Background

To start with some background, I am using Azure cloud services along with Intune and Microsoft 356. Azure provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to customers. IaaS often provides access to virtualized hardware to run many different machines and services. Iaas may also provide logging, security, load balancing, elasticity, replication and recovery, and much more. Overall, the service is very powerful and can be used in many ways by the customer. Azure has a ton of features from IoT to development, to AI, and more. Azure is a very useful platform with many features, many of which I will not likely use, but I would like to explore as many as possible throughout my capstone.

History

Azure services were first revealed in October of 2008. During this time, Azure was not much more than Windows and the Office suite running on the internet. During the early days of Azure, the service even had a different name, going by "Windows Azure" until it was changed in 2014. Between 2008 and 2011 Azure had only about four services being, Azure Blob storage, a compute service, SQL Azure, and Azure Service Bus. Azure became available to the public in 2010, but at the time the service was more of a niche platform used by few developers. From 2012 to 2014 Microsoft shifted its focus for Azure, from being another Microsft and Windows tool to being more of an IaaS option. Much of these changes were a result of EC2 being added to AWS, which became a more popular service at the time. Azure shifted and implemented Linux VMs as an option for Azure virtual machines. Around this time is when Azure really started to pick up popularity. From there Azure kept evolving, adding more and more services for things such as IoT devices and more recently artificial intelligence development.

Sources

https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2020/02/03/a-look-back-at-ten-years-of-microsoft-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/upcoming-name-change-for-windows-azure/