What Is Microsoft Azure? Microsoft's Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft public cloud: a broad set of compute, storage, networking, and managed services, popular with enterprises and Microsoft-centric teams.

Azure is one of the three major clouds, strong in enterprise and hybrid scenarios and tightly integrated with Microsoft products like Active Directory and Windows. It offers everything from virtual machines to managed Kubernetes and serverless apps, and it is a frequent destination for CI/CD pipelines.

Core Azure services

Virtual Machines and App Service for compute.
AKS for managed Kubernetes and Container Apps for serverless containers.
Blob Storage for object storage.
Azure SQL and Cosmos DB for managed databases.

Resource groups and subscriptions

Azure organizes resources into resource groups, which live under subscriptions (the billing boundary), under a tenant. Grouping resources makes it easy to manage, tag, and tear down an environment as a unit.

Identity with Entra ID

Azure access is governed by Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) plus role-based access control. Applications and pipelines authenticate as service principals or managed identities, which are granted RBAC roles on resources.

Regions

Azure runs in many regions worldwide, often with availability zones for redundancy. You choose regions for latency, compliance, and data residency, and most resources are scoped to a region.

Role in CI/CD

A pipeline builds an image, pushes it to Azure Container Registry, and deploys to App Service, Container Apps, or AKS. GitHub Actions authenticates using a service principal with OIDC federated credentials, so no client secret is stored. Azure also offers its own CI/CD via Azure Pipelines.

Key takeaways

Azure is Microsoft public cloud, strong in enterprise and hybrid scenarios.
Resources live in resource groups under subscriptions, governed by Entra ID RBAC.
Pipelines deploy via ACR and App Service, Container Apps, or AKS using a service principal.