Microsoft Azure
Containers and delivery, integration and messaging, data, storage and observability on Azure.
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Designing
Developing
Microsoft Azure is the public cloud most commonly found inside organisations that already run Microsoft technology such as Active Directory, SQL Server, .NET and Microsoft 365. That existing footprint is usually what decides an Azure migration, rather than a feature comparison. The services listed below are the Azure building blocks that map most directly to the architecture patterns covered elsewhere on this site: managed Kubernetes, container delivery, messaging and integration, and the data and monitoring layer.
Microsoft Azure - Containers and Delivery
Azure Kubernetes Service
Azure Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes offering in which Azure runs and maintains the control plane and integrates cluster access with Microsoft Entra ID.
Azure Container Registry
Azure Container Registry stores and manages container images and Helm charts, with geo-replication and image scanning built in.
Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines builds, tests and deploys code to any platform or cloud. It is the continuous integration and delivery part of Azure DevOps.
Microsoft Azure - Integration and Messaging
Azure Service Bus
Azure Service Bus is an enterprise message broker with queues and publish-subscribe topics, used to decouple applications and services from each other.
Azure Event Hubs
Azure Event Hubs is an event ingestion and streaming service able to receive and process very large volumes of events per second.
Azure Event Grid
Azure Event Grid routes discrete events from Azure services and custom sources to subscribers using a publish-subscribe model.
Microsoft Azure - Data, Storage and Observability
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is the managed relational database service built on the Microsoft SQL Server engine, with patching, backups and high availability handled by Azure.
Azure Disk Storage
Azure Disk Storage provides managed block storage volumes for Azure Virtual Machines and container workloads, across several performance tiers.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor collects metrics and logs from Azure resources and applications, and includes Application Insights for application-level tracing.