Compute Resources

Every VM is a bundle of four allocations — CPU, memory, storage, and network — sized to match what the application actually does. Get the mix wrong and you either overpay or run into an outage.

3.1

Compute Resources

Compute resources encompass the CPU, memory, storage, and network allocations assigned to a system. When an administrator deploys an application server on a VM, configuring the right mix of these four — to match performance, availability, and security requirements — is called resource allocation. Tap each component below.

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CPU / GPU

vCPU devices

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Memory

Paired to CPU

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Storage

I/O bound

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Network

Connectivity

CPU / GPU — the processor capability assigned to a VM is called a virtual CPU, or vCPU. Task-specific GPUs are allocated the same way for workloads that lean on parallel processing, like rendering or machine learning.

Processor and memory usage are closely tied — sizing one usually means sizing the other. Storage and network are generally treated as separate, independently-scaled components.

3.1a

What a vCPU Actually Is

Virtualization is what lets a single physical host be sliced into vCPU devices for many VMs at once — the mechanism that makes it easy to scale compute manually or automatically, instead of building a new physical server for every request.

Physical cores on host 8 cores

vCPUs requested for this VM 4 vCPU

Physical host

This VM's allocation

3.1b

Compute-Intensive vs. Data-Intensive Roles

Not every application leans on resources the same way. Administrators need to know which profile an application fits before sizing its VM — some roles are compute-intensive, hungry for processor and memory time; others are data-intensive, relying heavily on storage I/O.

3.1c

Permissions & Misconfiguration Risk

None of this matters if the wrong person can change it. Provisioning access has to be scoped as carefully as the resources themselves.

Get the permissions model wrong and it shows up as an outage

Cloud administrators must have the appropriate permissions to create and modify resources like VMs — no more, no less. Misconfigurations, whether from over-broad access or a simple mistake, can lead directly to availability issues, unexpected outages, or hours-long troubleshooting situations that trace back to a single wrong setting.