Don't buy a new computer - create a Virtual Machine in Azure Cloud instead

hello and welcome to learning and technology my name is frank and i'm glad that you're here in this video i want to talk about a question that i get a lot should i buy a new computer a lot of students and a lot of people i speak with ask me this question when they're starting a new course of studies or a new project a new career path and they're curious about how much storage should they get what type of processor should they get how much ram and memory should they get well what if i told

you that you don't really need to buy a new computer that there is a way that you can get more processor more storage and more memory in a dynamic way by going to a cloud-based virtual machine which is what this video is about in this video i'm going to go through some of the cloud concepts about how we can create a virtual machine in a cloud-based environment and then we can adjust the resources of that machine as we need them so if we need a more powerful computer we'll go ahead and create a more powerful

virtual machine and if we need to dial it back because we're not using all those resources we can dial it back and that's going to affect how much it costs us every month as well that that computer that we run in the cloud can run at a fraction of the cost of buying a new computer and we can even use our old computer or some inexpensive device like a raspberry pi an ipad that we have again our old computer to connect up to that machine we also get the benefit of being able to connect up

to that machine anywhere in the world i can run that virtual machine in europe and access it from north america or i could run it in north america and access it from europe it's a very powerful way of working with computation memory and storage without having to go and purchase hardware for those things it's pretty cool pretty exciting pretty cool and i think you'll enjoy it let's go have a look and don't forget to like and subscribe for more videos like this and comment down below and share with colleagues let's go have a look at

building a virtual machine in the cloud before we start building a virtual machine in the cloud let's break down some of the components that are important to us so that we understand what's going on so we have some sort of computer at home maybe it's a desktop maybe it's a laptop even something like an ipad or any of those devices they're all computers and they're really comprised of three components that the user cares about the user cares about seeing what's on their screen so they care about the video they care about being able to input

so they care about the keyboard now in the case of some devices that's a touch screen but they care about input to the machine and they care about some way of pointing at things in a graphical user environment so they care about the mouse so we sometimes refer to this as keyboard video mouse when we're working with a computer those are the only ways that we interact with the computer as a general rule we work with the keyboard video mouse to get information to and to receive information from the computer now in terms of how

good or at the level of quality that we have that's going to depend on the computer itself that's going to depend on its ability to do computing so the components of computing are the cpu the central processing unit the more powerful the central processing unit the better we're going to be able to have processing occur then we also have our ram and that handles our memory so more processing more memory equals a better compute experience now there's more to it than that obviously the chipset on the motherboard it's quite complex but the point is we

have a compute layer that handles the computations to give me fast processing so that when i put in keyboard input i see on the screen that's that takes very little processing but if i do something like try to do some mathematical functions then all of a sudden the processing matters in fact one of the things that a lot of people use computer for is playing video games and when i'm dealing with video games one of the key processing components are the graphics so we might even have a special unit called a graphical processing unit and

we'll talk about that later as well but the idea is that that can be an augmentation to the compute capabilities of your computer then we also have some sort of storage so we might have a hard drive or we might have a solid state drive we could even have a usb drive or an sd drive that contains storage and that is the storage component of my computer so why am i breaking these apart they're going to come into play when i go to build a virtual machine over here in the cloud we also have something

called the internet and the internet obviously is very popular we everybody uses the internet and there's a lot of aspects to the internet but for the purposes of what we're talking about here all we care about is that the internet allows me to connect one computer to another computer far away and that computer connects back to me from far away and i'm passing information over and from that internet so i'm passing a whole bunch of data to and from the internet uh there's a lot of that a lot of components to that but the point

is the faster internet i have the faster i can move data between those two endpoints one of the very first things that we did when it came to working with cloud services is we took our hard drives and what we did with the hard drive is we would go ahead and we would put that hard drive into a cloud service we would take some of our storage now quite some time ago what we would do is we would actually buy an external hard drive and we would attach that to our local computer through a usb

