specify an IP address or a number of network adapters. A Microsoft Azure IaaS VM by
default has only a single network adapter, and its IP address is allocated by the
Microsoft Azure fabric using DHCP. There is some control of the virtual networks in
Microsoft Azure that I cover later, but you can never specify a static IP address within
the VM. The IP address must be allocated by Microsoft Azure. Additionally, a single
adapter can have only a single IP address—the one set by Microsoft Azure. If you set
the IP address statically, at some point you will lose access to your virtual machine.
The good news is that using Azure virtual networks, you can do some clever things to
make sure that a virtual machine always gets the same IP address within ranges that
you configure. For communication, you can use TCP, UDP, and any IP-based protocol
within the virtual network in Microsoft Azure, but you cannot perform broadcast
communications.
Hopefully, at this point it is clear that Microsoft Azure IaaS is giving you various-sized
virtual machines with which you can do pretty much anything you wish, provided that
you stay within the capabilities of Microsoft Azure IaaS that I briefly covered earlier.
The next question is, “How much does it cost?”
Azure is not broken into separate buckets of credit. You have a certain amount of
Azure credit, and you can use it however you want: for storage, VMs, websites, SQL
databases, services, and so on. You are charged for the services that you use under
your Azure account, and different services and different sizes of service vary in price.
The easiest way to understand the cost of various services is to use the Microsoft
Azure pricing calculator available at azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ calculator.
The calculator allows you to specify the quantity of services you need, and then it
shows the monthly price. Note that discounts are available as part of various plans and
agreements with Microsoft. Figure 12. 8 shows part of the virtual machine section of
the pricing calculator, where I have requested pricing to run 10 small Windows and 10
small Linux virtual machines along with 1 TB of geo-redundant storage. I also specified
200 GB of egress (outbound) traffic from Microsoft Azure. It shows me the estimated
monthly price of the requested virtual elements.