Azure Quick Reference

Azure has well over 200 services, and no working engineer memorizes them all — what actually matters day to day is fluency with a core set (compute, storage, networking, identity) plus knowing exactly where to look things up fast when you're outside that core. A good quick reference isn't a replacement for understanding the underlying concepts (covered in the other topics in this course); it's a fast-recall layer for command syntax, service names, and default limits that you don't want to re-derive from first principles every time — the kind of thing you'd otherwise re-search in the docs mid-task and lose ten minutes to. Treat this as a living document you personalize: the commands and facts that matter most are the ones specific to the services you actually touch regularly.

For compute: App Service is PaaS web hosting (no OS management); Azure Functions is serverless, billed per execution on the Consumption plan or with reserved capacity on Premium/Dedicated plans; Container Apps runs containers with built-in autoscaling and scale-to-zero; AKS gives you a full managed Kubernetes control plane when you need real orchestration; and Virtual Machines are full IaaS, giving OS-level control at the cost of managing patching yourself. For storage: Blob Storage holds unstructured data (files, images, backups) across Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive access tiers with different costs and retrieval latencies; Azure Files gives you an SMB/NFS file share mountable like a network drive; Disk Storage backs VM disks (Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, Ultra Disk, tiered by IOPS/throughput); and Azure Table Storage/Cosmos DB Table API handle simple NoSQL key-value data at massive scale.

Networking core: a Virtual Network (VNet) is your isolated network space, subdivided into subnets; NSGs filter traffic statefully at the subnet or NIC level; a Load Balancer distributes Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) traffic while Application Gateway or Front Door handle Layer 7 (HTTP) routing, with Front Door additionally providing global anycast entry and CDN caching; VNet Peering connects VNets directly (even across regions), while a VPN Gateway or ExpressRoute connects on-premises networks to Azure, the latter over a private, non-internet circuit for guaranteed low latency and higher throughput. Identity core: Microsoft Entra ID is the identity provider; RBAC roles (Owner, Contributor, Reader, and hundreds of built-in granular roles) are assigned at a scope (management group, subscription, resource group, or resource) and inherit downward; managed identities let a resource authenticate to other Azure services without any credential in code at all — system-assigned (tied to the resource's lifecycle) or user-assigned (a standalone identity you can attach to multiple resources).

Pricing models to know: pay-as-you-go (no commitment, highest per-unit cost), Reserved Instances/Savings Plans (1 or 3-year commitment for significant discounts on predictable workloads, typically 30-70% off), and Spot pricing (steep discounts on VMs Azure can reclaim with short notice when it needs the capacity back, suited only to interruption-tolerant workloads like batch processing). Azure Free Tier and student/dev-test subscriptions offer limited free monthly amounts of popular services (a fixed number of App Service or Function App compute hours, some Cosmos DB RU/s) useful for learning and testing, but hit hard caps quickly under real load. Subscription-level limits matter for planning too — default quotas exist on things like vCPU count per region and per VM family, storage accounts per region, and resource group count — and these are soft limits you can request an increase for through a support ticket, not hard architectural ceilings, so don't design around them without checking the current documented values, since Microsoft revises them periodically.