key or through usb port and then we would have externally attached storage which we could then use to back up our computer we could use that to save family photos if we were running out of space on the built-in hard drive we would use an external hard drive to expand our storage capabilities but soon these cloud services came out and they said well don't do that they said if you have extra material that you can't store on your computer we will give you storage over here that you can pay for or we'll even give you

some free storage in some cases and we'll store it on our data center and when you need it just come through the internet come pick it up and bring it back and the cool thing about that is if i needed more storage i could just buy more storage and you might be familiar with that with services such as dropbox google drive microsoft onedrive they give us all of this storage in the cloud and if you have a photo for example and it takes you let's say let's exaggerate let's say it takes you a minute to

transfer that photo to your computer screen if you're saving money on storage you might be acceptable that that's an acceptable period of time we do this all the time you're watching this video through the internet so obviously the internet is fast enough and good enough and our computers are fast enough and good enough that it doesn't take so long that it's inconvenient it's never going to be as fast as if it was locally attached but it's fast enough to meet our needs and that's storage in the cloud very early on we we did storage in

the cloud now we also have other components we have this compute layer well what if instead of just putting storage in the cloud what if we went in and we also put our compute layer in the cloud what if we went in and we took our processor and we took our memory and we put that in the cloud as well that's a virtual machine in the cloud and then what we could do is we could take this virtual machine we could run it in the cloud instead of running it on our local computer and all

we need to do is pass the keyboard video mouse information to and from the cloud so all we're doing is we're transferring through the internet the keyboard video mouse keyboard video mouse i do all my compute i do all of my storage in the cloud and all i'm doing is bringing the keyboard video mouse connection between these two end points through the internet and we can do that quite quickly we can do that quite effectively the one thing that we currently can't do super well is bring our gpus through the cloud not that people aren't

trying so for example there is a service by google where they have a whole bunch of gpus all stacked together in the cloud and what they're doing is they're doing a bunch of processing for video game playing and trying to bring the keyboard video mouse onto a controller that connects to your tv that's called stadia so and you can read reviews on stadia i've i've used it i've been a founding member of stadia back when it first started and i don't find it that bad at all some people say for extreme video game players they're

not going to do that yet but imagine a world where i can run this machine in the cloud and just pass keyboard video mouse back and forth and the very cool part about that is let's say i have a really old computer i still have a good keyboard video and mouse but my computer is a little old but it can still handle transferring data to and from the internet at a high speed and all of a sudden i decide i need to do something really powerful on this computer some data analytics so i need some

more storage no problem just allocate more storage in your cloud i need more ram no problem increase the amount of memory and that you have in the cloud i need more processing power no problem just have more processing power we can expand it and still just transfer the keyboard video mouse to our computer that's pretty cool let's go and do that right now okay let's build our computer out in the cloud so i've gone to azure.com which brings me to the microsoft azure website and azure has many many compute and storage and all sorts of

data services that i can purchase so i'm going in and i've logged in with my account you can sign up for a free account if you're a corporate client and if you are a student check to see whether your school has azure for education because if they do you can get a lot of free software and you can get a lot of free azure credits in order to work with this uh this service and learn it so i've logged in i'm just going to go to a tab where i've logged in and i'm going to

create a new resource and the resource i want to create you can see there's a lot of cool stuff i can do but i want to create a compute resource and specifically i want to create a virtual machine and when i create the virtual machine i'm going to use my subscription i need to create something called a resource group in order for this to work and i'm going to call this sky cpu so this is sky cpu is be the name of my resource group and then i'm going to go in and the virtual machine

will be named i'll call it uh vm in the cloud clever name for it there now i'm not going to go through every single option for creating a virtual machine just enough so i can demonstrate it to you there's there's a lot more to virtualization than i have time for in this video in terms of the region this is pretty cool i can actually make this machine anywhere in the world so i could be in for example well i am in canada so i could make a computer in canada or if i wanted to i

could make that computer in europe so i've done that before as well and if you have a look this is very important it's going to say okay you know some availability options for for there but i want to go into my image here and i want to choose windows 10 pro and what's important here is when i choose windows 10 pro notice that it will cost me 103 dollars canadian per month but notice it's not available for this particular subscription so if i go in what i need to do is i can go in and

