Introduction to Cloud Computing and Azure
Cloud computing means renting computing power, storage, and services from a provider instead of buying and maintaining your own servers. Microsoft Azure is one of the largest cloud providers, alongside AWS and Google Cloud.
The service models
| Model | You manage | Provider manages | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, app | Physical hardware, networking | Azure Virtual Machines |
| PaaS | Just your app and data | OS, runtime, scaling | Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Just your data | Everything else | Microsoft 365 |
Most of this course focuses on PaaS, services like App Service let you deploy code directly without managing servers at all.
Azure's building blocks
- Regions, physical data center locations around the world (e.g. "West Europe").
- Resource groups, logical containers that hold related resources (a web app, its database, its storage) so you can manage and delete them together.
- Azure Portal, the web dashboard for creating and managing everything visually, at portal.azure.com.
NOTE
Every Azure resource you create belongs to exactly one resource group, get comfortable with them early, they're the organizing unit for almost everything else in this course.