What to Do Next

This chapter focuses on overcoming both types of barriers and starting your journey towards learning the concept of Azure services. Most concerns related to the utilization of public cloud services, including Azure, relate to perceived security risks. For systems running in your own datacenter, you have full control. You can see the physical servers; you can see if someone enters the server room; you know the other administrators who have access; and you know all the various users of the infrastructure. Of all concerns organizations have related to the public cloud, the number‐one concern is security. The loss of control, compliance, and complexity are also big concerns. To a lesser degree, concerns such as maturity of technology, lack of expertise, and cost exist, but security is the big one. Every public cloud vendor knows this. Azure has its own specification for fabric elements such as compute and storage. However, commodity components, such as off‐the‐shelf processors rather than some Azure‐specific CPU, are used. This means that common CPU firmware is used. Azure also uses a common hypervisor, Hyper‐V, the same way other major public cloud operators do. (Amazon Web Services [AWS] uses Xen, and Google uses Kernel‐based Virtual Machine [KVM].) Common web components‐for example, IIS in Azure‐and common API support are used. If there is vulnerability in one of these, it exposes the risk in a huge way when in public cloud at the mega‐scale of Azure where the resources are shared between organizations.