see whether or not some other size is available in terms of the number of resources and you'll see here that in my case the canadian east region on my particular subscription doesn't really support uh any of those virtual machines now i went a little bit too far back here so we'll go ahead and put in sky cpu i'm going to choose uh us west which is close to me as well so we're going to create a new one called sky cpu we'll say okay to that resource we'll go ahead and call the virtual machine cpu

in the cloud and i'll take us west 2 i'm going to make this a windows pro see if it's able to do that if that size is available it'll load the u.s price here but i'm still getting um in this case here uh there's there's the red flag on the size so i'm going to go in here and see whether it'll grab that size so it's going to cost me 106 dollars a month canadian however that may be acceptable but i'm not going to run this machine 24 hours a day seven days a week that's

if i ran it 24 hours a day seven days a week so let's go down here the username i'll use my name and for my password i'll put in a super secret password okay so we put that in there and then i'm going to go in and now i need to allow access to this machine from outside on the internet so i'm going to allow what's called the remote desktop protocol or port 3389 to come through my network i'll still have to authenticate using this username and password but this allows me to come in from

the outside to get to this machine i'll say that i'm eligible for the licensing i am eligible for licensing i'll go into my disks i'm going to use a standard solid state drive and i'll do encryption at rest again this is just choosing my disk i could also choose a premium solid state drive or a standard mechanical drive but i'll just take the default and now i'll go to networking underneath networking what's really important here is that it's going to go in and it's going to give me some information about my networking which i'll see

after i create the machine as well but for the most part what i really care about here is that i have a public inbound rdp port you can also do web or command line through secure shell but i just gonna do i'm just going to do a remote desktop protocol and i'll go into management again underneath here i have things like some security options this is a very important one the auto shutdown now 106 dollars is a lot of money for a machine if i'm not running it 24 hours a day seven days a week

so what happens is when i release compute resources back to azure when i'm not computing i don't have to pay for those compute resources so let's say for example i know that i study between you know 7 pm and 9 pm or whatever the case may be i want to make sure that if i forget to turn off the machine i can go in and i can have it automatically turned off for me at 9 00 pm at night and that way if i forget to turn it off it'll automatically shut down and before it

shuts down it'll send me a notification so if i'm staying up a little bit later to study i it's not going to automatically shut down behind me so i can go in here and i can go into advanced and then underneath here you can put some custom data in there as well i'm not going to i can put some tags if i have a lot of virtual machines like for an it department but here i go and i'm going to create this machine and this is the really important part i'm actually paying 14 cents 15

cents per hour that i'm using this machine so even though it came out at 106 or whatever it was dollars canadian per month that's if i'm running it 24 hours a day seven days a week so here you can see i'm really only paying 16 cents per hour to use this machine so if i use this hour or if i use this machine even if i used it for 10 hours a day i'm paying somewhere in the neighborhood of a dollar fifty per day to use the machine obviously that can add up but it's less

than a price of coffee as they say so underneath here i've got the machine that's the validation process and it's actually building that machine for me right now soon as i hit create so here we go so the machines being created and you can see the deployment status up here if i go here it tells me how much credit i have remaining and the deployments going and it's happening and if i go back if i also forgot to mention that 15 cents an hour was 15 cents canadian so that's only like half no it's about

