Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft. It allows you to build, test, deploy and manage applications to help your organisation face its business challenges.
Azure virtual machines are on-demand computing resources that you can scale to your need. Because they are virtual, you have a lot of flexibility without needing to buy any of the physical hardware to run them.
Azure Virtual Machines are very capable. We’ll go more in detail with Azure VMs later in this course, but to give you a taste of what’s possible, here is a list of just some features available to Azure VMs.
Autoscale and Virtual Machine Scale Sets allows you to easily deploy and scale your VMs automatically based on resource demand
VMs can be of different sizes allowing you to cut costs as well as be adjusted later
VMs can be placed on separate virtual networks for isolation and segmentation yet still have the capability of connecting to each other as well as with on-premises machines
Much of the remote administration for VMs can be performed outside the VM through the Azure Portal and other tools such as Azure PowerShell.
Resources that make up the VM are separate from the VM itself allowing you to re-attach disks, network interface cards, Public IPs, etc. as well as rebuild a VM without having to remove any of these resources making rebuilding VMs that much easier.
Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with some of these terms now as by the end of this course you’ll have a full understanding of these features.