Overview

- [Jesse] Hi, this is Jesse Liberty, and in this course, we're going to be looking at an overview of Azure from the perspective of developers. Azure is a very, very large topic with many aspects to it. One way to think about Azure is to divide it into three types of services. The first type is infrastructure as a service. The second type is platform as a service.

And finally, we have software as a service. Infrastructure as a service implies that you're going to be able to get the entire infrastructure of your application through Azure. This includes things like virtual machines and scaling your network. With infrastructure as a service, you the developer will manage your application and your data, but you'll also manage the runtime, the middleware, and the operating system.

With platform as a service, Azure's going to provide your computing resources for you, and so there's no need for you to manage the computing resources or the operating system, and that's going to be the focus of this course. Platform as a service, you have access to Active Directory, you can create APIs and create storage, you have access to familiar software, such as SQL databases, and newer software, such as table storage and web applications.

Software as a service we will not be covering, but it essentially provides ready-made solutions. So if you want to get a web app up and running instantly, software as a service is the way to go. The focus of this course is going to be on an overview of Azure, what services are available, and we'll take a look at creating virtual machines.