Welcome to this lesson on what is an Azure VM. I’m sure most of you are probably already familiar with virtual machines either from VMs you’ve created on-premises through VMWare or Hyper-V, for example, or by virtualizing some operating system on your personal computer. In Azure, virtual machines are very similar in that you have a physical server, a hypervisor, and an operating system that runs on top of that hypervisor creating the virtual server. Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources.

In this lesson we have three objectives. We’ll briefly discuss the differences of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. We’ll talk about VM workloads. Then we’ll wrap-up with an overview of Azure VM features.