Microsoft Azure Overview

Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that helps individuals and organizations provision, deploy, and operate cloud-based services and IT assessment. When you are starting to use Azure, you create an Azure account. Microsoft lets users start Azure with a free Azure account. In Azure, the maximum number of services and resources is applied on per-subscription and per-region levels.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) versus Azure Service Manager (ASM)

Microsoft Azure has two different deployment models:

The first is called the Azure Service Management model. In this model, each resource that existed in the cloud is independent and has no connection with another cloud. The resources for hosting virtual machines are provided by a Cloud Service, which is required in this model so that it acts as a container to host these VMs. There is also a network interface card (NIC) and an IP address, which are allocated by Azure linked with this VM. The VHD for each virtual machine is usually saved as a page blob in Azure Storage. A storage account is also required in this model. These VHDs stores the operating system as well as the temporary and additional data disks. If you want to deploy a virtual network, (optional) with the classic deployment model, you can create a subnetted structure and allocate the subnets in the same VNET, and let the target virtual machine use the same VNET.

Azure Resource Manager Deployment

The other deployment model is the Azure Resource Manager deployment model, (ARM). It lets you deploy, manage, and monitor all of the IT resources in the cloud such as virtual machines, storage accounts, virtual networks, or a database with a logical group, called a resource group. The advantage is organizing the resources in a logical way, and all the resources in the same resource group share the same life cycle, meaning you can deploy, update, or delete them in a single operation. Another advantage is that resources deployed with ARM model can also be provisioned by a JSON-based template. While interacting with the ARM, you can use command-line tools such as Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI, and you can also use ARM RESTful APIs. When you start to deploy each a new resource in Azure, it will be necessary to specify the deployment model if this resource exists in two models. The Resource Manager deployment model and classic deployment model are not completely compatible with each other. ARM model is strongly recommended by Microsoft while deploying new IT solutions.