A data center has a certain amount of capacity in regards to computing, storage, and networking which we build services on top of where we have our applications deployed. We have the same concept in the cloud, the amount of capacity will be much higher though. The physical locations of the Azure data centers can be visualized using the Azure Infrastructure map at https://infrastructuremap.microsoft.com/.
The main method of accessing applications deployed in the cloud is via the internet. If the cloud is an extension of an on-prem data center there are private connectivity options as well such as VPNs and Azure ExpressRoute.
Benefits
- Services are available on-demand which provides agility.
- Deploy infrastructure in different zones which provide high availability.
- The sets of regions in Azure also provide us with disaster recovery for faults that affect a whole region.
- As services are available on-demand we also get scalability where we only pay for what we use, a consumption-based model.
Benefits of the cloud ☁️