At that time, in fact, Azure was quite simple, with nothing, basically computing and storage. Computing is to provide cloud services, PaaS, and support web roles and worker roles. At that time, all the focus was on PaaS. Everyone thinks PaaS is good. IaaS is too low and profits are too low. Your users should quickly rewrite the code and use PaaS instead. But customers really ignore you, and there is too much resistance to migrate their existing code to PaaS architecture. Then Amazon next door did a good job in IaaS, so later the bosses began to realize that IaaS really can't be ignored, so they began to seriously engage in IaaS, which is another story.
The storage is Azure Storage and SQL Azure. Azure storage has long provided three forms: blob, table and queue. SQL Azure mainly changed the original SQL Server. From the user's point of view, SQL Azure is relatively familiar, the original code is easier to transplant, and Azure storage is more suitable for new development. At that time, user satisfaction was not very good, and the reliability (usability) of SQL Azure was a bit poor. Sometimes, it needs a wind connection timeout.
Later, things gradually increased. The use of VM in IaaS has increased, and not only Windows VM, but also Linux has begun to provide it. Interestingly, Linux VM charges less than Windows VM. The slogan of embracing open source has also been shouting. In addition, the Azure website is also a very good thing. Compared with the web role in cloud services, publishing websites by using websites is much more convenient and faster, and the threshold is lower and cheaper. Others, such as traffic manager and service bus, are also useful.
After that, there were too many things to keep up with the rhythm. Mobile, Azure Batch, HDInsight(Hadoop), DocDB, Data Lake, Data Warehouse, Data Factory, Stream Analysis, Machine Learning, EventHub, AAD, VNet, ExpressRoute, etc. I only know a little about a lot of things. The overall feeling is that Azure is more and more developed and diversified. Not long ago, China's Azure also launched MySQL service, which was unimaginable in previous years. By the way, MySQL service is done by my classmates upstairs.
From the perspective of the global expansion of Azure, the development is also very rapid. It's not easy to build a data center, it costs money, but I'm really rich. When I first started making Azure, I remember very clearly that there were only two data centers in North America, namely, North and South, one in Amsterdam, one in Dublin, Europe, then one in Hong Kong and one in Singapore. Now there are 6-7 in North America, but not in Africa, Antarctica and Brazil. The most rare thing is that Chinese mainland has also settled down.