Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform. Instead of buying servers, storage, and software and running them in your own data centre, you rent what you need from Microsoft's global infrastructure and pay for what you use. Organisations that run their IT stack in Azure remove the capital cost of hardware, the lead time to procure and configure it, and the overhead of keeping it running. You provision resources in minutes, scale them based on demand, and decommission them when they are no longer needed. Azure launched in 2010 and now covers over 200 services: compute, storage, networking, databases, AI, security, and more.
