- A computer or server that you have access to, exclusively
- Its virtual as it does not have its own exclusive hardware
- VMs are an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering from Azure - manage everything else except hardware
- User Azure tools to manage a large number of VMs and even hybrid clouds
- Use Azure blueprints to make your VMs comply with company guidelines
- Azure will recommend improvements to ensure better security, higher availability and greater performance
- Choose amount of RAM, number of CPU’s, as well as Operating Systems (Windows or Linux)
- Pro’s
- Control
- Use VMs when you need to control all aspects of an environment or machine
- Application
- Install specific applications on your VMs
- Existing Infrastructure
- You can move move existing infrastructure to Azure - from on-premises or another cloud provider
- Con’s
- Not for everything
- If you can use another Azure Service instead, its often worth it (lesser price)
- Maintenance
- A lot of maintenance with VMs or updates, patches and security concerns
Scale sets
- A group of identical, load balanded VMs
- Benefits
- Multiple VMs
- Simple to manage multiple identical VMs using a load balancer
- High availability
- If one VM fails or stops, the others in the scale set step up and keep working
- Auto scaling
- Automatically match demand by adding or removing VMs from the scale set
- Large scale
- Run upto 1000 VMs in a single scale set
- No extra cost
- No added costs for using scale sets
Spot VMs
- Save money by using unused capacity
- Can be evicted anytime
- Use for interruptible non-critical workloads
- Use with Scale sets
- Set a max price for the Spot VM