Services Enable Broad Range of Scenarios

Azure consists of dozens of services, and new service previews arrive on short notice. The services can be used individually or in combinations to address many categories of IT scenarios.

VM Hosting

Workloads deployed on-premises or with non-Microsoft hosting providers can be moved to Azure VMs (an IaaS offering) with little or no code rewriting. Hybrid deployments can be created with on-premises counterparts, especially when on-premises Microsoft products are used. For example, SQL Server allows AlwaysOn Availability Group replicas of on-premises databases to be hosted in Azure for disaster recovery.

Using Azure in this way can reduce hardware costs, simplify scaling, provide elasticity to grow and shrink resources (so-called bursting), and reduce latency for users by locating deployments in optimal geographical regions. Azure can also be used for development and test efforts to reduce costs of provisioning local lab resources, and most Visual Studio  subscriptions include monthly credits for Azure services.