Compute Services

Compute services provide the actual processing power to run applications, ranging from full virtual machines you manage yourself to fully managed container and serverless platforms.

Virtual Machines

A virtual machine instance (like Amazon EC2 or Azure Virtual Machines) gives you a configurable server in the cloud, where you choose the operating system, CPU, and memory, and manage everything above that layer yourself — the most flexible, but also the most hands-on compute option.

Managed Compute Options

Beyond raw virtual machines, providers offer increasingly managed compute options that remove more operational burden: managed container services (running Docker containers without managing the underlying servers) and auto-scaling groups (automatically adding or removing VM instances based on demand).

Common Mistakes

• Provisioning a virtual machine much larger than actually needed "just in case", wasting money on unused capacity.
• Not setting up auto-scaling for workloads with variable traffic, leading to either poor performance during spikes or wasted spend during quiet periods.
• Manually managing servers when a managed compute option would meaningfully reduce operational overhead for the same workload.
• Forgetting to shut down or deallocate unused virtual machine instances, continuing to incur charges for idle resources.