Key Feature

  • Biggest cloud providers worldwide
  • Microsoft’s public cloud computing service
  • A collection of around 68 products that include virtual machines, SQL Database, App Service, and others.
  • It is used to build, deploy and manage applications through a network of Microsoft-owned data centers.
  • Provides a solid-state drive and top-notch hardware capabilities

Hosting Services

Computing Resources

To run cloud-based applications Azure provides storage disks, memory, processes, networking, and the operating system.

Virtual Machine

A user gets full control over the operating system and all deployed applications. He/She can also quickly build, deploy and scale different applications running on multiple platforms.
It eliminates the overhead of managing and maintaining the machine hardware resources. The Azure Function also provides code logic and runs it to respond to a specific even or timer without worrying about the underlying platform or infrastructure where this code will be running.

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Network Services

Helps to connect and manage the hosted resources with the on-premise resources, appropriately and securely. Thus achieving the organization's networking and security requirements. A user can add the resource from the same region to a single virtual network. Hence, resources located in different virtual networks can communicate together using the virtual network peering.

Load Balancer or Application Gateway

  • Maintains application high availability and workload with the highest possible throughput and lowest latency.
  • It balances the incoming internet and internal responses to the web applications across the Azure service. Routes the incoming traffic based on the IP address and the port number of both the source and destination.
  • Besides, it helps in protecting the web application using the Web Application Firewall of the load balancer.

Azure's Safety Net

(June 02, 2017) Microsoft Extends Azure's Safety Net for Windows Server Cloud Backups to protect both and configuration information. It would make it easier for Azure Backup Customers to bounce back from Windows Server mishaps, or worse, debilitating ransomware attacks. Since Windows Server 2008 R2, the feature integrates cloud backup with Windows Server State.

Azure Backup agent software

Take account of the server's operating system and application configuration. It enables businesses to resume operations with a minimum of server setup chores quickly.

Azure Stack

APIs, tools, and processes allow an organization to use the company's Azure cloud service within its data center, i.e., hosted on-premises in private cloud scenarios. Both end-user customers and third-party providers are anxious to deploy the solution. Organizations using Dell EMC, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo systems can now order Azure Stack.

Microsoft Azure Data Service

Infrastructure as a Service offering (IaaS) database services, includes SQL on Azure Virtual Machine

  • SQL Databases
  • SQL Data Warehouse

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines

Platform as a Service (PaaS) database services

  • A comprehensive range of relational and non-relational platforms. It includes Azure Database Services, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure MySQL/ MariaDB/ PostgreSQL, Azure Synapse Service, and Azure Cosmos DB.
  • A customer can focus on the database design and performance aspects
    Scale the database resources up and down and tune the performance automatically in response to the workload changes
  • Gives more control over the database server or plan to migrate your databases directly from your on-premises database servers to Microsoft Azure without performing changes in your databases or applications.
    Using the Azure Portal or the Azure Resource Manager Templates, or ARM templates, Azure database services can be provisioned for large-scale deployments.

Relational Database Management System (RDBMS)

Always an excellent choice for working with data.

The software package enables database administrators to create, maintain and manage a database.
Schema: Microsoft SQL Server database engine

The Azure Resource Manager: The management and deployment service to deploy the different resources using the Azure Portal. These resources are translated internally to an ARM template. Azure provides a customized ARM template to deploy a set of related resources in a single template, with the ability to define dependencies between them and parameters to offer values during the deployment process.

The ARM template: It is a JSON document that describes the structure and the state of the resources deployed. It's different from the imperative language that uses procedural models to specify the deployment process, such as PowerShell, Azure CLI.

Non Relational Database Management System

Open-Source Databases on Azure SQL Platform

  • Database for MySQL
  • Database for PostgreSQL
  • Database for MariaDB

Synapse Analytics

Cognitive Services

Computer Vision, Text Analysis, Bing Search, and Language Understanding (LUIS). The AI Engineer implements Cognitive Service API's prebuilt capabilities and embeds intelligence within an application or Bots, instead of creating existing models from scratch.

Virtual Private Network Gateway

It provides a secure connection between Azure Virtual Network and the on-premise network by encrypting the traffic following between the two sites.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Helps to cache and deliver the web content like multimedia to the users in the local or nearest regions. Thus, minimizes the web page startup latency and provides the best performance to the web application.

Executive

Program Manager: Saurabh Sensharma

Achievements/Awards

Azure SQL Database

  • According to DB-Engines, it is named among the top three databases of 2020.

What for Customers?

Empowers game creators to build, run, and grow their games on a global scale. It powers the biggest multiplayer games, featuring state-of-the-art security and the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings of any cloud service provider.

Region: Data centers are consolidated into Regions located in different locations around the world. It provides the lowest possible latency, flexibility, and scalability to deploy services in the closest geographical location to the service user. Thus, allowing faster and more efficient services.

Data Center: Regions are physically divided into separate data centers having their power, colling, and networking resource.

Availability Zones: A minimum of three data centers connected via high-speed private fiber-optic connections to increase the same region availability. In case one AZ goes down, the other handles the workload. AZ supports specific services or zonal services or zone redundant services replicated to other zones.

Geography: Two or more regions are grouped to preserve data residency and compliance requirements to host data in the same boundary. The Geographies include America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific.

Paired region: At the same geography with at least 300 miles distance, each region paired with another except Brazil South. It helps to replicate the resources and increases the availability and redundancy of these region services by performing service failover from one region to another in case of outage due to a natural calamity.

Resource Group: To manage different resources, as a management unit, instead of using them as an individual resource, based on resource's lifecycle such a billing, monitoring, altering, access control, policies, and quota.

Availability Sets – Maintain the Application Availability: During the planned maintenance or in case of failure

Azure also minimizes the downtime required for the planned maintenance by performing the maintenance sequentially on the first region directing the workload to the second replica and then performs the same on the second replica.

The data center is logically divided into Update Domains (UD). The performance and security updates are applied sequentially. Thus, ensuring that the data center will not be completely unavailable during the update process.

The Fault Domains: The workload is physically distributed across different power, cooling, and network hardware supporting the server's data center racks. In case of hardware failure, the failing rack will be unavailable without affecting the overall data center.

Latest News

KRAFTON, Inc. announced a global collaboration with Microsoft Azure to maximize data security & privacy

November 08, 2020:  It would host its portfolio of multiplatform products directly operated by the company and its subsidiaries, including PUBG Corporation’s multiplayer battle royale PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) on PC and consoles, in addition to PUBG MOBILE. The company wants to ensure personal data protection through Azure through the verification process to ensure that the storage of personally identifiable information of its players follows all appropriate requirements in the territories where ‘KRAFTON' and its subsidiaries operate gaming services. Thus want the relevant software in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.