So what are Azure virtual machines? Azure gives you the best of both worlds.
So if you remember, IAAS, or infrastructure as
a service, virtual machines fall under this category.
This is different than PAAS, or platform as a service.
So anything that you create inside of Azure Virtual Machines, you manage.
You're going to manage the patching of those machines
and the updating of any software on those machines.
The upside to that is that you can go ahead
and you can install whatever applications and services you need.
This maybe different run times, so for example
Java run times, maybe your own corporate run time.
You can install that, as well as different types of application, for example you
could install Share Point or SQL Server inside of a virtual machine, and run that.
So you're
actually running that in the cloud, but
you have complete control over those servers.
You also have choice when it comes to operating system.
You can use both Linux and Windows operating systems and there's a gallery
set up so that you can go
ahead and choose predefined operating system configurations.
In fact, once you have an operating system machine
set up the way that you want you can image
that virtual machine.
And then in the future, you can go in and you
can create new virtual machines based off that image that you've created.
Even though you are in the cloud, you
can integrate these virtual machines with virtual private networks.
And have them be isolated from other machines.
You can set up a subnet and then VPN tunnel those connected
machines in Windows Azure, so that they look just like they're part of
your corporate network.
Machines also offer very flexible workloads.
So you can create machines as small as 768 MB of RAM.
That would be be an extra small instance, and move all
the way up to machines with 28 or 56 gigs of RAM.
Azure is constantly being updated, so you can rest assured that the
RAM sizes in these machines will only increase as time moves forward.