Azure Fundamentals — Almost all you need to know

Let’s start with the reason why any cloud is a cheaper option than others: Economies of Scale. Economy of scale is the ability to reduce costs and gain efficiency when operating at a larger scale in comparison to operating at a smaller scale. Cloud services offer high availability, fault tolerance, agility, scalability, elasticity, global reach, disaster recovery, security and lots more. It involves moving away from CapEx (Capital expenditure — server / storage / network upfront costs) into OpEx ( Operational Expenditure — deductible expense on cloud services used). The following diagram shows how with CapEx you are always playing catch up and are either under-provisioned or over-provisioned most of the time, whereas with OpEx model you depend on a cloud service to autoscale (up or down) and then pay the appropriate costs for rendered services later (no upfront costs).