Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform for infrastructure, hosting, data, and managed services.
What a cloud platform actually is
A cloud platform is not primarily a place to put servers. It is an operating environment where identity, networking, storage, observability, and deployment are all provided as services with their own models — and adopting one means adopting those models, not just renting hardware.
The contrast with self-hosting
Azure fits projects that need managed infrastructure, enterprise identity integration, or cloud-native hosting patterns without running every layer by hand on self-managed Linux infrastructure.
It also provides a useful contrast to self-hosted operations patterns built around Proxmox, Docker Compose, and SaltStack.
Trade-offs
- Managed services genuinely reduce operational toil, and they relocate the complexity into permissions, service boundaries, and provider-specific conventions. The work does not disappear; it changes shape, and the new shape is less transferable.
- Cost becomes a design constraint rather than a procurement decision, since an inefficient architecture bills continuously. Egress charges in particular shape data-heavy designs, and they are the item most often discovered late.
- Coupling accumulates quietly. Each managed service used is a piece of the architecture that does not move to another provider, and the point at which that matters is usually the point at which it is expensive to address.