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Azure Today

Azure has come a long way since its PaaS origins. Today it offers more than 600 services that cover IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, anchored by strong support for hybrid cloud and open-source tools. This breadth is backed by 300 datacenters across 60-plus regions and a partner network that eases adoption.

A deep partnership with OpenAI and the early launch of Azure OpenAI Service have made generative-AI workloads one of Azure’s fastest-growing lines, surging well over 140 % year on year. Hybrid products such as Azure Arc and Azure Stack reinforce this momentum by letting customers blend on-prem and cloud resources.

In market share, Azure held roughly 22 % of a $94 billion cloud-infrastructure market in Q1 2025 - second to AWS but in a sector expanding 23 % annually. While that share is down a few points from a year earlier, Azure’s own cloud revenue still climbed 33 %, showing it is winning plenty of new spend even as competitors multiply.

Ninety-five per cent of the Fortune 500 already rely on Azure, especially in tightly regulated fields like healthcare and finance where Microsoft’s certifications matter. 

Core Azure Concepts

Every resource - whether a VM, database, or VNet - lives inside a single subscription, and each subscription is tied to an account, a pricing offer, and hard scale limits.

Management Groups sit above subscriptions so you can push consistent policies and access rules across your estate.

Inside a subscription, Resource Groups bundle related resources that share a lifecycle, making deployment and teardown simpler.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the control plane behind it all. With templates or Bicep you define infrastructure as code so environments can be cloned, audited, and rolled back safely.

Deployment happens in regions - over sixty worldwide - each inside a larger geography for data-residency laws. For uptime you choose between Availability Sets (spread VMs across racks in one datacenter) and Availability Zones (isolate workloads across separate datacenters). Some services also replicate across paired regions for disaster recovery.

Compute, storage, networking, and database services form the migration core, all benefiting from the cloud’s elasticity and global reach. 

Mastering the full hierarchy—Account → Management Group → Subscription → Resource Group → Resource - and the resilience options is the difference between a governed, cost-efficient cloud landing zone and a sprawl of exposed, overpriced assets.

• Pay-As-You-Go is the default: switch services on and off whenever you like and pay only for the minutes or hours you use. It’s perfect for unpredictable demand but carries the highest rates, so bills can jump if you’re not watching.
• Reserved Instances lock you into a specific virtual-machine setup for one or three years. In return you can slash costs - often by more than two-thirds - and you can still exchange or partially cancel reservations if needs change.
• Savings Plans for Compute ask for a fixed hourly spend commitment over one or three years, but they apply that commitment to any eligible VM family or region. They save less than RIs in the best case yet offer far more flexibility.
• Spot Virtual Machines use Azure’s spare capacity at deep discounts, but Microsoft can reclaim the hardware at short notice. They suit batch work, testing, or any stateless job that can restart elsewhere.
• Azure Hybrid Benefit lets organisations with Windows Server or SQL Server licences covered by Software Assurance bring those licences to Azure and avoid paying for them twice - often cutting VM or database costs by 80 % or more.

No single model wins every time. The usual recipe is to reserve or commit spending for steady workloads, sprinkle in Spot VMs where interruptions are fine, and fall back on PAYG for genuine spikes.

Azure Cost Management plus Billing (free in the portal) provides dashboards, Cost Analysis drill-downs, budget alerts, and Advisor recommendations such as right-sizing VMs or buying reservations. These tools supply the data every FinOps-minded team needs.

Moving to Azure is a business change, not just a lift of servers, so the team must mix planning savvy with hands-on skill. They need fluency in Azure compute, storage, networking and databases, and they must master the tooling - Azure Migrate for discovery, cost and compatibility checks, Site Recovery for straight lifts, and Database Migration Service for data moves - so every workload can be rehosted, replatformed or fully refactored as fit.

Scripts keep it tidy: PowerShell, Azure CLI and ARM / Bicep templates turn repeat tasks into one-click runs, while Policy, Blueprints and Purview lock down governance and compliance. Hybrid links stay safe through ExpressRoute or VPN gateways.

Gaps in human skill are the silent killer, so audit the team early, train with Microsoft Learn, labs or certifications, and pull in partners when depth is missing. Keep business stakeholders in the loop and encourage tight collaboration inside IT to avoid surprises.

Run the move in small, test-driven waves: pick a low-risk app, use “Test Migrate” and load tests to prove it, cut it over, learn, and iterate. That phased rhythm delivers modernised workloads without budget overruns or late-night fire drills.

The United States is still the most expensive location for Azure talent. 

Glassdoor’s May 2025 data shows a median base pay of about $123 k for an Azure developer, with total compensation near $156 k. National averages sit around $131 k for cloud engineers and $155 k for Azure architects, while senior Azure-developer base pay is roughly $109 k (total ≈ $151 k). Demand clusters in the big tech corridors: Indeed lists 700-plus Azure vacancies in Silicon Valley, more than 400 in Seattle and around 270 cloud-engineer openings in New York City. A recent labour-market review notes that “demand for talent often outstrips supply” across these hubs, driving intense salary competition and wider remote hiring.

In Canada the average AI-engineer package is about CA $110 k (≈ US $81 k) according to Talent.com’s 2025 figures.

Across regions, Azure compensation follows a clear gradient—U.S. > Switzerland/Germany > Australia & Singapore > UK/Canada > Central-Eastern Europe > Latin America/Vietnam - shaped by living-cost differentials and persistent skills shortages. Rapid cloud adoption, especially in AI-driven workloads, continues to lift both demand and pay.

Belitsoft has a Central-Eastern European team - meaning you get high-quality Azure developers at affordable rates for the US/UK market.