What is Microsoft Azure? A plain-English introduction
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform — a vast set of on-demand services for computing, storage, networking, databases, AI and more, delivered over the internet and billed by usage, and one of the two largest cloud providers alongside AWS. If you already understand what cloud computing is, Azure is that same model with Microsoft’s services, consoles and names attached. It is especially prominent in organisations that already run Microsoft software — Windows Server, Microsoft 365, Active Directory — because Azure integrates naturally with all of it. This article explains what Azure is, how it maps onto the cloud concepts you may already know from AWS, what its flagship services do in plain terms, how it compares to AWS fairly, and how to start learning it.
Azure in one paragraph
Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud: enormous data centres around the world, whose capacity Microsoft rents out as services. Instead of buying servers, you create virtual machines in minutes; instead of running your own storage arrays and database servers, you use Azure’s managed equivalents and pay for what you consume. Everything is self-service, programmable through consoles and APIs, and metered — the same defining characteristics that make anything genuinely “cloud”, explained in our plain-English guide to cloud computing.
What distinguishes Azure is its owner. Microsoft has decades of enterprise software behind it — Windows Server, SQL Server, Office, Active Directory — and Azure is the cloud those technologies extend into. For an organisation already licensed and skilled in Microsoft’s stack, Azure is often the path of least resistance to the cloud, which is a large part of why it sits alongside AWS at the top of the market.
If you know AWS concepts, you already know Azure’s
Azure is built on exactly the ideas that every cloud provider shares. The service models are the same — IaaS where you manage virtual machines, PaaS where the platform runs your code, SaaS where you just use finished software — as covered in our IaaS, PaaS and SaaS explainer. Azure organises its infrastructure into regions containing availability zones, the same resilience model AWS uses: keep copies of your workload in separate physical locations so one failure cannot take everything down.
The shared responsibility model applies identically too: Microsoft secures the cloud itself — the data centres, hardware and underlying platform — while you secure what you build in it, with the dividing line shifting depending on how managed the service is. Our explainer on the shared responsibility model covers the concept in depth, and it transfers to Azure without modification. The vocabulary changes between providers; the ideas do not.
The flagship service areas, in plain terms
Azure offers hundreds of services, but a handful of families do most of the everyday work:
- Azure Virtual Machines — rentable servers in the cloud, Windows or Linux, the basic IaaS building block (Azure’s counterpart to Amazon EC2).
- Azure App Service — a managed platform for running web applications and APIs without managing the servers underneath, a classic PaaS.
- Azure Storage — durable cloud storage for files, objects (blobs), queues and disks, the counterpart to services like Amazon S3.
- Azure SQL Database — a fully managed relational database service, the cloud descendant of Microsoft’s long-standing SQL Server.
- Microsoft Entra ID — Azure’s identity and access service, the current name for what was Azure Active Directory (Azure AD); it controls who can sign in and what they can do.
- Azure AI services — managed machine learning and AI capabilities, from ready-made APIs for language and vision to platforms for building custom models.
How Azure compares to AWS — fairly
At a high level, Azure and AWS are more alike than different. Both offer the same fundamental building blocks — compute, storage, networking, databases, identity, AI — with different names and consoles; a skill learned on one transfers to the other far more readily than beginners expect. Neither is simply “better”; they are the two largest providers because both are excellent at the core job.
The honest distinctions are about fit rather than capability. AWS launched the public cloud market and is known for the sheer breadth of its service catalogue and its enormous ecosystem of tooling and community material. Azure’s deepest strength is the Microsoft ecosystem: organisations running Windows Server, Microsoft 365 and Entra ID find Azure integrates with what they already own, and Microsoft’s enterprise relationships run deep. We deliberately avoid quoting market-share figures — they change and are measured inconsistently — but both platforms are ubiquitous enough that skills in either are widely employable.
How to start learning Azure
Azure is unusually well served by free official material. Microsoft Learn — Microsoft’s free learning platform — hosts structured learning paths, documentation and hands-on exercises for every level, from complete beginner to specialist. It is the official study resource for Azure certifications, and it costs nothing.
For hands-on practice, Microsoft offers a free Azure account with some starter credit for new users — the current terms are on Azure’s website — which is enough to create real resources and learn by doing. The natural first milestone is the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals certification: a foundational exam that assumes no hands-on experience and covers cloud concepts, core Azure services, security, identity and governance. From there, role-based associate certifications like AZ-104 Azure Administrator take you into real technical depth. Our guide to the Azure certification path maps the full route.
Original practice questions, timed mock exams and revision notes. No card, nothing to pay.