As it is said everywhere else, I would also start with the below sentence:
Cloud is NOT a very new concept.
The basic concepts were originally present in very early days of internet,
e.g. many concepts were available since very beginning of internet era.
- there were already data centers, there were already traffic managers or CDNs / load balancers
- the concepts of database servers or web servers or cache servers were already being used
- Scaling concepts were also already being used by many applications
In recent years, the cloud computing concept has become very popular. Many big players are moving their applications to some or the other cloud platforms.
Where is the challenge?
There are many cloud platforms available – Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google’s Google Cloud, and many other platforms.
When someone try to start learning any of these platform on our own, many of us get confused on where to start. Each of these platform provides huge number of services/offerings.
We try to apply “the brute force strategy” to learn. We start by learning “each offering”. Then we get to know that there is too much to learn and this fact discourages many of us from reach our end goal.
I faced the same challenge few years back when I started learning Azure. But then after struggling for couple of months, I learned a way, which I feel is best way to learn any of these platform. I am trying to put the strategy which help me to plan this and I am hoping this would help many of you too.
A tip to overcome this challenge…
The secret is “Divide and Conquer strategy”. Every cloud platform provides a lot of services / offerings, but all of them are broadly categorized in very few categories. I will talk only about Azure in this section. But this strategy applies to all other cloud platforms.
The complete directory of all services offered by Azure can be found on this page. This list also has a lot of categories. Hence I attempted to categorize all of these services broadly in 6 categories.
Once we understand basics of those categories, it becomes very easy to learn them further. This also provides comprehensive view of all the offerings.
Compute
This block is for all Azure products which provide computing power and other infrastructure required for your application. This can be again divided into two parts
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Some examples are Virtual Machines, Containers, etc.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Some examples are Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps, Web Jobs, Azure Functions, Logic Apps
Data
This is set of Azure services which provide data storage and data processing capabilities. This can further be divided into:
- Structured Data
- Unstructured Data
- Azure Storage – File , Blob , Table Storage, Queue, etc.
- Caching
- Integration among applications
Monitoring and Governance
This block enables administrators and developers to monitor their applications and thereby help in better governance. Below are some of the important services from this section:
Network
This block enables developers and administrators to configure network related requirements for your applications. Below are some important Azure services:
- Azure Traffic Manager
- Azure Load Balancer
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Virtual Networks and VPNs
- ExpressRoutes
- Azure Firewall
Security
Every application have some security requirement. This block aggregates all the Azure services which are targeted to better the security of your applications. Below are some important Azure services from this block:
AI and Machine Learning
This section includes all those Azure services which are targeted to enable developers to build intelligent applications. Below are some of the well known Azure services:
I am sure this tip would help you to remember comprehensive view of Azure Products and help you to speed up your learning.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Do not forget to comment and let me know your thoughts.
