Summary and Quiz on Programming the Cloud

Summary

Azure Storage is only one service out of hundreds that we can use to build applications in the cloud. Each cloud service provider has analogous storage services that operate in a similar way. The examples shown in this section are specific to Microsoft Azure, but they can be easily emulated for other clouds.

The Azure Storage example is useful for illustrating the separation between the management plane and the data plane of the cloud. If we look closely, we can observe a significant similarity in Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) resource operations using ARM in contrast to interacting with the Azure Storage service, container, and blob clients. Resource management is uniform within a cloud. The data plane for databases, storage services, and content delivery networks is rarely uniform and often exposed through purpose-built APIs.

In this section, we learned that the cloud is not just someone else's computer. The cloud is a planet-scale web of high-security data centers filled with computing, networking, and storage hardware. We also learned the fundamentals of identity, authentication, and authorization, with specifics drawn from Microsoft Azure. We briefly covered Azure RBAC and its relationship with AAD identities. Finally, we learned how to provision and use cloud resources using Microsoft Azure.

We should be able to take what we learned here and apply it to provisioning and using cloud services to achieve our goals. These skills were focused on Microsoft Azure, but the skills learned here are easily transferred to the AWS or Google clouds.