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Cloud Computing Beginner

What is Virtual Machine (VM)?

A software-based emulation of a physical computer that runs its own operating system and applications.

Virtual machines run on a hypervisor that abstracts physical hardware, allowing multiple VMs to share a single physical server. Each VM has its own OS, CPU allocation, memory, and disk, providing complete isolation.

VMs are heavier than containers (full OS per VM) but provide stronger isolation. Popular hypervisors include VMware ESXi, KVM (Linux), and Hyper-V (Microsoft). Cloud VMs include EC2 (AWS), Azure VMs, and Compute Engine (GCP).

Related Terms

Serverless Computing
A cloud execution model where the provider manages servers and dynamically allocates resources, charging only for actual usage.
Cloud Storage Tiers
Different storage classes offered by cloud providers, optimized for varying access patterns from frequent to archival use.
Cloud Monitoring
Services that collect, analyze, and alert on metrics, logs, and traces from cloud infrastructure and applications.
Auto Scaling
Automatically adjusting the number of computing resources based on current demand to maintain performance and optimize costs.
CDK (Cloud Development Kit)
A software development framework for defining cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages instead of YAML or JSON templates.
Kubernetes Service
An abstraction that provides a stable network endpoint for accessing a group of Pods, handling load balancing and service discovery.
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