What is Virtual Machine ?

In computing, a virtual machine is an emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. A virtual machine (VM) is a software-based computer that exists within another computer’s operating system, often used for the purposes of testing, backing up data, or running SaaS applications. To fully grasp how VMs work, it’s important to first understand how computer software and hardware are typically integrated by an operating system.

A virtual computer system environment created on a physical hardware system (located off- or on-premises) with its own allocated CPU, memory, network interface, and storage resources. It is a guest system that is created within a computing environment called a host system using a Hypervisor.

Amazon EC2 instance is a virtual server in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for running applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is part of Google’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, where you can build high-performance, fault-tolerant, massively scalable compute nodes to handle your application’s needs. Google Compute Engine is the Infrastructure as a Service component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google’s search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and other services. Google Compute Engine enables users to launch virtual machines on demand.

Azure Virtual Machine provides on-demand computing resources that come under the Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) category in Azure. We can use an image provided by Azure, or a partner, or we can use our own to create the virtual machine. Azure Virtual Machines (VM) is one of several types of on-demand, scalable computing resources that Azure offers. Typically, you choose a VM when you need more control over the computing environment than the other choices offer.