET, Ruby

With a container — any dependencies

  • CI/CD: automatic build & deploy
  • GitHub integration
  • Mountable storage (/home, etc.)

Database — SQL

  • Azure SQL (managed SQL Server)
  • SQL Server on VM
  • PostgreSQL / MySQL / MariaDB

Database — NoSQL

  • Cosmos DB — MongoDB & Cassandra compatible
  • Redis — in-memory cache
  • Cassandra — wide-column store

Load Balancer

  • 📢 Publish services to the internet
  • 🔁 Ensure high availability
  • 🔒 HTTPS termination

Azure Networking Basics

Component Purpose
VNet + subnets Private network for services
NSG Inbound/outbound rules at subnet/NIC
Public IP / DNS Publish services to the internet

ACR — Container Registry

  • 📦 Registry of container images
  • Used by App Services and AKS
  • Private registry within your subscription

AKS — Kubernetes Service

  • ☸️ Managed Kubernetes cluster
  • On-demand cluster creation
  • Automatic scaling
  • CI/CD integration
  • Hybrid cloud support — manage multiple clusters

Azure Account Structure

Account : Login and identity

Subscription : Billing and accounting unit

Tenant (Microsoft Entra ID) : Identity boundary — users, groups, app registrations

Resource Organization

Resource Group : A group of resources within a subscription

Resource : A specific billable service

ARM Template (resourceManagerTemplate) : File defining one or more resources as code

Tags and Governance

Concept Purpose
Tags Cost allocation (project, course, team)
Management Groups Group subscriptions for policies
RBAC Least-privilege access control

Quality of Service — SKU

SKU = Stock Keeping Unit

Choose the tier that matches your needs:

Tier Attributes
Basic Low cost, limited redundancy
Standard Balanced performance
Premium High speed, redundancy, low latency

Selection of Location

It matters where the service physically runs:

Region : Geographic area with one or more datacenters

Data Center : Specific physical facility

Considerations: latency ⚡, jurisdiction ⚖️

Managing Azure Services

Tool Description
Azure Portal Web interface for managing services
Azure CLI (az) Command-line scripting & automation
ARM / Bicep Infrastructure as code

Management Architecture

+--------------+     +---------------+
| Provider API |-----| Cloud Service |
+--------------+     +---------------+
        |
   App protocol
        |
+--------------------+
| Web or CLI client  |
+--------------------+

Bibliography

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