Microsoft Azure had a very different start compared to AWS. It was originally launched in 2009 as the Windows Azure platform, where the focus was on developers and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) components. The initial set of services that were launched were Windows Server AppFabric and ASP.NET MVC2 to help developers build applications using the frameworks and services in the cloud. The only infrastructure components at that time were Windows Server virtual machines to enable hybrid use cases, but the overall strategy was still geared towards developer community, which was radically different from AWS, who had more infrastructure components around that time being offered apart from some basic application-centric services. With this foray into the cloud, Azure continued the push towards application aspects until 2014, when it changed the whole strategy to go into the IaaS space as well and also rebranded the platform to Microsoft Azure.

Since the time Microsoft entered the cloud IaaS market with the launch of Azure Virtual Machines in June 2012 (with general availability in April 2013), Azure has grown dramatically in terms of its global presence as well as the services it has to offer. At the time of writing this book, Microsoft Azure has 36 regions globally, with plans for six additional regions to come online in the near future. One point to consider here is that there's a subtle difference in the way AWS describes its regions versus Microsoft Azure. For AWS, it's a cluster of Availability Zones (AZs) that make up a region, and an AZ can comprise one or more data centers in itself, whereas for Microsoft Azure, a region is a geographic location where it has a data center. Microsoft recently announced that it will also now offer AZs like AWS, however that feature is still in beta and will take some time to roll out globally. So, for users who are looking for high availability deployments in Microsoft Azure in the interim, there's another option called Availability Sets (details are available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/manage-availability?toc=%2Fazure%2Fvirtual-machines%2Fwindows%2Ftoc.json#configure-multiple-virtual-machines-in-an-availability-set-for-redundancy).

Another important aspect of Microsoft's cloud business is that apart from Microsoft Azure, it also has services around Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, which are included in there.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Microsoft Azure's cloud native services, strengths, and differentiators around CI/CD, serverless, containers, and microservices concepts, covering the following services:
  • Azure functions
  • Visual Studio team services
  • Azure container service
  • Azure IoT
  • Azure machine learning studio
  • Office 365
• Understanding cloud native database capabilities:
  • Azure Cosmos DB
• Management and monitoring capabilities for Microsoft Azure native application architectures
• Patterns for moving off monolithic application architectures to Microsoft Azure native architectures
• Sample reference architectures and code snippets for CI/CD, serverless, containers, and microservices application architectures