Microsoft Azure’s design center is enterprise integration. Its decisive advantage is gravity with the rest of the Microsoft estate — Entra ID (Active Directory), Microsoft 365, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Dynamics — plus first-class hybrid (Azure Arc, Azure Stack) and the commercial machinery (Enterprise Agreements, Hybrid Benefit licensing) that large organizations already run on. It leans PaaS-first (App Service, Functions, Logic Apps) more than AWS’s build-from-primitives style, and it’s the default front-runner for shops already standardized on Microsoft.
This page localizes the reference architecture to Azure: Front Door → API Management / App Gateway → Virtual Machines · AKS · Functions/App Service → Azure SQL / Cosmos DB / Cache for Redis / Blob → Synapse · Event Hubs · Azure ML/OpenAI, with Entra ID, Key Vault, Monitor, and Bicep cross-cutting.
| Capability | Service | What it is | Unit price | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object Storage | Blob Storage (Hot, LRS) | General-purpose object storage; hot tier for frequent access, locally redundant. | $0.0208/GB-month | live |
| Block Storage (SSD volume) | Premium SSD Managed Disk | Premium SSD managed disk for production VMs (approx per-GB list). | $0.12/GB-month | list |
| VM Compute (general purpose, ~2 vCPU / 8 GB) | D2s v5 (2 vCPU) | General-purpose on-demand VM, 2 vCPU / 8 GB; live price normalized per vCPU-hour. | $0.048/vCPU-hour | live |
| Serverless Functions / Edge Compute | Functions (Consumption) | Event-driven functions; first 1M executions/mo free, then per-request. | $0.2/1M requests | list |
| Managed Relational DB (PostgreSQL, ~2 vCPU / 8 GB) | Azure DB for PostgreSQL (Flexible, D2s_v3) | Managed PostgreSQL Flexible Server, 2 vCPU / 8 GB, on-demand (compute only). | $0.14/instance-hour | list |
| Internet Data Egress | Bandwidth egress | Internet data transfer out; first 100 GB/mo free, then per-GB. | $0.087/GB | list |
| CDN (content delivery egress) | Front Door / CDN | CDN cache egress (NA/EU first tier). | $0.081/GB | list |
| Managed Kubernetes (control plane) | AKS | Managed Kubernetes; free control plane on the standard tier (nodes billed separately). | $0/cluster-hour | list |
Cost note: prices above are first-tier on-demand list/live. Azure economics improve markedly with Reserved Instances / Savings Plans, Hybrid Benefit (Windows/SQL), and right-sized disk SKUs — model those for committed workloads.
Pricing generated from the live cost catalog via scripts/gen_cloud_docs.py.