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Microsoft Azure VS Azure Virtual Machines

Compare Microsoft Azure VS Azure Virtual Machines and see what are their differences

Microsoft Azure logo Microsoft Azure

Windows Azure and SQL Azure enable you to build, host and scale applications in Microsoft datacenters.

Azure Virtual Machines logo Azure Virtual Machines

Build Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) and save up to 80 percent with Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server.
  • Microsoft Azure Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-10
  • Azure Virtual Machines Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-19

Microsoft Azure features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure offers a highly scalable environment where you can easily adjust compute resources to match your needs.
  • Global Reach
    Azure has multiple data centers around the globe, providing extensive global coverage for applications and services.
  • Integration with Microsoft Products
    Azure integrates seamlessly with existing Microsoft software like Office 365, Active Directory, and Windows Server.
  • Compliance
    Azure adheres to a broad set of international standards and compliance certifications, including GDPR, ISO, and many others.
  • Service Offerings
    Azure provides a wide variety of services, from virtual machines to databases and AI-powered functionalities.
  • Hybrid Solutions
    Azure supports hybrid cloud configurations, allowing businesses to run some resources on-premises and some in the cloud.
  • Security
    Azure employs advanced security protocols and has multiple layers of security, including data encryption and secure access controls.

Possible disadvantages of Microsoft Azure

  • Cost Management
    The pricing structure can be complex and may lead to unexpected costs if not carefully managed.
  • Learning Curve
    New users may find Azure challenging to learn due to its extensive range of services and configurations.
  • Service Limits
    Some Azure services have limitations and quotas, which can hinder performance or scalability if reached.
  • Support Costs
    While Azure offers robust support, advanced support plans can be expensive.
  • Complexity in Hybrid Setup
    Setting up and managing a hybrid environment can be technically challenging and may require specialized skills.
  • Downtime Risks
    Although rare, Azure is not immune to outages and downtime, which can impact service availability.
  • Data Migration
    Migrating data and services into Azure can be complicated and may require significant planning and resources.

Azure Virtual Machines features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure Virtual Machines allow you to easily scale up or down based on your needs, providing flexibility to handle varying workloads.
  • Global Reach
    Azure offers a vast network of data centers around the world, enabling low-latency access and compliance with local data regulations.
  • Wide Range of VM Sizes
    Azure provides a variety of VM sizes and configurations to suit different types of applications and workloads.
  • Integrated Ecosystem
    Azure VMs can seamlessly integrate with other Azure services like Azure SQL Database, Azure App Services, and Azure Active Directory.
  • High Availability
    Azure offers features such as Availability Zones and VM Scale Sets to ensure high availability and resilience of your applications.
  • Security
    Azure VMs come with built-in security features, including Azure Security Center, for monitoring and defending against threats.
  • Pay-As-You-Go Pricing
    Azure's pricing model allows you to pay only for what you use, which can be cost-effective for many businesses.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Virtual Machines

  • Complexity
    Managing Azure Virtual Machines can be complex, especially for companies without dedicated IT teams or cloud experts.
  • Cost Management
    While Azure provides a pay-as-you-go model, costs can quickly add up if not monitored and managed effectively.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a significant learning curve associated with understanding and utilizing all the features and services offered by Azure.
  • Dependence on Internet
    Performance and availability are highly dependent on internet connectivity, which may not be universally reliable or fast.
  • Resource Limitations
    There are certain quotas and limits on resources that can be allocated, which might require quota increase requests for larger deployments.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Using proprietary technologies and services from Azure can lead to being locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, making migration to other platforms challenging.
  • Downtime
    While Azure aims for high availability, there can still be occasional downtime due to maintenance or unforeseen issues.

Analysis of Microsoft Azure

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Microsoft Azure is a reliable and capable cloud service provider, widely regarded as a good choice, especially for businesses that heavily rely on Microsoft products, or those that require a cloud solution with robust global and hybrid capabilities.

Why this product is good

  • Microsoft Azure is considered a robust cloud computing platform for various reasons: 1. **Scalability and Flexibility**: It offers flexible and scalable cloud services, allowing businesses to scale up their operations without significant upfront capital investment. 2. **Integration with Microsoft Products**: Seamless integration with Microsoft products such as Windows Server, Active Directory, and SQL Server makes it particularly appealing for enterprises already using Microsoft ecosystems. 3. **Global Reach and Compliance**: With data centers worldwide, Azure provides opportunities for global scaling. It also supports a wide range of compliance certifications, vital for businesses in regulated industries. 4. **Comprehensive Services**: A variety of services, including Machine Learning, analytics, IoT, and DevOps, cater to numerous industrial requirements. 5. **Hybrid Capabilities**: Azure’s hybrid capabilities support environments that use on-premises infrastructure in conjunction with cloud solutions.

Recommended for

    Microsoft Azure is recommended for enterprise businesses, established organizations transitioning from on-premise data centers to the cloud, startups looking for professional scale quickly, and sectors requiring high compliance standards like healthcare, finance, and government services.

Analysis of Azure Virtual Machines

Overall verdict

  • Azure Virtual Machines are highly regarded for their performance, reliability, and integration capabilities. They are a solid choice for businesses looking for a comprehensive cloud infrastructure solution.

Why this product is good

  • Azure Virtual Machines are considered good because they offer a robust and flexible cloud computing service, allowing businesses to run applications with high availability and scalability. They provide extensive support for different operating systems and application environments, integration with other Azure services, and advanced security features. With a global infrastructure, Azure Virtual Machines ensure better performance and lower latency for users worldwide.

