Cloud services have come a long way in the last 5 to 10 years. Cloud was and still is one of the biggest trends in Information Technology (IT), with new topics still to be discovered.

In the early 2000s, cloud computing wasn't a widely phrase, but the concept, as well as data centers with massive computing power, already existed. Later in that decade, the word cloud became a buzzword for nearly anything that was not tangible or online. But the real rise of cloud computing with all its different service models happened before, when big IT companies started their cloud offerings. That was Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in particular. As these cloud offerings developed, they enabled companies from start ups to Fortune 500s to use cloud services, from web services to virtual machines, with billing exact to the minute.

In this chapter, we'll explore the following topics:

• Cloud service models
• Cloud deployment models
• Cloud characteristics
• Multi-cloud characteristics and models
• An overview of Azure services