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Top 10 Azure Project Ideas for 2024 [Beginners to Advanced]

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22nd Dec, 2023
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    Top 10 Azure Project Ideas for 2024 [Beginners to Advanced]

    Microsoft Azure is one of the fastest growing and among the leading cloud providers in the Information Technology industry right now. As cloud enthusiasts, many of us would want to learn it depending on our job roles in the industry. Most people get started by attaining the Azure Fundamentals Certification. However, a good way of learning the same is to build a project and understand real-world use cases. This blog helps understand the top 10 Azure projects one can use for learning and understanding Azure services. From Azure projects for beginners to advanced, this article explains in detail the various Microsoft Azure project ideas for people from the industry and for the people aspiring to get a job in the industry.

    Why Microsoft Azure is Important Today?

    Learning Microsoft Azure in today’s world becomes vital for engineers who have not worked in the cloud earlier. Today, almost all Fortune 500 companies are leveraging one or the other cloud services with very diverse use cases. Azure projects for learning that are discussed in this blog will help the candidates stand out in interviews as they correspond to some of the most common use cases in the industry. 

    Researches show that companies prefer candidates who have done azure projects and have a good hands on experience with the same. If you are looking for a career in the IT sector or you are already working but wish to change your domain, the Azure project examples that are discussed here will help you understand how Azure as a cloud provider can be a game changer for organizations looking for scaling up their business and developing applications faster in a secure and easy manner.

    Top Azure Project Ideas for Beginners

    1. Build Cardiovascular disease early detection system

    As the name suggests, this project is a simple one to get started with Azure Cognitive Services. The idea of this project is to build a system using the Anomaly detector service from Azure that analyzes the physiological data of patients or normal people and helps identify early signs of cardiovascular diseases so that they can be prevented or cured in time. These diseases account for around 30 percent of deaths worldwide and hence shall be a great milestone to achieve. Smart watches can help in data collection and then the same data can be fed into an application that is capable of sending alerts in case an outlier is detected. Refer to the architecture diagram below:

    For the scope of this project, we will consider a simple dataset and use the Azure Anomaly Detector API to detect any outliers present in it. To build the project:

    • Download the dataset and keep it ready for use. 
    • Next, we can create a free Azure subscription. 
    • We will then need to create an Azure Anomaly Detector service under the Azure Cognitive Services after login to our Azure account.
    • Refer the code from here and follow the document to visualize the results.
    • You can copy the output into an excel worksheet and visualize the results from there.
    • Once you understand the working, apply the same to any kind of dataset, like physiological. Below is a sample result:

    Note that we can also utilize this service for data cleaning for machine learning use cases.

    2. Customer Reviews Sentiment Analysis Using Azure Cognitive Services

    Businesses these days are usually customer driven. Customers are always in focus and every product that is built these days requires the opinions of consumers to further improve the experience and also to know what the clients are looking for. The most common way of knowing how the customers feel about something is feedback. And as a business scales up, it becomes next to impossible to analyze and draw conclusions out of large numbers of feedback. This is where the next Azure projects with source code come into the picture. We can utilize the Azure text analytics which is a part of the Azure Cognitive service to perform sentiment analysis on large amounts of text which can help us make better decisions. The solution diagram below explains the flow:

    For the scope of this project, we will consider a simple dataset and use the Azure Language service to detect any outliers present in it. To build the project:

    • Download the dataset and keep it ready for use. 
    • Next, we can create a free Azure subscription. 
    • We will then need to create an Azure Language Service under the Azure Cognitive Services after login in to our Azure account.
    • Refer the code from here and follow the document to visualize the results.
    • Below is a sample result:

    3. Food Order Management system for Hospital patients

    This project is a very common project which one can build using multiple Azure services along with other Microsoft technologies. The idea is to enable patients or their family members in hospitals to order food for them. It can be built with multiple modules but to get started one can build some basic functionalities. The below is the flow diagram for the solution:

    To get started, follow the below steps:

    • Create a free Azure subscription. 
    • We will then need to create an Azure App Service after login to our Azure account.
    • Develop and deploy a basic application using HTML, CSS, Javascript and NodeJS.
    • Create an Azure Function to host the APIs which will interact with the databases.
    • Create an Azure Cosmos DB to store data which can be retrieved using APIs.
    • Develop some basic APIs for CRUD operations and deploy them as HTTP triggers in Azure Functions.
    • Store the data in Azure Cosmos DB using SQL API.
    • These three services are sufficient for a basic application.

