You can incorporate Azure into your application in different ways depending on your needs.
Application hosting on Azure - Azure can host your entire application stack from web applications and APIs to databases to storage services. Azure supports a variety of hosting models from fully managed services to containers to virtual machines. When using fully managed Azure services, your applications can take advantage of the scalability, high-availability, and security built in to Azure.
Consuming cloud services from applications - Existing apps can incorporate Azure services to extend their capabilities. This could include adding full-text searching capability with Azure Cognitive Search, securely storing application secrets in Azure Key Vault or adding vision, speech and language understanding capabilities with Azure Cognitive Services. These services are fully managed by Azure and can be easily added to your application without changing your current application architecture or deployment model.
Modern serverless architectures - Azure Functions simplify building solutions to handle event-driven workflows, whether responding to HTTP requests, handling file uploads in Blob storage, or processing events in a queue. You write only the code necessary to handle your event without worrying about servers or framework code. Further, you can take advantage of over 250 connectors to other Azure and third-party services to tackle your toughest integration problems.