What is a Virtual Machine?
A Virtual Machine (VM) is essentially a computer that lives in the cloud instead of on your desk. A great way to understand why VMs matter is to think about a banking app.
Almost everyone has a bank app on their phone. If a bank tried to host that application on its own premises or in its own private data center, it would need to pay for cooling, electricity, hardware maintenance, and a dozen other operational expenses. That gets expensive fast and it doesn't scale well.
Instead, banks (and most companies today) use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which gives them full control over a virtual machine without the overhead of owning and maintaining physical hardware.
In this article, we'll walk through creating your own Linux VM on Microsoft Azure, step by step.
