A High-Level Summary of Azure Services

Most organizations consider migrating to hosted services, such as Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), for a variety of reasons, including reduction of cost and management and other benefits. However, to gain the expected benefits from Azure, it is important to understand what Azure services provide, how they differ from on-premises, and what customers can expect if they migrate to Azure.

Azure services can be divided into three main categories with distinct benefits and limitations:

Infrastructure services resemble an on-premises data center and primarily consist of virtual machines, networking, and storage. Microsoft purchases and manages the underlying hardware, but customers must continue to manage the operating system, storage, and applications. This approach reduces upfront capital costs, lends itself to an easier migration, and reduces the overhead of managing a data center, but it does not significantly reduce the cost of managing servers and applications.

Platform services are a level above infrastructure services and consist of preconfigured environments that customers can use without managing the underlying hardware, storage, or operating system. They have lower management costs, but migration from existing on-premises systems is often more difficult, usually requires modifying applications, and may incur more cost than infrastructure equivalents. Additionally, platform services are updated at a pace dictated by Microsoft, which is faster than the usual pace of updates mandated on-premises. This cadence could result in more frequent changes and testing, especially when those services are connected to other applications.