Azure's Evolution

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and... more

Azure has grown in scope dramatically since it debuted in Feb. 2010. It currently consists of dozens of services that span Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and new service previews arrive several times a year.

Azure consisted of four PaaS services when it launched. In a PaaS offering, a cloud vendor rents out the use of computer resources and takes responsibility for managing not only the hardware but also the OS and platform software running on the computers. Microsoft added IaaS services to Azure in Apr. 2013. These services, which primarily consist of hosted VMs that can run Windows Server or Linux variants, are similar to those offered by Amazon Web Services, Azure’s highly successful competitor.

The capacity and scalability of many of Azure’s components has grown. Network communications bandwidth and security has been addressed with ExpressRoute, which lets customers work with Microsoft partners that offer dedicated private network connections to Azure data centers.

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