Azure tutorials for beginners

This is Part 1 of Azure tutorial for beginners. In this course, we will discuss everything you need to know to build, deploy and scale applications using Microsoft Azure.

Before continuting with this course please learn the basics of cloud computing from our cloud computing tutorial for beginners course.

Cloud is everywhere. It has completely changed the way businesses think about IT resources and software solutions. Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases. Even individuals like you and me are using cloud and cloud services on a daily basis.

Azure is a cloud computing platform from Microsoft. Initially it was called Windows Azure. Later renamed to Microsoft Azure. It is an ever expanding set of services to help you build solutions to meet your business goals. It offers a wide variety of services. For example, we have

1. Virtual machines running in the cloud for you to host and run your software.
2. Storage services to store all sorts of data - relational, non-relational etc.
3. Software development and deployment services.
4. Networking and Data analysis services.
5. Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Internet of Things etc. The list goes on.

When we think about moving to a cloud from an on-permise datacenter, 2 immediate things that come to our mind are security and availability. 

Data Security

How secure is my data. If you are thinking, your applications and data are more secure in your own data center than in the cloud, you are almost certainly mistaken. Security and privacy are foundational for Azure. Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards and regulatory compliance. In fact, if you compare Azure with other cloud service providers, it has the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings. As of this recording, Azure has over 90+ compliance offerings - the largest portfolio in the industry.

Every year, Microsoft invests over $1 billion dollars in security to protect customers' data and apps from cyberthreats. 95% of fortune 500 companies trust their business and data on Azure.

Availability

As far as availability is concerned, for most services, Azure promises 99.9% uptime and connectivity. Even with our own on-premise data center, it's very difficult to achieve such a high availability and uptime.

Azure supports open source technologies

Many people think Azure is only for Windows apps and services. That's not true. Azure supports open source technologies, so you can use the tools and technologies you prefer. As of this recording, 1 in 4 Azure virtual machines run Linux. Why? Because Azure supports the open-source technologies millions of us already rely on and trust. With Azure, we have choices. We can develop, deploy and test open-source components end-to-end in Azure. As an example, Azure offers Enterprise-grade support for all popular Linux distributions. Run new and even existing business-critical workloads in the cloud with Azure Marketplace.

Almost anything that can be done with a conventional on-premise data center can be accomplished using Azure. Actually it opens a world of possibilities and help us build solutions that we wouldn't be able to build with our own on-premise datacenter. Azure has series of data centers across the globe. So we are able to take advantage of that global reach, massive scale and build solutions that otherwise are practically impossible.

In this course we will start with the basics of Azure and discuss everything you need to know to build, deploy and scale applications using Microsoft Azure.

Before you start this course, I strongly recomend to watch our cloud computing tutorial for beginners course. In this course we have covered all the basics of cloud computing.