My Dad Said: Start With Compute. Now I See Why.

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

When I told my dad I had started learning Azure, he asked me one question:

“Where did you start?”

I mentioned tutorials, some documentation, and browsing the portal. He replied simply:

“Start with compute. Everything else in the cloud builds on top of it.”

At the time it sounded obvious—applications need computers to run. But when I opened the Compute section inside Azure, I began to see what he actually meant.

Why Compute Matters

In tutorials, cloud computing often feels very conceptual. Words like scalability, high availability, distributed systems, and managed services float around, but they remain ideas.

Opening the Compute section removes the abstraction. Suddenly you see concrete services such as:

• Virtual Machines
• Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Images
• Availability Sets

At first glance it looks like a lot of different services, yet they all revolve around one question: Where does your code actually run?

Before anything else in the cloud can exist—databases, APIs, storage, authentication—something has to execute the code. That something is compute.

Virtual Machines: The First Layer

I already knew the concept of a virtual machine: a computer running inside another computer. Seeing it in Azure made it feel different. Instead of running a VM on my laptop, Azure offers a computer somewhere in a data center.

That realization brings a set of responsibilities:

• Managing the operating system
• Updating dependencies
• Monitoring resource usage
• Handling crashes
• Planning for scaling

The cloud stopped feeling like a magic “deploy” button and became real infrastructure.

Platform Services vs. Compute

This perspective helped me appreciate platforms like Vercel more. When I deploy projects there, I never think about:

• CPU
• RAM
• Operating systems
• Load balancing

Those problems are handled for me. Azure provides similar abstractions through services like App Service and Functions, but it also lets you go deeper. At the lowest layer, you have machines. Understanding compute is like seeing the foundation under a building.

New Questions That Matter

Before focusing on compute, deployment felt like the final step: code, push, click deploy, move on. After exploring compute, new questions arise:

• How many machines are running my app?
• What happens if one crashes?
• What happens when traffic spikes?
• How much does it cost to keep these machines running?

I ran into an account issue while trying to explore the free tier, so I couldn’t experiment much, but even a small exploration made the cloud feel less mysterious and more tangible.

Conclusion

This post is the second step in a short series where I document what I learn while exploring Azure and cloud architecture. The first post covered opening the Azure Portal and realizing how big the cloud ecosystem is.

Now I’ve discovered something simpler: Everything eventually comes back to machines. Compute is where the cloud stops being abstract and starts becoming engineering.

If you’ve worked with cloud platforms longer than I have, what was the moment when cloud finally “clicked” for you? I feel like I’ve only just found the first layer.