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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

Cloud IAM
Identity and Access Management services that control who can access cloud resources and what actions they can perform.
Azure
Microsoft's cloud computing platform offering IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services for building, deploying, and managing applications.
Auto Scaling
Automatically adjusting the number of computing resources based on current demand to maintain performance and optimize costs.
Hybrid Cloud
A computing environment that combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services, allowing data and applications to move between them.
Kubernetes Namespace
A virtual cluster within a Kubernetes cluster that provides scope for names and enables resource isolation between teams or environments.
Cloud Cost Optimization
Strategies and practices to reduce and control cloud computing expenses while maintaining performance and availability.
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