European alternatives to Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines is Microsoft’s infrastructure-as-a-service compute product and the foundation most of Azure is built on. You pick a VM series tuned to a workload shape, attach Managed Disks for block storage, place it in a virtual network behind network security groups, and pay per second on demand — or commit to Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for large discounts.

Azure launched as Windows Azure in February 2010, having been introduced under the “Project Red Dog” codename at PDC in October 2008. Microsoft reported at fiscal year-end 2025 that Azure passed US$75 billion in annual revenue.

What is not commodity about an Azure VM is everything around it: Entra ID for identity, Azure Arc for hybrid estates, Windows Server and SQL Server licensing folded into the bill, and enterprise agreements that price the whole Microsoft stack together. That bundle, rather than the compute itself, is what keeps customers in place.

The owner is Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; Nasdaq: MSFT.