What Is Virtual Machine? Is It Possible To Use For Free?

Introduction

Virtual Machine or (VM) is one of the services offered by the Cloud Providers. For example Google Cloud, Azure and AWS.

Virtualization can be considered as part of the cloud, but cloud computing itself is an entire infrastructure in one environment that built around supporting online access to the applications, services, and data.

In this article we will share in short as we can and using  simple terminology to make most of us understand a little bit about virtual machines and explain if it is possible to use for free. Perhaps we can learn a little bit about the differences between them. (Virtualization and Cloud).

What Is Virtualization

Virtualization is a cycle that takes into consideration of the making of virtual representations of the physical desktops, networks, servers, storage, and other services. As an example, a virtual machines.  It permits clients to run numerous, separate and isolated environments on a single hardware system, dividing them (resources) between various virtual machines.

In simple words, virtualization is the utilization of virtual equipment stages as a swap for the physical one. In virtualization, the virtual servers including desktops, storage devices and other resources are created using virtualization software. This software creates a virtual machine (VM), which behaves identically to a physical machine running software on its own underlying hardware.

What Is Virtual Machine

As mentioned previously, a virtual machine is normal machines (computers) in virtual version. They works and functions identically as same as what physical machines can perform.  This virtual machine is one of resources (services) offered by many cloud providers nowadays as part of products from the virtualization technology.

Why Do We Need Virtual Machine

As a normal blogger or digital web creator like us, we seems not too depended on virtual machines to write contents in our websites. Bloggers primarily will focused on writing, sharing content, SEO and perhaps marketing.

Generally, virtual machines are used by web, app, software developer or DevOp team to run several test on several applications, plugins or tools they have developed without affecting their main system. While using this virtual machine it allows us to test all of them in secured and isolated environment.

In shorts, there are few conditions that utilizing a virtual machine is the right choice

1. Server Simulation : A blogger or a normal user who runs a website and want to test server configurations, a VM can simulate different server environments, allowing us to experiment without affecting the live site
2. Privacy and Anonymity : By using VM, we can browse anonymously or manage sensitive tasks without leaving traces on their main system. But still it traceable in Cloud environment. Hence, you need to be extra careful and do not manipulate this powerful service to perform anything that prohibited or against the law.
3. Cross Platform Compatibility : Using VM, we can make sure those websites or functions appears on different operating system or browsers. Example: Windows, Linux and macOS). While creating VM, we can choose the specification including OS and RAM/CPU depending the task we required to perform.
4. Resource Isolation : If you run resource heavy applications like video editing, graphic design tools or website testing tools, we can use VM as well to allocate dedicated resources (CPU, RAM) for those specific tasks without slowing down their main system. For example, we run 3 VMs and perform video editing in VM1, graphic designer in VM2 and content writing in VM3.

Actually there are more than what we mentioned in here. As a normal user or normal blogger like us, those four conditions are sufficient enough to get closer to virtualization before we go into more deeper.

Is It Possible To Use For Free

Yes. We are now able to utilizing VM for free as most of the VM providers and Cloud providers allowed us to use create VM with their free tier VM service. Of course it has the limitation in terms of duration and specification, but for normal user like us it is worth it to try them.

Here is the list of VM and Cloud Provider offers you free tier of VM

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS). Free tier offers you a free VM with duration 750 hours per month.
2. Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Free tier f1-micro instance (VM) for the first 12 months and also includes a $300 credit for the first 90 days to use other services in Cloud Environment.
3. Microsoft Azure. Free tier offers with 750 hours per month of B1S VM (1vCPU, 1 GB RAM) for the first 12 months, along with credit $200 for the first 30 days to use other services offered in Azure Cloud
4. IBM Cloud. Free tier with single virtual server (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM) for up to 30 days.
5. Ngrok. Offers free tier to use VM with limited number of tunnels, temporary URLS and limited features.

For many VM use cases such as testing or performing certain task in small scale projects, using a free VM should be sufficient enough.

Virtualization and Cloud

Virtualization is technology that bring services like VM to be possible to use widely and practically. Meanwhile Cloud is an environment. It looks different, but VM can be use in Cloud Environment and this VM resources are mostly offered by all cloud providers.

Conclusion

From this article What Is Virtual Machine? Is It Possible To Use For Free? we hope you know a little bit about virtualization, virtual machine, the benefits of using it and the possibility to use them for free or charge. As for a normal user and blogger like us, utilizing VMs really helpful for us to make sure our website keep compatible with OS, browser, different location and region from all over the world.  In simple words, just to make sure that this blog still can accessible globally regardless where do you located at and which country you come from.