Azure provides more than 200 services, are divided into 18 categories. These categories include computing, networking, storage, IoT, migration, mobile, analytics, containers, artificial intelligence, and other machine learning, integration, management tools, developer tools, security, databases, DevOps, media identity, and web services. Let’s take a look at some of the major Azure services by category:
Compute Services
This service enables you to create a virtual machine in Windows, Linux or any other configuration in seconds.
This service lets you create scalable applications within the cloud. Once the application is deployed, everything, including provisioning, load balancing, and health monitoring, is taken care of by Azure.
With service fabric, the process of developing a microservice is immensely simplified. Microservice is an application that contains other bundled smaller applications.
With functions, you can create applications in any programming language. The best part about this service is that you need not worry about hardware requirements while developing applications because Azure takes care of that. All you need to do is provide the code.
Enhance and Implement Backup and Disaster Recovery
Microsoft Azure is a backup and disaster recovery dream tool. Why? Because of its flexibility, advanced site recovery, and built-in integration.
As a cloud-based solution, Azure is innately flexible – it can back up your data in almost any language, on any OS, and from any location. Plus, you define the frequency and extent of your backup schedule (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.).
Tape backup has a time and place, but it has limited abilities as a stand-alone backup and disaster recovery solution. Azure site recovery can enhance your tape backup with offsite replication, minimal onsite maintenance, up to ninety-nine years of data retention, minimal or no capital investment, and minimal operational costs. Azure backup stores three copies of your data in three different locations in the data center, and then another three copies in a remote Azure data center, so you never have to worry about losing data.
If you’re in a Windows virtual environment, Azure’s built-in integration for additional backup will be a quick and painless solution. Azure site recovery integrates with System Center and HyperV architectures, creating a robust and seamless cohesion between Azure, System Center, and HyperV.
Do you need data consumption in a range of tools, but there is no way of sharing data artifacts across them? Or are you spending more time looking for data than analyzing it? Then, Azure Catalog is designed specifically for you to address such issues. It is an enterprise-wide metadata catalogue built-in Azure to enable power users (like data scientists, producers or analysts) with the self-service discovery of data from all sources. This makes the entire data asset discovery process quite simple and effortless. However, to enable Data Catalog, you should follow these five steps:
- Provisioning data catalog
- Register and annotate assets
- Discover assets
- Connect to the data
- Set-up security for data assets