Azure for .NET Core Developers: Implementing Microsoft Azure Solutions Using .NET Core Framework

CHAPTER 1

Azure Ecosystem

Firstly, big congratulations to you for selecting Azure in your career path and having your professional skills upgrading with the super cool, intelligent cloud, Microsoft Azure. From here to the end of this book, I will be your partner in the journey of enhancing your skillset from .NET technologies to NET Core with Microsoft Azure. In this chapter, I will give you an eagle view about Azure Ecosystem. What a developer should know about Azure along with the subject’s exercise, which you will be learning in the coming chapters.

Structure

Azure and its components

Azure services

Working with Azure

ARM templates

Azure CLI

Azure PowerShell

Objective

The objective of this chapter is to understand the following:

Services developer should know

What we will cover at the end of the book

Prerequisite and setup to start with

Azure and its components

Let us study Azure and its components in detail in the following sections.

What is Azure?

As Microsoft says, Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business challenges. It is the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

As mentioned, Azure does come with flexibility and ease to work with different operating systems such as Windows, Linux, with multiple language support such as C#, JAVA, Python, and so on. Along with different developers’ tools such as Visual Studio, Visual Code, and so on. When it comes to the backend, it does support not only different databases such as SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, but also different types of databases such as Relational, NoSQL, Graph, and so on. It comes with a wide range of scalable infrastructure offerings as well as serverless offerings. And same goes when it comes for pricing, with fixed monthly plans to per execution plan.

The reason behind this amazing Ecosystem is to empower you to have the liberty to go for the desired technology stack in terms of the operating system, compute database, language, tools, and pricing. You should focus more on working on solutions to meet the business goals, and the underline technology should never be constrained. Working with Microsoft Azure brings you in pleasure to work with world-class technology stack. In short, Azure is very much compatible with your designed stack.

As you may have knowledge of their different key areas in the software development process. Now, here I am more specifically, talking with the developer’s perspective.

To list it:

Networking

Storage

Servers

Virtualization

Operating System

Middleware

Runtime

Data

Application

Considering the preceding nine points, let the responsibility of each area be shared as follows:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Azure gains the responsibility or control for points 1 to 4 in the preceding list, and the rest are managed by you. To name, Azure Virtual Machine.

Figure 1.1

Platform as a Service (PaaS): To name, Azure gains the responsibility or control for points 1 to 7 in the preceding list, and the rest are managed by you. To name, Azure Web App Service:

Figure 1.2

Software as Service (SaaS): To name, Azure gains the responsibility or control for points 1 to 9 in the preceding list, and the rest are managed by you. To name, cloud-based programs available in Office 365, such as Microsoft Office Tools, Email.

Azure further categorizes into:

Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS): Services involved in integration architecture, to name, Azure Event Grid:

Figure 1.3

Desktop as a Service (DaaS): To name, Windows Virtual Desktop:

Figure 1.4

Database as a Service (DBaaS): As the name suggests, offerings about serve backend. To name, Azure CosmosDB:

Figure 1.5

Blockchain as a Service (BaaS): To name, Azure Blockchain Service, few to be listed among. This later got globally adopted by all other Cloud vendors in the race. And interestingly for all the categories of Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure offers different services and products:

Figure 1.6

At the time of writing this book, Azure offers 100+ services ready to work with, as can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.7

Azure has data centers across the globe. Azure combines these data centers into regions. Now, each region has multiple data centers to ensure that recovery from disasters is quick and efficient. Again, when I talk about regions, Azure has more global regions than any other cloud provider—offering the scale needed to bring applications closer to users around the world, preserving data residency, and offering comprehensive compliance and resiliency options for customers.

At the time of writing this book, Azure is spread across 55 regions worldwide and is growing at a faster rate. The recent I read the news was in the country of