Free preview · Beginner · 17 min read
Understand Azure as a programmable cloud platform: tenants, subscriptions, resource hierarchy, identity, networks, compute, managed services, observability, policy and the cloud engineer responsibility boundary.
Azure is not a list of products to memorize. A cloud engineer should see it as a programmable operating environment built from identity, subscriptions, resource groups, networks, compute platforms, managed data services, observability and governance.
REQUIREMENT
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TENANT + SUBSCRIPTION + IDENTITY
↓
REGION + NETWORK + COMPUTE + DATA
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AUTOMATE / DEPLOY
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OBSERVE
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SECURE + SCALE + OPTIMIZE
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RECOVER + IMPROVE
For every workload, answer:
| Service model | Azure manages more of | You still own |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual Machines | facilities, hardware, hypervisor | guest OS, patches, application, data, network/security choices |
| AKS | managed Kubernetes control plane and platform integration | workloads, images, RBAC, policies, node/workload configuration, reliability |
| Azure SQL Database | database infrastructure, patching, built-in HA platform | schema, access, queries, capacity/performance choices, application behavior |
| Azure Container Apps | servers, orchestration platform, ingress/scaling platform | container, identity, config, revisions, dependencies, workload behavior |
| Blob Storage | storage infrastructure and durability mechanisms | IAM/RBAC, networking, lifecycle, retention, data exposure |
| Need | Common Azure service |
|---|---|
| virtual machines | Azure Virtual Machines |
| autoscaled VM fleet | Virtual Machine Scale Sets |
| managed Kubernetes | AKS |
| serverless containers | Azure Container Apps |
| web/API PaaS | App Service |
| functions/event code | Azure Functions |
| object/file storage | Blob Storage / Azure Files |
| relational database | Azure SQL / PostgreSQL / MySQL |
| globally distributed NoSQL | Cosmos DB |
| in-memory data | Azure Managed Redis |
| container registry | Azure Container Registry |
| messaging | Service Bus / Event Grid / Event Hubs |
| metrics/logs/traces | Azure Monitor / Log Analytics / Application Insights |
| secrets/keys | Key Vault |
| IaC | Bicep / ARM / Terraform |