If you are just starting out with Microsoft Azure, or have even been working with it for a while, it can be overwhelming to see all of the available services and products. This begs the question, is Azure easy to learn?
Microsoft has created and freely provided a vast amount of documentation for their Azure services. Over and above this they have prepared many tutorials, courses, and exams to help their Microsoft Azure customers easily become proficient in any of the available services.
People that are new to the Amazon Web Services cloud quickly find out that there is an enormous amount of services available. Once seeing this, a question usually comes to mind.
Is AWS easy to learn? Amazon Web Services provides an extensive amount of documentation resources for all of their services. They also offer free digital training, in class training and private training. On top of this there are a large amount of learning paths made available for most end user use cases.
Many people hear about the cloud, and know Microsoft runs a fairly large one known as Microsoft Azure. However most people don’t know how to program, or how to write code for these cloud platforms. So it is ok to wonder if Azure needs coding to be useful.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud environment which provides access to a vast array of services to accomplish many tasks. Many of these services do not require any programming skills from the end user. This includes storage services, machine learning services, search services, migration services and more.
When most amazon web service customers start out they begin with a service known as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2 as it is more well known. However, after building up a large amount of data, you may want to start looking into another service known as Amazon Elastic Map Reduce, or Amazon EMR as it is known.
Amazon EC2 is a cloud based service which gives customers access to a varying range of compute instances, or virtual machines. Amazon EMR is a managed big data service which provides pre-configured compute clusters of Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi, and Presto.
All three major cloud providers have similar options for what was originally known as spot instances, which Amazon Web Services initially introduced. There are many interesting usage scenarios for these types of machines, but it might be useful to know when not to use them.
Spot instances should not be used with applications or systems that are unable to handle intermittent or random failures of nodes. Processing tasks that have long run times to complete their work with no external partial saving mechanism should also avoid being run on spot instances.
There are many cloud based services provided by Amazon Web Services which require no coding knowledge at all. This includes services which cover a broad array of workloads including storage, email, machine learning, media, server backup and many more.
The most expensive Amazon EC2 is currently the p3dn.24xlarge which costs $31.212 USD per hour when running a Linux OS and $35.628 per hour when running the Window OS on the instance in the US East (N. Virginia) region. The instance comes with 96 vCPUs, 768 GiB of RAM and two 900 GB NVMe SSDs.
All Microsoft Azure services have a pricing model attached to them, however there is a list of services that are ALWAYS free if the usage of those services stay under specific limits. The free services include things like Azure CosmosDB, Azure Functions, Azure Active Directory and more.
AWS Fargate works by having the underlying servers fully configured, hosted, patched, monitored and maintained by AWS. This enables a completely serverless experience for the customer to run distributed fleets of containers. The customer only pays for time that the container instances are used.
Microsoft Azure Key Vault is designed in a way that prevents Microsoft from ever seeing the raw keys or secrets. The private data is processed with FIPS 140-2 level 2 validated HSMs. Multiple permission points must be passed to retrieve any secret information. Any access can be logged for review.
