Azure's Evolution

Azure has grown in scope dramatically since it debuted in Feb. 2010. It currently consists of more than 30 services that span Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and batches of 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 virtual machines 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. For example, Azure Virtual Machines are available with up to 32 cores, 448GB of RAM, and 6.5TB of storage per instance. Azure SQL Database instances can be provisioned in sizes up to 500GB. Network communications bandwidth and security has been addressed with a feature called ExpressRoute, which lets customers work with Microsoft partners that offer dedicated private network connections to Azure data centers.