Together with partners and out of its own portfolio, Microsoft offers a wide range of extensions for virtual machines. Those extensions range from simple anti-malware solutions, backup, to deployment extension for desired state configuration to open source plugins such as for Chef server or Puppet.
The following screenshot shows some of the Extensions:
The number of Extensions for virtual machines is rapidly growing. To get a full and accurate list, you need to run the following PowerShell command against Microsoft Azure:
Get-AzureVMAvailableExtension | Select ExtensionName, VersionThe virtual machine extensions are already delivered with a license for the product and the cost for that license will be calculated together with your virtual machine costs. Even with the license not purchased by yourself, you can include those extensions into your central management; for example, when it comes to anti malware, and so on.