title: Which Azure services are PaaS?
body: <p>(note: To address a criticism I've deleted a prior question and reposted this more succinct version)</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to compare AWS and Azure for a custom web app that's essentially like any canned content management system. It requires web hosting, database, email, storage, security, some way to process ASP.NET but with high availability and load balanced. </p>
  
  <p>The PaaS/IaaS distinction can sometimes be grey (in part because companies tend to use marketing jargon that portrays IaaS type services as maintenance free). From a small business perspective its quite clear though. If a service involves the SMB spend time maintaining rather than developing, its in the IaaS camp. Since I'm a single developer with limited time, a PaaS model for all services would be preferable. The ideal would be all services (web hosting, database, email, etc are offered as a zero maintenance scalable service rather than have to spin up and manage individual instances.</p>
  
  <p>I find AWS can do everything but a drawback is that one still needs to manage instances (i.e. I would need to keep the software on instances updated, track instances, manage network, security, etc.) S3 doesn't process scripts. AWS Beanstalk and Optworks are still essentially mostly helper apps for starting up an IaaS type environment. (whereas say DynamoDB would count as a PaaS type service).  Recently Microsoft has dropped prices on Azure which makes it an attractive alternative </p>
  
  <p>In short, I am looking for a list of services offered by Azure which are actually no maintenance services that don't require I patch software or need to spin up instances to handle traffic spikes (e.g. web hosting, script processing, database, email, etc..)</p>