Microsoft Azure is the cloud computing platform of Microsoft. Cloud computing means renting computing resources, such as servers, storage and databases, over the internet instead of owning the hardware. Azure offers more than 200 products, from Windows and Linux virtual machines and Kubernetes containers (AKS) to managed databases such as Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and serverless code in Azure Functions.
For AI, Microsoft Foundry is the part of Azure for building AI applications and agents. Its Foundry Models catalog lists more than 11,000 models from Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI and other makers. An application calls a deployed model through an API, without provisioning or managing servers, and the Azure AI model inference API lets developers switch between models and compare their performance.
Azure uses consumption-based pricing: customers pay only for the resources they use. There is a free trial and a set of free services, and committed use is cheaper through Azure reservations and savings plans.