Azure Core Services

Azure App Service — one-click web hosting

App Service runs your web app without you touching a VM. Push code with git, deploy via GitHub Actions, or drop a Docker image.

az webapp up --name my-notes --runtime "PYTHON:3.11"

Supports .NET, Python, Node, Java, PHP and Docker containers.

Azure SQL Database — managed SQL Server

• Fully managed relational database.
• Automatic backups, patching, geo-replication.
• Priced per DTU (simple) or vCore (advanced).

Connect from App Service with a single environment variable:

az webapp config connection-string set \
  --name my-notes --resource-group rg --connection-string-type SQLAzure \
  --settings default="Server=...;Database=...;..."

Azure Storage — files, blobs, queues, tables

Four sub-services in one:

Type	Use it for
Blob	Files, images, backups (like AWS S3).
File	Shared network drive (SMB).
Queue	Simple message queue.
Table	Cheap NoSQL key-value store.

Real-world example

For a small SaaS: App Service hosts the React frontend and Node API; Azure SQL holds users and billing; Blob Storage stores uploaded documents; Application Insights monitors it all. Total cost at 100 users: ~$40/month.