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Note that both pricing and VM size availability vary by region.
Disk Roles and Persistence of Data
Read about Data, OS and Temporary disks, including notes regarding data persistence, on this Azure documentation page:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/managed-disks-overview#disk-roles
cloud-config: VM configuration in a text file
Many standard Azure VM images (including examples running Ubuntu, CentOS, and Windows) run the cloud-init service. This service allows you to submit a yaml-formatted cloud-config text file as part of the VM creation request. This cloud-config file encodes your set of VM configuration instructions, including software package installations. This enables you to define your VM's configuration in a text file, which can be documented, shared, re-used, and even managed under version control. DTI researchers are strongly encouraged to consider using the built-in cloud-init service in Azure VMs to help manage deployments.
To read more about using cloud-config files with Azure VMs, see this documentation:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/using-cloud-init
This page features many cloud-config file examples:
https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/examples.html
Note: the cloud-init service is not Azure-specific, with support from other cloud providers as well.
Managing Azure resources
There are three distinct ways to manage (create, destroy, inspect, modify) your Azure resources:
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