Categories of Virtual Machines
Microsoft offers a range of virtual machine sizes, categorized into six types to cater to various needs. Here, for example, we see prices for Linux VMs in the West US 2 region and may change.
- Compute Optimized: Designed for tasks requiring strong CPU capabilities, such as medium-traffic servers, batch processing, and network services. Pricing begins at $0.0846 per hour.
- General Purpose VMs: These offer a balanced mix of CPU and memory, suitable for medium and low traffic servers, databases, and testing environments, with pricing starting at $0.096 per hour.
- Memory Optimized: Equipped with ample RAM and high-speed RAM hardware, ideal for in-memory analytics, caching services, and relational databases, starting at $0.126 per hour.
- Storage Optimized: Geared towards high storage throughput and I/O, suitable for data warehouses, big data analytics, and transactional SQL/NoSQL databases, with pricing starting at $0.624 per hour.
- High-Performance Computing (HPC): Offers powerful distributed CPU resources and support for high-throughput networking like RDMA, making it suitable for massively parallel HPC workloads, with pricing starting at $0.796 per hour.
- Graphical Processing Units (GPU): Includes GPU resources for tasks like deep learning, machine learning, video editing, and graphics rendering, with prices beginning at $0.90 per hour.
Azure Virtual Machine Pricing
Virtual Machines are one of the computing resources offered by Microsoft Azure. These are available on-demand and are scalable. Virtual Machines offers more control over the computing environment. Virtual Machines provides the flexibility of Virtualization without the need to purchase physical hardware to run it.