Microsoft Azure

Azure was first introduced at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October 2008 under the code name "Project Red Dog". It was officially launched as Windows Azure in February 2010 and later renamed to Microsoft Azure on March 25, 2014.

Services

Microsoft Azure uses large-scale virtualization at Microsoft data centers worldwide and offers more than 600 services. Microsoft Azure offers a service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees 99.9% availability for applications and data hosted on its platform, subject to specific terms and conditions outlined in the SLA documentation.

Computer services

• Virtual machines, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), allowing users to launch general-purpose Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, software as a service (SaaS), as well as preconfigured machine images for popular software packages.
  • Starting in 2022, these virtual machines are now powered by Ampere Cloud-native processors.
  • Most users run Linux on Azure, some of the many Linux distributions offered, including Microsoft's own Linux-based Azure Sphere.
• App services, a platform as a service (PaaS) environment for publishing and managing websites.
• Azure Web Apps, formerly Azure Web Sites, allows developers to build and deploy websites using various programming languages and deployment tools. This PaaS feature was announced in June 2012 and renamed in April 2015.
• Web Jobs are applications that can be deployed to an App Service environment to implement background processing that can be invoked on a schedule, on-demand, or run continuously. The Blob, Table, and Queue services can be used to communicate between Web Apps and Web Jobs and to provide state.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides the capability to deploy production-ready Kubernetes clusters in Azure.
• In July 2023, watermarking support on Azure Virtual Desktop was announced as an optional feature of Screen Capture to provide additional security against data leakage.

Identity

• Entra ID connect is used to synchronize on-premises directories and enable SSO (Single Sign On).
• Entra ID B2C allows the use of consumer identity and access management in the cloud.
• Entra Domain Services is used to join Azure virtual machines to a domain without domain controllers.
• Azure information protection can be used to protect sensitive information.
• Entra ID External Identities is a set of capabilities that allow organizations to collaborate with external users, including customers and partners.
• On July 11, 2023, Microsoft announced the renaming of Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID. The name change took place four days later.

Mobile services

• Mobile Engagement collects real-time analytics that highlight users' behavior. It also provides push notifications to mobile devices.
• HockeyApp can be used to develop, distribute, and beta-test mobile apps.

Storage services

• Storage Services provides REST and SDK APIs for storing and accessing data on the cloud.
• Table Service lets programs store structured text in partitioned collections of entities that are accessed by the partition key and primary key. Azure Table Service is a NoSQL non-relational database.
• Blob Service allows programs to store unstructured text and binary data as object storage blobs that can be accessed by an HTTP(S) path. Blob service also provides security mechanisms to control access to data.
• Queue Service lets programs communicate asynchronously by message using queues.
• File Service allows storing and access of data on the cloud using the REST APIs or the SMB protocol.

Communication services

• Azure Communication Services offers an SDK for creating web and mobile communications applications that include SMS, video calling, VOIP and PSTN calling, and web-based chat.

Data management

• Azure Data Explorer provides big data analytics and data-exploration capabilities.
• Azure Search provides text search and a subset of OData's structured filters using REST or SDK APIs.
• Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database service that implements a subset of the SQL SELECT statement on JSON documents.
• Azure Cache for Redis is a managed implementation of Redis.
• StorSimple manages storage tasks between on-premises devices and cloud storage.
• Azure SQL Database works to create, scale, and extend applications into the cloud using Microsoft SQL Server technology. It also integrates with Active Directory, Microsoft System Center, and Hadoop.
• Azure Synapse Analytics is a fully managed cloud data warehouse.
• Azure Data Factory is a data integration service that allows creation of data-driven workflows in the cloud for orchestrating and automating data movement and data transformation.
• Azure Data Lake is a scalable data storage and analytic service for big data analytics workloads that require developers to run massively parallel queries.
• Azure HDInsight is a big data-relevant service that deploys Hortonworks Hadoop on Microsoft Azure and supports the creation of Hadoop clusters using Linux with Ubuntu.
• Azure Stream Analytics is a Serverless scalable event-processing engine that enables users to develop and run real-time analytics on multiple streams of data from sources such as devices, sensors, websites, social media, and other applications.

Messaging

The Microsoft Azure Service Bus allows applications running on Azure premises or off-premises devices to communicate with Azure. This helps to build scalable and reliable applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Azure service bus supports four different types of communication mechanisms:

• Event Hubs, which provides event and telemetry ingress to the cloud at a massive scale, with low latency and high reliability. For example, an event hub can be used to track data from cell phones such as coordinating with a GPS in real time.
• Queues, which allows one-directional communication. A sender application would send the message to the service bus queue and a receiver would read from the queue. Though there can be multiple readers for the queue, only one would process a single message.
• Topics, which provides one-directional communication using a subscriber pattern. It is similar to a queue; however, each subscriber will receive a copy of the message sent to a Topic. Optionally, the subscriber can filter out messages based on specific criteria defined by the subscriber.
• Relays, which provides bi-directional communication. Unlike queues and topics, a relay does not store in-flight messages in its memory; instead, it just passes them on to the destination application.

Media services

A PaaS offering that can be used for encoding, content protection, streaming, or analytics.

CDN

Azure has a worldwide content delivery network (CDN) designed to efficiently deliver audio, video, applications, images, and other static files. It improves the performance of websites by caching static files closer to users, based on their geographic location. Users can manage the network using a REST-based HTTP API.

Azure has 118 point-of-presence locations across 100 cities worldwide (also known as Edge locations) as of January 2023.

Developer

• Application Insights
• Azure DevOps

Management

• Azure Automation allows users to automate repetitive tasks using runbooks or desired state configurations for process automation.
• Microsoft SMA

Azure AI

• Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) provides tools and frameworks for developers to create their own machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services.
• Azure AI Services by Microsoft comprises prebuilt APIs, SDKs, and services developers can customize. These services encompass perceptual and cognitive intelligence features such as speech recognition, speaker recognition, neural speech synthesis, face recognition, computer vision, OCR/form understanding, natural language processing, machine translation, and business decision services. Many AI characteristics in Microsoft's products and services, namely Bing, Office, Teams, Xbox, and Windows, are driven by Azure AI Services.
• Microsoft Foundry (formerly known as Azure AI Studio) can be used for building and deploying generative AI applications, notably using OpenAI's foundation model GPT-4o.

Azure Blockchain Workbench

Through Azure Blockchain Workbench, Microsoft is providing the required infrastructure to set up a consortium network in multiple topologies using a variety of consensus mechanisms. Microsoft provides integration from these blockchain platforms to other Microsoft services to streamline the development of distributed applications. Microsoft supports many general-purpose blockchains, including Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric and purpose-built blockchains like Corda.

Azure Function

Azure functions are used in serverless computing architectures, where subscribers can execute code as an event-driven Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) without managing the underlying server resources. Customers using Azure functions are billed based on per-second resource consumption and executions.

Internet of Things (IoT)

• Azure IoT Hub enables the connection, monitoring, and management of a large number of IoT assets. On February 4, 2016, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the Azure IoT Hub service.
• Azure IoT Edge is a fully managed service built on IoT Hub that allows for cloud intelligence deployed locally on IoT edge devices.
• Azure IoT Central is a managed SaaS application for connecting, monitoring, and managing IoT assets. Its public preview was announced on December 5, 2017. On December 5, 2017, Microsoft announced the Public Preview of Azure IoT Central, its Azure IoT SaaS service.
• On October 4, 2017, Microsoft began shipping GA versions of the official Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Kit (Devkit) board, manufactured by MX Chip.
• On April 16, 2018, Microsoft announced the launch of the Azure Sphere, an end-to-end IoT product that focuses on microcontroller-based devices and uses Linux.
• On May 7, 2018, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure Maps, an enterprise maps API and SDK platform.
• On June 27, 2018, Microsoft launched Azure IoT Edge, used to run Azure services and artificial intelligence on IoT devices.
• On November 20, 2018, Microsoft launched the Open Enclave SDK for cross-platform systems such as ARM Trust Zone and Intel SGX.

Azure Local

Azure Local (previously Azure Stack HCI) is a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) product that uses validated hardware to run virtualized workloads on-premises to consolidate aging infrastructure and connect to Azure for cloud services.

Azure Orbital

Launched in September 2020, Azure Orbital lets private industries and government agencies process satellite data quickly by connecting directly to cloud computing networks. Mobile cloud computing ground stations are also available to provide connectivity to remote locations without ground infrastructure. Third-party satellite systems, like SpaceX's Starlink and SES' O3b constellation, can be employed.

SES plans to use Microsoft's data centers to provide cloud connectivity to remote areas through its next generation O3b mPOWER MEO satellites alongside Microsoft's data centers. The company will deploy satellite control and uplink ground stations to achieve this. SES launched the first two O3b mPOWER satellites in December 2022; nine more are scheduled between 2023 and 2024. The service should begin in Q3 2023.

According to Microsoft, satellite cloud connectivity can provide lower latency than terrestrial fiber routes in specific regions. The company stated that during network testing for Xbox Cloud, satellite connections out-performed terrestrial networks in certain rural or geographically remote areas of the United States due to fewer network routing hops.

Azure Orbital was retired in December 2024, with existing assets being sold off to Space Leasing International.

Azure Container Storage

In August 2024, Azure launched Azure Container Storage, a platform-managed container-native storage service for the public cloud. The service supports Ephemeral Disks (Local NVMe/Temp SSD) and Azure Disks for containerized applications.

Azure Quantum

Released for public preview in 2021. Azure Quantum provides access to quantum hardware and software. The platform provides access to third-party quantum systems utilizing varied hardware architectures, including trapped ion, neutral atom, and superconducting systems.

Azure Quantum Elements is an integrated cloud software platform designed for computational chemistry and materials science applications that uses artificial intelligence models, high-performance computing clusters, and cloud-based quantum processor access to execute molecular simulations.The platform includes a GPT-4-based tool called Copilot to assist users in querying dataset metrics, generating code scripts, and setting up simulations.

In 2021, Microsoft developed the quantum programming language Q# (pronounced Q Sharp) and an open-source quantum development kit for algorithm development and simulation.

In 2023, Microsoft developed Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) from LLVM as a common interface between programming languages and target quantum processors.

The Azure Quantum Resource Estimator estimates the resources required to execute a given quantum algorithm on a fault-tolerant quantum computer. It can also show how future quantum computers will impact today's encryption algorithms.