The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life—to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.

The Azure cloud services are trained and created to deploy and manage even complex apps, through virtual infrastructure. It supports various programming languages, devices, databases, operating systems, and extensive frameworks. Therefore, Azure services intended for the professionals and enterprises offer all-around alternatives to the traditional means of organizational processes, with top Azure services greatly improving the performance.

Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory (AD) is one of the most popular cloud computing services from Microsoft Azure. Belonging to the Identity section, it is a universal identity platform to ensure the management and security of identities. It deserves the topmost mention in our list of best Azure services because of its robust security solutions.

Azure CDN

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) deserves a mention here for being an extremely important Azure service that enables and accelerates growth in businesses. Its server is designed in a way that it can integrate a lot of storage space, web apps, and Azure cloud services. This is why Azure CDN is used to deliver content securely all across the world.

Azure Data Factory

To create a data-driven workflow in cloud computing, Azure Data Factory ingests data from several sources to automate data transmission and movement. Azure Data Factory utilizes several Azure services for computing like – Azure Machine Learning, Azure HDInsight Hadoop, and Azure Data Lake Analytics. Azure Data Lake can be understood as a huge repository of data in its original form for Big data analytics.

Output data from Azure Data Factory can be published on Azure Data Lake for Business Analytics (BI) applications for analytics and visualization. Azure Data Factory deserves a mention in the top Azure services as it does not store any data but allows you to gauge the movement of data and determine a data-driven workflow. By utilizing the raw data through data stores, better business decisions can be taken. Using UI and programmatic mechanisms, Azure Data Factory creates and monitors workflows.

Azure SQL

Azure SQL database comes under the category of the platform as a service (PaaS) and is related to most of the database management functions, like – backups, monitoring, patching, and upgrading without any kind of user involvement. The efficiency of Azure SQL without requiring any human intervention is the reason why we have to mention it in our list of top Azure services.

The Azure SQL database brings integrated PaaS capabilities helping you administer domain-specific databases and optimize the activities as per your business needs. The Azure SQL database is always upgraded to the latest and stable version of the SQL server database engine. It is accompanied by a patched OS with 99.99% availability.

If your business deals with both relational and non-relational data structures like JSON, Spatial, graphs, and XML, then Azure SQL database can be one of the best Azure services for processing both kinds of data structures. For modern cloud applications, the Azure SQL database adds a readily available data storage facility with enhanced performance for enterprises.

Azure Function

Developers use Azure Functions to connect to data sources or messaging solutions and react to events. The best part about Azure Function is its compute-on-demand capacity which means that you only pay for the services when you consume the resources. Azure Functions, a serverless compute service, enables enterprises to run event-triggered codes without having an infrastructure for its provision.

Azure Function is greatly reliable and is used in production settings. It can be used to achieve decoupling, high-throughput, shared, and reusability.

CosmosDB

One of the most celebrated Azure services, CosmosDB is a globally distributed database service. It can access and manage data from scattered data centers while offering tools to scale up your computation resources and global distribution patterns through Microsoft Azure.

Interestingly, CosmosDB ensures 99.99% availability while restricting read and write latencies to single-digit milliseconds. It also supports multiple data models through a single backend – and thus, can be used for graph models, key-value, relational models, and documents. CosmosDB is a top Azure service widely regarded as a NewSQL database, but it stays distinct with its inability to process-relational data models.

DevOps

As you start using Microsoft Azure services, the software as a service (SaaS) platform of DevOps will be needed to develop and deploy software. It offers easy integration facilities with famous tools in the industry and can help orchestrate a DevOps toolchain. DevOps services prove the agility of the tools by tracking, planning, and discussing their work among other teams.

For most of the users, DevOps are greatly beneficial to their applications, irrespective of the platform, language, or cloud. They also enable faster delivery through active planning and better collaboration. Using the efficient tools, this Azure service ensures an access to unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repository where the application coding welcomes collaboration with advanced file management.

Learn more about DevOps.

Azure Backup

Human error is a crude reality and Azure Backup allows simple data protection tools from the Azure Web app services, to keep your data protected from ransomware or loss of any kind. The backup cost is almost inexpensive, and can be used for backing up SQL workloads, as well as data from virtual machines too.

Tools like Windows VSS Snapshot and Linux fsfreeze can come in handy along with Azure Backup to maintain consistency in the data. The backup system of Azure enables better task management and project efficiency.

Logic Apps

As one of the top Azure services, Logic Apps have gained immense popularity due to their useful and efficient tools. They can offer effective solutions to integrate different applications. One must note the tightly-knit ecosystem of cloud-based SaaS connectors like Google Services, Twitter, and Office 365.

Logic apps make it very easy for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards to operate in collaboration with trading partners through their B2B functionalities. Logic apps can also virtually connect devices, data, and apps across different locations.

Virtual Machine

A virtual machine is generally called an image, a file that can behave like an actual computer. Microsoft Azure offers the addition of virtual machines in its Compute category, thus creating Windows or Linux systems within a few seconds on a physical computer. The virtual machine stays separate from the rest of the computer, thus providing a perfect space to test beta applications, access virus-infected data, create system backups and run applications that were not natively intended to be run on the given operating system.

Using Hypervisor’s management, Microsoft Azure also enables running multiple virtual machines on the same physical computer. Each virtual machine has its own virtual hardware along with specifications for CPU, memory, hard drive, network, etc. Virtual Machines can reduce the cost of investing in physical machines along with the added maintenance cost, power charges, and cooling facilities.

Solutions do the work for you

Healthcare - Develop solutions for proactive, personalised healthcare.
Financial Services - Better serve customers, empower employees and optimise risk management.
Government - Build secure solutions to better serve and protect your citizens.
Retail - Deliver personal, seamless and differentiated experiences.
Manufacturing - Respond quicker to customer feedback and market trends.

References

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