Azure Virtual Machines

We tend to use as much App Services, and Serverless as we can. But what those win in ease of use and efficiency, they lack in flexibility. Many workloads cannot run on those services. Especially when you need heavy and time-consuming computing. Azure Virtual Machines on the other hand, give you anything you need in terms of flexibility, since you have access to the underlying OS, and for the fraction of the price. But as always, it's a tradoff, since you also need to manage, reboot, maintain, and patch those VMs

The VM deployment process is really simple in Azure Virtual Machines. But as I said earlier, compute types were a bit limited when I used it. In a few scenarios we had requirements for a Bare Metal GPU instance for high performance compute, but it wasn't available, so we had to look for alternatives.

Easy to extend our on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and provides us with on-demand capabilities to storage and a highly flexible and scalable product. A secure product that protects our workloads and has very good controls to access and is cost-effective with the pay-as-you-go billing system and offers ready-to-use storage resources.

Using a self-hosted integration runtime with Azure Data Factory, although only supports Windows, will make it more expensive. Hosting DevOps tools, such as Jenkins, code scanners, etc. can be set up very easily and replicated if needed. Any kind of distributed architecture, like Selenium grid for GUI testing of applications, can be set up very easily because of the myriad of possibilities for OSs.

Scaling up virtual machines is very easy and can be automated as well. Based on the inbound traffic, the virtual machines get scaled up and down. If the traffic is low, they scale down and if the traffic goes high, they scale up. Eventually, it saves the overall costs.

It's well suited to delivering information about our sports events as during the events a lot of processing power is needed and instantly becomes available by scaling out when the event is over the service can be scaled right back making massive savings.
We use it for football, horse racing, Olympics games etc, it is also used when things happen in the world like right now there is a lot of concern over the Russia and Ukraine conflict, since the demand for this information is high we instantly scale to meet the demand of our news feed services. I believe up to 90% of the UK's News, sports and media information actually passes through our computer systems, we are a market leading news and information service and Azure Virtual Machines provide us with the reliability that we need so that we can provide a rock solid reliable news and information service to the world.

It is well suited for anyone who needs to run a VM (Windows or Linux). Really quick to deploy and start using it.