Azure VM Offerings Require Planning to Meet Requirements

• Azure VM choices are changing again, impacting existing deployments and altering decisions for new deployments.
• Customers new to Azure VMs should be careful in their selection to control costs and ensure room to grow.
• Organizations with existing Azure VM deployments should evaluate their usage to take advantage of updated offerings.
• Older Azure VM series are starting to be deprecated, and new capabilities like generation 2 VMs are likely to become standard.

The Azure VM service allows organizations to run Windows Server and Linux workloads on VMs in Azure, using a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing model for each minute a VM is running. Azure offers several series of VMs for different usage scenarios, each with predefined processor, memory, storage, and networking configurations. In addition, newer options such as dedicated hosting, generation 2 VMs with enhanced security, and confidential computing can address new usage scenarios. Azure VMs range significantly in terms of price, performance, and regional availability, so organizations should match their application requirements with the most appropriate VM series and size to properly balance cost, performance, and future growth.