The Many Considerations of Selecting Azure VMs

• Azure VMs continue to evolve with new capabilities and offerings to address emerging customer needs.
• 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 regularly evaluate their usage to take advantage of updated offerings.
• Generation 2 VMs, now broadly supported, can be considered the default choice for new Azure VM deployments.

The Azure VM service allows organizations to run Windows Server, Windows, and Linux workloads on VMs in Azure, using a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing model for each minute a VM is running. Azure VMs range significantly in terms of capabilities, performance, and regional availability, and new capabilities such as enhanced security, Arm-based VMs, GPU-based compute, and confidential computing are often added to address new use cases. Organizations should match their application requirements with the most appropriate VM series and size to properly balance cost, performance, and future growth.