    4. Build a Movie Recommendation Engine

    This is one of the amazing Azure projects for practice. One can leverage some of the core Azure services and build something and use it as their personal recommendation engine. The idea is pretty straightforward. Based on the choices made earlier, an AI model can make predictions on what the user may or may not like. This can be a game-changer project for many people and adds a lot of weight to any candidate’s profile. And for businesses, relevant recommendations drive higher sales and generate more revenue. The reference architecture for the same is shown below:

    This uses a lot of Azure resources and is among the best projects from a learning standpoint.

    To get started, consider the below points:

    5. Auditing, Risk, and Compliance management

    This is an Azure project that can be used by almost all organizations that deal with security, compliance, and similar activities on the legal front. The idea is to leverage cloud services to build a management system that is capable of knowledge mining through thousands of documents and then identify potential threats to security, and loop them over the different compliance infrastructures across the globe to identify risks and help them get rectified.

    There other way to approach this problem is to use out-of-the-box solutions from Azure called the Azure Security Center which is a one stop solution for a variety of such problems.

    In case, as a part of this Azure project for learning, if you wish to develop such a system from scratch at a small scale, the following services can help you get started, if you follow them step-by-step:

    • Azure Language Service can help you get started for first-hand analysis of documents.
    • Azure Translator API can simplify the process of unified analysis of documents worldwide on various standards.
    • Azure Cognitive Search capability can give us the flexibility to search through documents across domains and hence can be a game changer in the process.
    • The application can be built in the below flow:
      • An Azure Storage Account can act as a Data source which can be fed into services like Translator and then to Search and Language for analysis from Compliance and Security perspective. The application can be hosted on an App Service which exposes the outcome of this Knowledge mining solution to the legal teams for various interpretations and call for actions.

    Top Azure Project Ideas for Advance Professionals

    1. Deploy A Classification Model Using Azure DevOps

    This is a very good Azure project that can give you an idea of the DevOps process using Azure DevOps as well as a glimpse of MLOps. The idea is as simple as it sounds. We need to create a simple Machine learning model and then deploy it using CI(Continuous Integration) / CD(Continuous Delivery) pipeline instead of doing it manually. This is a significant practice in any product development setup in IT. Below is the recommended solution diagram:

    To accomplish this, follow the steps below:

    2. Intelligent Call Center with Azure

    This project in Azure is among the most prominent examples of a case where the cloud can make a major impact. Organizations across the globe rely heavily on customer feedback and demands on call centers and tap even seconds of such conversations to draw useful insights. These insights are classified manually by agents after the calls which is inefficient and error-prone.

    To tackle this, Azure Cognitive services offer a packaged solution for the end-to-end implementation of this use case. You can create a workflow that can pacify the entire process end-to-end and execute tasks at call centers even without user actions.

    To implement such a workflow, follow the below steps:

    • Use Azure Speech Service to facilitate automated call transcription(requires model training). Azure Translator API can be an add-on in case of various languages.
    • Azure Language Service is the next in the list which will help you with classification and extraction capabilities to classify calls and map relevant executives dynamically.
    • Azure Cognitive Search can dynamically find the right document from the transcriptions thereby saving time.

    The below image explains the resources utilized for this project:

    3. Create an Inventory Management 

    This project uses the Azure Computer Vision API is a simple one to start with and understand how AI can be used for a wide use case like Inventory management. For any kind of information that one needs to collect for better decision making, the OCR and the Image Analysis API from Azure gives you the flexibility to extract all the details of the product like detecting faces, generating captions, categorizing images, recognizing characters, and identifying domain-specific content. This helps businesses segregate products based on various parameters thus reducing manual efforts and processing time.

    In most cases, the computer vision capabilities are integrated with Internet of Things(IoT) solutions like drones for clicking pictures of the products which are further analyzed by them.

    The source code for OCR will help you get started in any programming languages of your choice.

    4. Building a Facial recognition to detect mood

    This project is also an advanced AI use case where you can build a very simple application from scratch using Azure for Facial recognition. This can further be used for mood detection, age detection, gender detections etc. The Azure Face service is also a part of the Azure Cognitive service and can be used to build applications like this. You can leverage the Azure Face API or the Azure Face SDK to get started quickly. 

