Sitecore Experience Platform behavior on Azure
What you can expect from Sitecore Experience Platform features when they're running on Azure.
For most aspects of Sitecore development, all standard Sitecore facilities, operations, and requirements work in the same way on Microsoft Azure® as they do when Sitecore runs on an on-premise server. With Managed Cloud, Sitecore maintains the platform, so you can focus on implementing your solution.
From Sitecore 8.2 Update-1 and later, the Sitecore Experience Platform is released ready for deployment into Azure Web Apps. The Sitecore platform architecture creates a similar experience for Sitecore customers using the platform, whether in the Cloud or on-premise. This approach guarantees that all platform features, configuration settings, security, API, and scaling options apply to both Sitecore on-premise and Sitecore deployed in Azure Web Apps, (regardless of whether you deploy Sitecore through the Managed Cloud service, manually, by using the Sitecore Azure Toolkit, or through the Azure Marketplace).
Learn more about the Sitecore Managed Cloud service and deploying your customizations with Microsoft Azure on the Sitecore Doc site or on the Sitecore Knowledge Base.
The default Sitecore setup in Azure connects Sitecore to appropriate Azure PaaS services such as Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Redis (for session state), and Application Insights, (for logging, monitoring, and performance counters).
Sitecore patches configuration files to integrate into each of these services, which means that it is very simple to swap out some of the services if you want to. The only exception is the Sitecore Platform parts compatibility.