10 10 cents u.s you can see that it's you know it's creating all the resources here i just pause the video while it creates them and it takes a few moments to do that okay so the resource is complete and now i can go to the resource i can even pin it to my dashboard i'll do that as well and that way if i go to my dashboard so if i go into i can look at all resources here but if i view my dashboard here you can see that i've got cpu in the cloud

the virtual machine is pinned to there so i'm going to click on that machine and this is my machine running in the cloud and this is the important part i have a public ip address and so this address will allow me to use rdp to connect to it now don't get excited all you hackers out there i'm going to be deleting this machine as soon as i'm done so if i go here i can actually take this address here and i'll copy it and i can now use remote desktop to connect to this machine and

run it through the internet so i've opened up the remote desktop connection that comes built into windows and i'll show you you can also download it and install it on an ios device and you can even install a rdp client on a raspberry pi but for now i'll use windows 10 running remote desktop and i'll just put in the address here so we go in there and now remote desktop will launch notice it's asking me for my credentials but that's actually not my name there so we'll go in there i'll go into more choices and

i'll use a different account when i created this i use my name and i use my super secret password and i can even have it remember me so now i'll say okay to that and it gives me a certificate warning but i'm okay with the certificate i can view the certificate install the certificate on my system for the local machine that's just so i don't get prompted by that again and we'll go ahead and just put that in okay so we got that in there and so we'll say yes here and now i'll get my

remote desktop and here we are you can see i've connected up to the ip address of my machine in the cloud i get my first privacy settings i'm just going to accept them again i am doing some of these things a little bit quickly just because i want to demonstrate so you you know you'd read the dialog boxes make sure that it's right for you and here we are i've got an entire machine in the cloud and if i go in i can go in and see that it's you know it responds quite quickly so

if i go in here i can go into try something fun here go to movies and tv underneath movies and tv you can see i can go and log into my account i can see some of the movies that are available to me now one of the things is do not use this to build a virtual machine in a different region so that you can watch movies from a region that you're not entitled to that's illegal don't do that but you can go in here and you can do things like if i run the paint

program right so i have the paint program in here i can create some sort of new paint item i'm i'm not an artist and you'll see that as evident but you can see that's pretty quick like i don't get a lot of lag happening here this is pretty quick based upon my my my skill set my drawing there so if i go in here you can see it's a fairly fast and peppy environment for me you can also see that the time is 11 31 pm which it currently is not so i can go and

change my date and time settings and such if i want to i can even go in there and if i have other software i can install it i'll do that right now i've gone in and i downloaded the new version of edge i'm going to run a speed test so just to show you here if i run a speed test on this system so i can do an internet speed test let's have let's see how fast this works so you can see that i'm getting very fast internet speeds because i'm actually running this computer off

of a data center out of the western united states so microsoft's data center surprise surprise has a pretty fast connection to the internet so you can get some really good browsing here okay so i'm on my ipad so i'm going to go into microsoft's rd client so that's the remote desktop client and you'll notice i'll have to add the machine it gets a little bit tricky here when i add the machine i'm going to add the pc and in terms of putting the ip address that's the one that i showed you earlier when we connect

it up using microsoft remote desktop but when it comes to the ipad or this particular application this is something that's a little bit weird but you'll see it in a moment so i put in the address hitting return won't do anything for me if i hit the back arrow it does populate that field user account i'm going to use that frank account i can put a friendly name in there if i want but i'm not going to keep this so you can see here that i've got all this information in here i can share audio

visual stuff back and forth but i'm going to go ahead and save just so i can show you it asked me for my password i'm going to put in my super secret password i think i may have just spelt it wrong we'll find out in a moment nope there we go so you can see i'm now connected to my windows machine in azure using my ipad but are we done nope not yet i've gone into my little raspberry pi here into the internet and i've opened up the remina viewer which is at rdp connection i've

put in the ip address for that particular server that we have let's connect up to it says do you want to have the certificate yes i'll accept the certificate put in my username put in my password and i don't have a domain here i won't save the password we'll say ok and right here on my raspberry pi i am now running my windows environment now my screen resolution is pretty low here but you can see i've got my windows environment in here and of course i could expand this out to to fill up my raspberry

pi screen i'm using a very small monitor just playing around with this but the point here is that i have my remote connection i can go into the edge browser i can do all sorts of fun things using my raspberry pi thank you so much for watching the video i hope you'll like it and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this share it with colleagues that might benefit from this most of all i hope you've learned something new and a way that you can get more computing power for lower cost by going to

the cloud thank you again for watching here's some more videos on the channel