Microsoft Azure: Compute

As part of the Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative I am looking into different topics in Azure and summarize my learnings. This post is about Azure Compute

Services

Let’s dig into some of the most prominent services offered by [Azure]

Azure virtual machines

Virtual Machines allows you to create Linux and Windows virtual machines using based on one of the available images. A VM Azure resource consists of several elements:

  • The VM which is
    • based on an os image
    • has a defined Size i.e. memory, cpu, gpu to be used
    • sits in a dedicate location
  • Storage account for the disks
    • virtual machines will have at least two virtual hard disks (VHDs), one for the operating system and the other one a temporary storage.
    • additional disks can be added
  • Network interface to communicate on the network
    • the interface which connect to the VNets
  • [Virtual networks (VNets)] (shared with other VMs and services)
    • [Virtual networks (VNets)] are used in Azure to provide private connectivity between Azure Virtual Machines and other Azure services.
  • [Network Security Groups (NSGs)] to secure the network traffic
    • Software firewalls to control the traffic flow to and from subnets and to and from VMs. It consist of rules and allow filtering inbound and outbound traffic on the VNet.
  • Public Internet address (optional)
    • Public addresses allow you to connect from anywhere to your instance e.g. using SSH

The following picture visualizes the relation VNets, NSGs and VMs: