The 30 Most Used Microsoft Azure Icons Explained!

The easy guide to understanding your Azure Architecture Diagrams

Whether you are new to the world of Azure architecture diagrams or an expert, this article will help you navigate the wide range of cloud architecture components Microsoft Azure has to offer. Unfortunately, before this article, there wasn’t a one-stop shop to explain what each icon represents. Look no further, Cloudockit, one of the leading experts in cloud diagramming, has you covered.

Please note that the information for the article was taken from various online sources. A full list of sources is available after the article if you wish to continue your research.

Virtual Machines

Virtual Machine

Azure Virtual Machines are image service instances that provide on-demand and scalable computing resources. In general, virtual machines are sandboxed from the rest of the system, the software inside a virtual machine can’t escape or tamper with the underlying server itself.

Azure Load Balancer

An Azure load balancer is a Layer-4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that provides high availability by distributing incoming traffic among healthy VMs. A load balancer health probe monitors a given port on each VM and only distributes traffic to an operational VM.

Network Interface Card

A network interface enables an Azure Virtual Machine to communicate with the internet, Azure, and on-premises resources. When creating a virtual machine using the Azure portal, the portal creates one network interface with default settings for you.

VHD Data Disk — VHD

Just like any other computer, virtual machines in Azure use disks as a place to store an operating system, applications, and data. All Azure virtual machines have at least two disks — an operating system disk and a temporary disk. The operating system disk is created from an image, and both the operating system disk and the image are actually virtual hard disks (VHDs) stored in an Azure storage account. Virtual machines also can have one or more data disks, that are also stored as VHDs.

Storage Accounts

An Azure storage account contains all of your Azure Storage data objects: blobs, files, queues, tables, and disks. The storage account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.

For the full list of icons and tips, visit Cloudockit’s blog.