Microsoft Azure For Dummies

Introduction

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud service in which you rent compute services from Microsoft that run in Microsoft’s data centers. You pay only for the resources you use over the course of your billing period.

I wrote this book to give you a gentle yet thorough introduction to Microsoft Azure, showing you how it works and why you may want to use it to save your company money, time, effort, and sanity.

About This Book

You may wonder why you don’t find a large number of Azure–related books in your local bookstores or at online retailers. The answer is quite simple: Azure changes often, so print publishers have a great deal of difficulty keeping up.

I’ve worked with Azure for several years and have regular contact with Azure team members at Microsoft, who find it to be just as time- and effort-intensive to stay current with the technologies as users do.

Thus, I wrote this book with the intention of helping you with the following:

• Becoming comfortable with Microsoft Azure: I give you this comfort by sticking to what Microsoft calls the “80 percent scenarios,” or Azure deployments used by 80 percent of its customer base.
• Gaining skill with programmatic deployment: Along the way, I show you how to use Azure PowerShell, Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI), and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to get your Azure work done. These Azure access methods change less frequently than the Azure portal graphical user interface (GUI).
• Becoming comfortable with tools and staying ...