Adding new content for a new provider is a special thing, and when it is an important one like Microsoft, the feeling is even more special as we are launching our first Azure Course ever, What is Azure?. Microsoft is one of the top cloud providers, and thanks to the tight integration with its Operating System and the development tools like Visual Studio or .Net, it has been able to gather a huge niche of Windows Developers who are actively using Azure to build and deploy their application. Also, thanks to the availability of a leading operating system like Linux on its IaaS service, it can be an interesting alternative to other big providers like Google or the giant AWS.

To help you begin your ride through the Azure family, and to help you grasp the basic concepts of this service, our skilled Azure expert Ganapathi Subramanian crafted this Azure course that is the first of a long series of content we will work on for this provider. It’s a beginner level course, so you need no specific skills to get started with it, and will definitely enjoy it even if you are totally new to Azure.

What is Azure?

The first two lectures of the What is Azure? course are about introducing the whole platform. Microsoft Azure has a broad variety of different services, and also some details about terminology and founding concepts might be a little bit obscure to newcomers, so Ganapathi will deal a good amount of time to clarify these points. Then, the course follows up with a quick overview of the 4 most important services in the Azure family. It will begin with Cloud Services, a PaaS service that is broadly used by .Net developers thanks to its tight integration with Microsoft’s development tools. Then, the main IaaS service is shown, that is Azure Virtual Machine, probably the most important and used Azure service. The next two lectures of this quick review are about Azure Storage and SQL Azure database, the former to store files and data on the Azure cloud, the latter being the key RDBMS in the platform.

The best is yet to come though as we are actively working on more Azure courses that will follow this first one. The next one will be dedicated to Azure Virtual Machines and will give you a broad and thorough overview of the service, telling you how to get started with it and what its pros and cons are compared to the other major cloud providers.