Recommended for

  • Organizations needing scalable infrastructure for applications
  • Businesses requiring a global presence with low-latency access
  • Teams looking for integrated solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem
  • Developers needing extensive OS and application environment support
  • Enterprises prioritizing security and compliance features

Microsoft Azure videos

How does Microsoft Azure work?

More videos:

  • Review - Building your first Azure Blockchain Workbench application
  • Review - Microsoft Azure Overview
  • Review - Introduction to Azure Blockchain Workbench
  • Tutorial - What Is Azure? | Microsoft Azure Tutorial For Beginners | Microsoft Azure Training | Simplilearn
  • Review - Bots and Azure Blockchain Workbench

Azure Virtual Machines videos

No Azure Virtual Machines videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Microsoft Azure and Azure Virtual Machines)
Cloud Computing
86 86%
14% 14
Cloud Infrastructure
92 92%
8% 8
Virtual Machine Management
VPS
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Microsoft Azure and Azure Virtual Machines

Microsoft Azure Reviews

Top 15 MuleSoft Competitors and Alternatives
The Azure API Management platform has over a million APIs for modernizing legacy apps to adopting API-first strategies from on-premises to multi-cloud. Thousands of the world’s largest enterprises use the solution to build, secure, and scale API initiatives.
20 Best Free Website Hosting (July 2023)
New users can usually receive a free site credit at the largest cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform to get started. However, when these free credits expire, cloud products can be quite expensive and out of the price range of many projects.
AWS vs Azure Which is best for your career?
This course provides the key knowledge required to prepare for Exam AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure. You will learn how to develop and deploy cloud applications on Azure using various Azure services.
Top 10 Best Container Software in 2022
Tool Cost/Plan Details: There is no upfront cost. Azure does not charge for cluster management. It charges only for what you use. It has Pricing for nodes model. Based on your container needs, you can get the price estimator through Container Services calculator.
Top 50 Cheapest Cloud Services Providers | Affordable Cloud Hosting
With direct competitors like AWS, Microsoft Azure has been one of the most preferred and also cheapest cloud services providers. The plan that Azure submit depends on the services a business seeks to access. Azure cloud platform includes over 200 products and cloud services to assist businesses in bringing new solutions to life—to solve today’s challenges and create the...

Azure Virtual Machines Reviews

10 Best VMware Alternatives and Similar Software
Azure Virtual Machines are one of the numerous forms of scalable, on-demand computing resources like VMware. VMs are typically used when you want greater control over any computer system than the other options provide.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Microsoft Azure should be more popular than Azure Virtual Machines. It has been mentiond 66 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Microsoft Azure mentions (66)

  • How to Develop a Voice Chatbot
    Microsoft Azure offers a Bot Framework with built-in support for voice interactions via the Speech SDK. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Setting Up a Windows 11 Virtual Machine with Azure on a MacOs
    The first step in creating a virtual machine is getting a Microsoft account. Once you have a Microsoft account click this link to create an Azure free trial account. Click on the "Try Azure for free" button. This takes you to the page below. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • How To Create Windows 11 Virtual Machine in Azure
    Before you start, ensure you have an active Azure subscription, if you don't have one, Click here to create a free account. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    A VM is the original “hosting” product of the cloud era. Over the last 20 years, VM providers have come and gone, as have enterprise virtualization solutions such as VMware. Today you can do this somewhere like OVHcloud, Hetzner or DigitalOcean, which took over the “server” market from the early 2000’s. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft's Azure also offer VMs, at a less... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Deploying flask app to Kubernetes using Minikube
    Before deploying the application with Kubernetes, you need to containerize the application using docker. This article shows how to deploy a Flask application on Ubuntu 22.04 using Minikube; a Kubernetes tool for local deployment for testing and free offering. Alternatively, you can deploy your container apps using Cloud providers such as GCP(Google Cloud), Azure(Microsoft) or AWS(Amazon). - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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Azure Virtual Machines mentions (9)

  • Stealing everything you've ever typed on your Windows Recall PC is now possible
    More than 60% of Azure is run on Linux [1] and the writing was already on the wall when the Linux subsystem was conceived so I don't think it's a good example of EEE. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/virtual-machines/linux. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago
  • Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins
    Https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/virtual-machines/linux#:~:text=Get%20up%20and%20running%20with,CentOS%2C%20Debian%2C%20and%20CoreOS. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Linux Crosses 4% Market Share Worldwide
    "More than 60 percent of customer cores in Azure run Linux workloads" https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/virtual-machines/linux So the Linux share would actually decrease if you exclude Azure ;). - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Azure has run out of compute. Anyone else affected?
    So does google, so does azure etc. etc. https://cloud.google.com/spot-vms, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/virtual-machines/spot/ Spot instances exist just to try to turn over-provisions in to not a complete loss. You're at least making some money from your mistake. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Infrastructure as code (IaC) for Java-based apps on Azure
    You can use virtual machines or virtual machine scale sets to host your Java applications. Scale sets, in particular, allow you to scale your applications across hundreds to thousands of VMs very rapidly. As we all probably know, virtual machines require a high level of management and configuration versus some other options out there. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Microsoft Azure and Azure Virtual Machines, you can also consider the following products

Amazon AWS - Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.

vSphere - Get started with VMware vSphere editions, the world’s leading server virtualization platform and the best foundation for your apps, your cloud, and your business.

DigitalOcean - Simplifying cloud hosting. Deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds.

Amazon EC2 - Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.

Linode - We make it simple to develop, deploy, and scale cloud infrastructure at the best price-to-performance ratio in the market.

Google Compute Engine - Google Compute Engine is not just fast. It’s Google fast.