Physical Infrastructure: Compute

What is compute?

Any software application needs a certain processing power, memory, storage, and network to run successfully. We refer to a combination of these resources as compute in the cloud computing model.

Computing services form some of the fundamental services any cloud platform offers, as they are required in everything we do in the cloud. Cloud platforms provide various services that can be used in different settings.

Here, we’ll discuss concepts related to computing that cloud platforms provide.

Virtual machine (VM)

A virtual machine (VM) is a piece of software that emulates a physical machine. That means it acts as a physical computer with a CPU, memory, storage, and network, but it is completely managed via the software. We can think of it as a digital representation of a physical machine. Traditionally, before VMs, we could only run applications supported by the underlying operating system on a physical machine, as depicted in the diagram below: