This has got to be one of the toughest questions I get to answer on a regular basis.
The reason behind this level of difficulty boils down to trying to pack all that is Azure into a brief meaningful statement. When I try to answer this question, I get lost in its vast awesomeness! Unfortunately, in order to help me target my answers, I usually answer this question by a question like “What does your system do?” or “Can tell me about what got you interested in Azure?”
Obviously, these aren’t the answers you are looking for. But it’s hard for me to shape an appropriate answer without knowing the angle you’re coming from. Are you a curious developer or a business owner looking for an opportunity?
This weekend, I mentored at the Montreal Startup Weekend and I was fascinated by the diversity of ideas that were buzzing around. Each team had different skill sets and many were interested in learning more about Azure. It got me thinking about how I could describe Azure in a generic way, which would enable further discussions targeted at the team’s goals. As I previously mentioned, Azure is an enabler that’s composed of a vast collection of services. Conversations easily get sidetracked because of all the options and we lose lots of precious time exploring them. 
So I came up with this answer, “Azure is an ecosystem of services that can be leveraged to build reliable solutions. What are you working on?” It’s generic enough to allow me to assess what angle you’re coming from so that we can concentrate our conversation around your project.
From a business standpoint, Azure can potentially save lots of headaches and resources. It’s a platform that allows us to host software and focus our energy on the core business. For example, by using the built-in auto scaling features of Azure Web Sites, the Web Site can handle traffic spikes generated by sudden interest in the advertised services. Azure will automatically scale the Web Site to handle the unexpected load, then it will scale back to reduce the overall costs of operation. This ability is crucial for businesses because it means that Web Sites remain available for potential customers and we only pay for the resources that were consumed during the traffic spike. Traditionally, we have to overprovision all year round so that we can handle these scenarios. Azure allows us to pay for the minimum resources required for our software to be available and responsive at all times.
Offload IT costs and responsibilities to Azure and build value for your customers.
From a developer stand point, Azure is a candy store! It allows us to create databases at the click of a button, it scales storage to our needs and provides us with tooling that supports us throughout our development efforts. In the interest of time, I would like to point out the official Azure documentation, because it does an amazing job at surfacing services and options that are available to developers. Keep in mind that new services surface regularly and that being familiar with the services allows us to offload lots of work and support to the Azure platform. For example, we can schedule daily backups for our Azure SQL Databases. Setting this up saves us time that we can put towards developing that new feature that we’ve been dying to get our hands on.
Stop getting called in at all hours of the night because a server didn’t reboot properly. Let Azure worry about the infrastructure while we concentrate on delivering value.
Azure is an ecosystem of services & possibilities
Alexandre Brisebois ☁ 