How to understand all the various Azure Products and their associated configuration options in the Pricing Calculator

Question

Having worked through the basic concepts of Azure - the jump to all the cloud services, and the multitude of options available for each service is rather overwhelming. I am just trying to understand about Azure - but dont yet understand all these services. There seems to be a big step missing between Azure Concepts and using the Calculators. Where do I go to learn more about all the various options?

Answer 1

Hi Gary - after spending several years helping customers on the Az platform, some of whom are new to the platform I can give the following advice:

Like GCP and AWS Azure is very broad - it's like a giant toolbox, from which you pick the tools that work best for whatever you're trying to achieve. But, keep in mind there's too much for any one person to learn to any level of depth and keep current on, it's our teams biggest challenge and it's all we do. For that reason focus on only the services that are going to be useful for whatever project you're working, don't try and learn "everything".

Training and reference:
There's a tonne of content on MS Learn (docs) each product has it's own set of docs which are organised consistently; overview, concepts, tutorials etc. The product docs do tend to focus only on the product and from a beginner perspective don't help so much when you're trying to work out how products fit together. This includes videos as well as documents. There's also exams and guided learning paths.
If you just want to know what's out there you can browse products by category too https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/category/

Other sources of info that are good to be aware of:

**Cloud Adoption Framework https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/

**Well Architected https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/well-architected/

**Architecture Centre https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/ This can help some with the "how to products fit" questions

These resources are "BIG" so don't try and consume it ALL, dip into and out of the things you feel may help you.

There's a cost to it but I also find Pluralsight really useful if I want to learn about something new in a guided way https://www.pluralsight.com/

Your project:
If you could provide some details on what you're planning I'd be happy to add further comment on prospective choices and pro's and con's.