What is Azure Virtual Machines used for?

Azure Virtual Machines offers scalable, on-demand Linux and Windows virtual machines on Microsoft Azure. It is a good fit for hosting applications on Azure and migrating existing servers to the cloud.

How much does Azure Virtual Machines cost?

Azure Virtual Machines is a paid product with no free plan.

Is Azure Virtual Machines open source?

No. Azure Virtual Machines is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Azure Virtual Machines include Apache CloudStack, KubeVirt and Incus.

What are some alternatives to Azure Virtual Machines?

Azure Virtual Machines competes with Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Azure Virtual Machines alternatives.

Azure Virtual Machines: features, pricing and alternatives

About Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines is Microsoft's infrastructure service for running Linux and Windows virtual machines in the Azure cloud. The vendor describes it as scalable, on-demand computing capacity, so teams can add or remove machines as demand changes.

The Azure portfolio around it includes Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Azure Functions, container services, Azure Arc and Azure Migrate, which relate to hosting, scaling and moving workloads. The page text available for this entry is mostly shared site navigation, so specific machine families and options are not described here and should be checked on the vendor's site.

Azure Virtual Machines is a proprietary, cloud-hosted service. Charges follow Azure's pricing model, with details on Microsoft's Azure pricing pages.

Key features

On-demand Linux and Windows virtual machines
Scalable compute capacity
Part of the wider Azure portfolio
Scale Sets for managing groups of machines

Good fit for

→Hosting applications on Azure
→Migrating existing servers to the cloud

Tags: virtual-machines; iaas; azure; compute; microsoft; cloud; managed-service

Azure Virtual Machines: questions and answers

What is Azure Virtual Machines used for?: Azure Virtual Machines offers scalable, on-demand Linux and Windows virtual machines on Microsoft Azure. It is a good fit for hosting applications on Azure and migrating existing servers to the cloud.
How much does Azure Virtual Machines cost?: Azure Virtual Machines is a paid product with no free plan.
Is Azure Virtual Machines open source?: No. Azure Virtual Machines is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Azure Virtual Machines include Apache CloudStack, KubeVirt and Incus.
What are some alternatives to Azure Virtual Machines?: Azure Virtual Machines competes with Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Azure Virtual Machines alternatives.