If you are new to Azure and looking forward to dive into the Azure world, keep this list handy and it can help you understand the basic terminologies used in Azure. Below are the list of terms and their definitions.
| Azure Account | Using Azure account, you can access the Azure portal and manage your subscriptions. You can create a free Microsoft Azure account using https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free With your free account, most of the popular Azure services will be Free for first 12 months along with 200$ credit. |
| Azure Portal | Azure portal is a secured visual platform to manage and deploy all Azure resources. It is available in multiple platforms like web and mobile devices. |
| Azure CLI | Azure CLI is Azure Command Line Interface. Using commands in the CLI, we can create and manage Azure resources. It also works in cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) |
| Azure PowerShell | It is also a command line interface and is supported by Azure. It can used to manipulate the Azure resources. |
| Azure Resource Manager | Azure Resource Manager is commonly referred to as ARM. It is used to deploy & manage the Azure resources. We can create ARM templates, they are used for the infrastructure setup and can be automated. ARM templates follows a common syntax and will be in JSON format. |
| Azure Active Directory | It is commonly referred to as Azure AD. It is Identity and Access management service (IAM). Using this, we can control and manage access to all the Azure services, resources and applications to your employees. |
| Storage Account | It is used to store the data in Azure. It supports the storage of both structured and unstructured data. It stores different data objects like blobs, files, tables and queues. |
| App Service | It is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) used for hosting the web applications, API or mobile applications. |
| Resource Group | As the name suggests, it is a group or collection of resources. It is a logical container within Azure used to group different resources and it makes the monitoring of the resources easy. |
| Subscription | Azure subscriptions is also a logical container, which is linked to your Azure account. It acts as a single billing unit which holds the Azure resources. You can create multiple Azure subscriptions within your account and each of these subscriptions can be linked with relevant Azure resources. |
| Tenant | Tenant is an organization and it has dedicated instance of Azure AD. |
| Azure Virtual Machine | Azure Virtual Machine is also referred to as Azure VM. Azure VM is an example of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and here we don’t have to maintain any physical server. We can create as many VMs as possible with just few button clicks or commands and these VMs are available in different sizes. |
| Cosmos DB | It’s a cloud based, fully managed NoSQL and relational database. |
| Azure Functions | It’s a serverless platform used to develop some functions required in your application using your preferred programming language. These functions can be event driven or can be invoked on-demand. |
| Key Vault | It’s a cloud service used to securely create and manage the secrets, keys and certificates. |
| Load Balancer | Load balancer distributes the incoming traffic to different Azure VMs to deliver the high availability of your application. |
| Virtual Network | Azure Virtual Network is referred to as Azure VNet. It is a private or isolated network within the cloud. |
If you feel, the list is not updated with any terminology, please drop your message in comment. I’ll try to update the same in this blog post.