    Refer the below simple diagram to explain how the service works:

    The final output of the Face API can be pushed to a database or dynamically utilized as shown in the sample source code. The Python source code is also available in a simpler manner.

    5. Real-Time Sensor Data Analysis Using Azure IoT Hub

    You can develop a dataset for this project using a simulator tool to generate simulated sensor data, or you can use sample datasets offered by Microsoft. You must set up an IoT Hub instance on the Azure portal to receive sensor data. A suitable protocol must be used to connect the sensors to the IoT Hub. You can use any protocol that IoT Hub supports, including MQTT, AMQP, and HTTP. Analyze the real-time data collected by the sensors using Azure Stream Analytics. To ingest data from the IoT Hub, you will build a Stream Analytics job and set it up accordingly. SQL-like queries that filter, aggregate, and manipulate the ingested data are supported by Azure Stream Analytics. These queries will be used to analyze the sensor data in real time. 

    Power BI will be used to build dashboards and visualizations based on Stream Analytics' real-time analysis. For continuous integration and application deployment, you'll utilize Azure DevOps. You can set up pipelines to consistently create, test, and deploy the application.

    How to Choose an Azure Project?

    Azure has a very wide variety of services to offer which correspond to various career domains inside the IT industry. To choose a project of your choice, it is recommended that you learn Cloud Computing to get a fair understanding. Once done, it should be easier to choose between the projects as they fall under the expertise of one the many job roles like Azure AI Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer, Azure Data Engineer, Azure Developer etc. The resources discussed throughout the article are mostly for the Azure AI Engineers.

    To choose an Azure project, follow the below simple steps:

    • Identify a problem statement / intent / domain of the project you wish to build and its complexity.
    • Research and identify the key Azure services or resources that can be help you in building the same. This becomes easy when you have a holistic view of the Azure offerings.
    • Once done, the next step would be to understand the integration points and see how we can connect two or more necessary Azure services together.
    • Once you have a mindmap ready, all you need is to choose a tech stack from an implementation standpoint like C# (Backend programming language), .NET (Backend framework), MySQL (Database), NodeJS, etc for implementation.
    • Finally, get ready with a flow diagram to implement the chosen projects.

    Conclusion

    Hope this blog helps you understand the uses of the various Azure Cognitive services offerings and provides guidance on how to use each of these services with the different Azure project examples discussed throughout. It is always better to identify the goal clearly and then choose the services for implementation carefully as some of the service capabilities are quite similar and it might not be easy to choose an economical and most accurate Azure resource for a given problem statement.

    It is highly recommended to attain the KnowledgeHut Azure Fundamentals Certification and try out at least two to three projects from the above list to get a thorough understanding of the services!

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    Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

    1. How do I get started with Azure?

    You can create an Azure Free Trial account to explore the services offered by Azure and build the above projects. Once the accouint is created, login using your credentials to the Azure Portal to create any new resource and learn it.

    2. What are the 4 fundamental Azure job roles?

    Azure Developer, Azure DevOps Engineer, Azure Data Engineer, and Azure AI Engineer are some of the most prominent and fundamental job roles in the industry. Apart from these Azure solutions Architects, Azure Data Scientist Associates, Azure Administrators are a few more.

    3. Is Azure a project management tool?

    Azure is actually way more than just that, but yes, the Boards in Azure DevOps is widely used for project management across the globe. Azure is a cloud service platform offered by Microsoft with more than 200 products under its umbrella.

    4. What are some best practices for managing Azure projects?

    A very good practice to manage projects in general is to go with the Agile methodology of product development and tracking. Along with this, extensice use of features like Boards for project and tasks tracking, Wikis for knowlegde sharing and Dashboards for better visualization are few others.

    5. Are there any tools or frameworks available to streamline Azure project development?

    There are no specific frameworks/tools that are a perfect fit for Azure project development. Most of the technologies and tools are compatible with Azure and can be used along. However, it has got good integrations with other Microsoft products like Office 365, Microsoft Graph, Windows, Power Platform etc.

    Profile

    Naman Sinha

    Blog Author

    An eminent speaker and author, Naman Sinha's interest lies in empowering people by mentoring them in the IT industry through articles, talks, training and much more. He is an expert passionate about Microsoft technologies.

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