What is Azure?

Azure is a complete cloud platform that can host your existing applications, streamline the development of new applications, and even enhance on-premises applications. Azure integrates the cloud services that you need to develop, test, deploy, and manage your applicationsâ??while taking advantage of the efficiencies of cloud computing.

By hosting your applications in Azure, you can start small and easily scale your application as your customer demand grows. Azure also offers the reliability thatâ??s needed for high-availability applications, even including fail over between different regions. The Azure portal lets you easily manage all your Azure services. You can also manage your services programmatically by using service-specific APIs and templates.

Who should read this: This guide is an introduction to the Azure platform for application developers. It provides guidance and direction that you need to start building new applications in Azure or migrating existing applications to Azure.

Where do I start?

With all the services that Azure offers, it can be a daunting task to figure out which services you need to support your solution architecture. This section highlights the Azure services that developers commonly use. For a list of all Azure services, see the Azure documentation.

First, you must decide on how to host your application in Azure. Do you need to manage your entire infrastructure as a virtual machine (VM). Can you use the platform management facilities that Azure provides? Maybe you need a serverless framework to host code execution only?

Your application needs cloud storage, which Azure provides several options for. You can take advantage of Azure's enterprise authentication. There are also tools for cloud-based development and monitoring, and most hosting services offer DevOps integration.

Now, let's look at some of the specific services that we recommend investigating for your applications.

Application hosting

Azure provides several cloud-based compute offerings to run your application so that you don't have to worry about the infrastructure details. You can easily scale up or scale out your resources as your application usage grows.

Azure offers services that support your application development and hosting needs. Azure provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to give you full control over your application hosting. Azure's Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings provide the fully managed services needed to power your apps. There is even true serverless hosting in Azure where all you need to do is write your code.

Azure App Service

When you want the quickest path to publish your web-based projects, consider Azure App Service. App Service makes it easy to extend your web apps to support your mobile clients and publish easily consumed REST APIs. This platform provides authentication by using social providers, traffic-based autoscaling, testing in production, and continuous and container-based deployments.

You can create web apps, mobile app back ends, and API apps.

Because all three app types share the App Service run time, you can host a website, support mobile clients, and expose your APIs in Azure, all from the same project or solution. To learn more about App Service, see What is Azure Web Apps.

App Service has been designed with DevOps in mind. It supports various tools for publishing and continuous integration deployments, including GitHub webhooks, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, and others.