Introduction to Azure services

Discover how Azure acts as a cloud computing service delivering compute, storage, and applications, with SQL database, Cosmos DB, Data Factory, Data Lake, and Stream Analytics.

Create and explore a free Azure account, understand the 12-month and $200 credit offers, and identify which services remain free, including SQL databases and storage.

Learn Cosmos DB, globally distributed, multi-model database that scales throughput and storage with milliseconds latency, offering five APIs: core SQL (JSON), Cosmos DB for MongoDB (JSON), Cassandra, Table, and Gremlin.

Azure SQL Database delivers a single SQL server database as a cloud paas with high availability, automated backups, and the latest version.

Discover Azure SQL managed instance, a paas cloud SQL server dedicated to you, highly compatible with on-prem SQL server, offering built-in high availability and on-prem migration via Azure Database Migration Service.

Azure database for MySQL and PostgreSQL lift existing deployments to the web with the LAMP stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP—providing high availability and point time restore up to 35 days.

Explore the Azure marketplace to deploy thousands of certified apps and services, accelerating development with a single bill for Microsoft and third-party solutions.

Discover how the Azure IoT Hub acts as a secure pass-through message hub between internet of things devices and Azure, enabling device management, command and control, and scalable messaging.

IoT central offers a SaaS user interface on top of the IoT hub, bridging business applications and data with centralized management and starter templates.

Azure Sphere secures IoT devices with a microcontroller and a Linux OS. The Azure Sphere Security Service verifies software via certification-based authentication and integrates with IoT Hub and IoT Central.

Explore Azure Synapse Analytics, a data warehouse that ingests, prepares, and serves data for business intelligence and machine learning, forming a cube with dimensions and measures for streaming data.

HDInsight is a big data processing service enabling massively parallel processing with Hive and Spark clusters, using Kafka, Hadoop, Storm, and R, storing data in Azure Data Lake storage.

Explore Azure Databricks, a Spark-based platform for big data modeling, processing, streaming, and machine learning. It features quick setup, auto scale, collaboration, exploration, data visualization, and multi-language support.

Explore artificial intelligence and machine learning with Azure Machine Learning Service and Studio, train and test models, deploy best performing algorithm, and publish web services with code-first and no-code tools.

Explore Azure cognitive services, including decision, language, speech, and vision services, using APIs and a few lines of code with pre-trained models; no data scientist required.

Explore Azure Bot Service to create virtual agents that answer questions like humans, automate restaurant bookings, gather data, and streamline systems using text, speech, interactive cards, and Q&A.

Connect apps, data, and services with logic apps to run trigger-based, serverless and stateful workflows using a no-code or low-code web-based designer and 200+ connectors.

Explore the Azure DevOps SaaS suite, including Azure Repos, Azure Boards, Pipelines, Artifacts, and Test Plans, with granular permissions for enterprise project management.

Explore how GitHub and GitHub actions enable open source collaboration, code hosting, lightweight project management, and automated CI/CD workflows.

Azure dev test labs manage creating and de-provisioning virtual machines via ARM templates. They enable auto shutdown with notifications to reduce costs, and define lab owner and lab user roles.

Explore Azure security center, a monitoring service for on premises and cloud, with policy compliance, malware blocking, application control rules, and just-in-time port access.

Explore Azure Key Vault as a store for secrets: tokens, passwords, certificates, keys, and API keys, with hardware security modules, access monitoring and control, and integration with other Azure services.

Explore Azure Sentinel, a CIM system that collects cloud data at scale via a log analytics workspace, detects threats with built-in and custom analytics, and automates responses using artificial intelligence.

Explore Azure dedicated hosts, a dedicated physical server for a single Azure subscription that lets you host multiple virtual machines across resource groups with visibility into the server infrastructure.

Explore network security groups (nsg) and how they filter traffic within a virtual network to protect the network layer, including priorities, default rules, and remote desktop protocol on tcp 3389.

Explore azure firewall, a managed cloud based network security service. Protects virtual network resources, enables virtual machines to communicate, and uses stateful analysis with nat rules.

Discover how Azure DDoS protection defends the perimeter with always-on traffic monitoring, real-time mitigation, and logging, alerting, and telemetry, from basic free to standard plans.

Explore the Azure cloud adoption framework and its five stages: strategy, plan, ready, migrate, and adopt, emphasizing governance, subscriptions, landing zones, and best practices to accelerate cloud innovation.

Explore Microsoft's core tenets of security, privacy, and compliance in Azure, from identity and access management to data protection and trusted cloud commitments.

Explore the Microsoft privacy statement, online service terms, and the data protection amendment, clarifying personal data handling, service level terms, updates, and data security provisions.

Explore the trust center to access security, privacy, and compliance resources, data management and GDPR, plus tools, audit reports, and blueprints for compliance.

Discover how Azure compliance documentation maps global, US government, and regional standards—ISO 27000, NIST, DoD, HITRUST, PCI DSS, and GDPR—with detailed reports in the Trust Center.

Azure blueprints orchestrate resource groups, ARM templates, policy and role assignments into a blueprint you draft, publish, and assign to a subscription or management group, with versioning and deny assignments.