Azure Virtual Machines

About Azure Virtual Machines

Azure launched in February 2010 as Windows Azure, Microsoft's answer to AWS and Google's cloud platforms; it dropped the Windows prefix in 2014 once it was clear the platform ran as much Linux as it did Windows. Virtual Machines is Azure's on-demand IaaS compute line, priced by the hour with managed disks and outbound bandwidth billed as separate charges rather than bundled into the instance price. Azure isn't a separate company. It's a product line inside Microsoft, the company Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded in 1975, so its backing is whatever Microsoft's is: one of the world's largest public companies.