Exploring the sizes and families of Azure VMs

Each cloud provider, when provisioning a VM, gives you a selection of available sizes and machine families to choose from. Some applications don’t really care about the underlying hardware, while others may perform much worse if run on incompatible machines. Such workloads include machine learning (ML), video processing, and game development.

Azure offers 11 different series of VMs, ranging from entry-level VMs to advanced instances with dedicated GPUs and optimized networking setups. Let’s review them for better understanding:

• Entry-level VMs: You don’t always need a VM that comes with advanced hardware and functionalities. Sometimes, all you need is a small, generic machine that you can quickly set up and use for initial development or testing. Azure offers a small subset of all machines available as entry-level machines. As of the time of writing, you can select between Basic (A0-A4) and Standard machines...