After this lesson, you will be able to: Recognise the core Azure services and what each is for: Virtual Machines, Blob Storage, Azure SQL, Functions, Entra ID, App Service.
Azure has 200+ services. This lesson covers the daily-driver 6 + the 'these have AWS equivalents' map.
Virtual Machines (VMs): Azure's EC2 equivalent. Pick OS + size; manage everything. App Service: managed PaaS for web apps. Deploy from git / zip / container. AWS's Elastic Beanstalk + App Runner cousin. The most-used Azure compute. Azure Functions: serverless functions. Triggers (HTTP, queue, timer, blob); pay per invocation. Lambda equivalent. Container Apps: managed Kubernetes-on-rails (built on AKS). Like Fargate / Cloud Run. AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service): full K8s, covered in do-azure-08.
Blob Storage: object storage. S3 equivalent. Tiers: Hot, Cool, Archive (each cheaper but slower to retrieve). Azure Files: SMB / NFS file shares. Mount from VMs or AKS Pods. EFS equivalent. Disks: managed disks for VMs. SSD / Premium SSD / Ultra Disk tiers. EBS equivalent. Cost-saving move: lifecycle rules on Blob Storage move old files to Cool / Archive automatically.
Azure SQL Database: managed Microsoft SQL Server. Azure Database for Postgres / MySQL: managed open-source DBs. Cosmos DB: globally distributed multi-model NoSQL (DynamoDB equivalent, but more flexible APIs). Azure Cache for Redis: managed Redis. For most learners: Postgres flexible-server is the go-to.
Entra ID is the killer Azure service. Workforce identity + SSO + conditional access + MFA + B2B/B2C. Even AWS-heavy enterprises use Entra ID as the identity provider that federates INTO AWS. Used by Microsoft 365, GitHub Enterprise, Slack, Salesforce, virtually every enterprise SaaS for SSO. We cover it deeply in do-azure-03.
VNet: VPC equivalent. Subnets, NSGs, peering. Application Gateway: L7 load balancer (= ALB). Plus a WAF tier for security. Front Door: global edge + CDN + WAF. CloudFront + Cloudflare equivalent. Load Balancer: L4 (= NLB). Same conceptual model as AWS; different names + slightly different UI.
Azure Monitor = the meta-service. Includes: Application Insights: APM (instrument code; see traces + perf). Log Analytics: aggregated logs queryable with KQL (Kusto Query Language, strong query DSL). Metrics: built-in time-series. Alerts: fire on metric or log thresholds. Tight integration: every Azure resource emits metrics + activity logs by default. Compare to AWS where you have to opt-in resource by resource.
Pick the easy choice.
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