Understanding VMs
VMs are the bread and butter of any cloud migration, allowing physical machines to be displaced by, well, virtual ones! VMs are not a new technology by any measure, but the scale at which they operate on the cloud is incredible. With just a few clicks, you can create a machine anywhere in the world and log in after a few minutes. Need multi-core CPU, 128 GB of RAM, a 1-TB disk, and a gigabit network interface? No problem, use the drop-down menu. Need a specific (modern) operating system version? No problem, install it using a predefined operating system image.
VMs achieve this magic by using a hardware abstraction layer. VMs facilitate the transfer of applications to the cloud with minimal restrictions on the machine specifications or performance penalty due to its hardware abstraction. If your application runs today on an Intel/AMD x86 64-bit machine, it can be lifted to an Azure VM and not notice any difference… probably. Yes, there are a few gotchas,...