Hello everyone. I'm Professor James Won-Ki Hong from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at POSTECH. Today, I will introduce Microsoft Azure, which is the cloud platform from Microsoft. Here's a table of contents for this lecture. First, I'm going to show you a video on Microsoft's Vision for IoT. I will then introduce Microsoft Azure, which is a set of cloud services from Microsoft. Please watch the following video on Microsoft Vision for IoT by pressing the link given below. So, what is Microsoft Azure? Azure is a set of cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy, and manage applications from Microsoft. It provides integrated tools, DevOps, and a marketplace to support developing anything from simple mobile apps to internet-scale solutions. Microsoft claims that Azure is the only consistent hybrid cloud in the world. Azure provides various tools such as Visual Studio, SDKs including.NET, Java, Python, Ruby and so on, PowerShell, CLI; Command Line Interface and other tools and open source technologies such as Linux, Java, PHP. Azure also provides security for its cloud interactions and builtin artificial intelligence functions for developing secure, intelligent, and scalable apps. Azure provides all three types of cloud computing service namely; IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Please watch the following introductory video on Microsoft Azure. This should give you a better understanding on Microsoft Azure. You may run across these two similar phrases, Microsoft Azure and Windows Azure. I was a bit confused myself, but here's a clarification. Microsoft released Windows Azure in 2010 and then renamed it Microsoft Azure in 2014. So, in practicality, they are the one and the same, just with different names. The change was a branding effort by Microsoft to make Azure as the public cloud platform for their customers. Additionally, it set the stage to make Azure the integrated cloud platform for Microsoft's other services, such as Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Bing, OneDrive, Skype and Xbox Live. Azure, of course, can also be used for building and deploying non Microsoft applications. Azure supports many different operating systems, such as Windows and various Linux, programming languages and frameworks. So, whether you develop with Python, Java, JavaScript PHP or.NET, your application integrates and works with Windows, Android and iOS devices. There are many websites providing various info about Microsoft Azure. In this lecture, I gave a very brief introduction to Microsoft Azure, which is a set of cloud services from Microsoft. In the next lecture, I will explain Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, which is a collection of tools and services for IoT. See you soon.