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

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

A cloud service model providing virtualized computing resources like servers, storage, and networking over the internet.

Identity and Access Management services that control who can access cloud resources and what actions they can perform.

Serverless Computing

A cloud execution model where the provider manages servers and dynamically allocates resources, charging only for actual usage.

Automatically adjusting the number of computing resources based on current demand to maintain performance and optimize costs.

Cloud Storage Tiers

Different storage classes offered by cloud providers, optimized for varying access patterns from frequent to archival use.

A storage architecture that manages data as objects with metadata and unique identifiers, ideal for unstructured data at scale.

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