infrastructure//Azure

Azure is Microsoft's cloud. Everything in it is a **resource**, a manageable item such as a virtual machine, a database or an AI service, and every request to create, change or delete one passes through one management layer (Azure Resource Manager). That is why the portal, the command line and the SDKs offer the same operations with the same results.

Azure is Microsoft's cloud. Everything in it is a resource, a manageable item such as a virtual machine, a database or an AI service, and every request to create, change or delete one passes through one management layer (Azure Resource Manager). That is why the portal, the command line and the SDKs offer the same operations with the same results.

Resources sit in nested scopes. A subscription is the billing and access boundary; it holds resource groups, and each resource group holds resources. A setting applied at one level (a policy, a role) is inherited by everything below it.

Creating a resource asks the same things every time: the subscription that pays, the resource group that holds it, the region it runs in and a name. Services with tiers add a pricing tier, which is where a free allowance such as F0 is chosen. The region matters later, because some services build their endpoint address from it.

An AI service resource exposes an endpoint and two API keys on its Keys and Endpoint page. There are two so that one can be regenerated while code runs on the other: move everything to key 1, regenerate key 2, move to key 2, then regenerate key 1. Regenerating a key stops the old one immediately.

Speech is the voice service built on this model.