Identifying Workloads for Azure VMs

Suitable Workloads for Microsoft Azure IaaS VMs

There are certain types of workloads that are a better fit for hosting in an Azure
IaaS environment than others. Here are some examples:

• Highly available service workloads such as commercial online stores.

• Unpredictable growth workloads like those experienced by small, but rapidly expanding
organizations, or short-term increased sales of fad items.

• Spiking workloads, such as those experienced by sites providing news services.

• Steady workload scenarios where organizations simply want to offload their

infrastructure to the cloud.

• Periodic workloads such as retail sales spurts during holidays.

Workloads that are not Suitable for Microsoft Azure IaaS VMs
When planning virtual machine workloads for Azure IaaS, it is also important to
remember that not every application or service is a suitable fit for the cloud.
Here are some examples.

• Low volume or limited growth workloads where the organization might be able to run
the service or application on commodity hardware on-premise less expensively than in
the cloud.

• Regulated environment workloads where an organization, or even the local

government, may regulate the type of data that can be hosted in the cloud. However,
these cases might be suitable candidates for a hybrid solution where only some highly
available data is hosted in Azure and the more sensitive, regulated data is kept on-
premises.