Azure Roadmap Introduction

The Directions on Microsoft Azure Roadmap describes the components and services of Azure, Microsoft’s hosted application and storage services cloud offering. It summarizes each service, explains its benefits, risks, and pricing metrics (based on U.S. regions), and discusses its near-term technical roadmap where possible. Organizations considering Azure can use the report to evaluate where Azure services might fit into their own environments, while organizations already on Azure can use it as a guide to evolving their services.

Azure has evolved substantially since it became commercially available in Feb. 2010. It consists of dozens of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) components. Customers can leverage Azure’s massive scale and geographic reach for solutions in diverse areas, including VM and Web site hosting, mobile application services, relational and nonrelational storage, disaster recovery, and machine learning (AI). Azure supports many non-Microsoft