👨‍🦱 💬 Virtual machine is a software emulation of physical hardware. It allows customers to emulate multiple computer systems using a single physical machine.

👨‍🦱 💬 Virtual Machine Scale Sets is a resource type that enables customers to deploy and manage a set of identical virtual machines using the same image.

👨‍🦱 💬 I admit. This is a tricky question. While some of those services are better than the others at hosting web applications/services. In Azure all of those services can be used to host web applications/services. Each service has it’s merits and can be used in specific scenarios.

If you want to learn how to pick the right hosting service review this decision flow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/compute-decision-tree

👨‍🦱 💬 Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration platform for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. As such the Kubernetes Service is the right choice here. Other services allow for container deployment but they don’t provide a rich orchestration layer.

👨‍🦱 💬 Azure Functions delivers a serverless hosting platform and SDK that allow customers to develop small pieces of code and host them as web services.

👨‍🦱 💬 Because Virtual Machines are simply an emulation of physical hardware they can accommodate any customer needs, as such they are often used for ‘Lift-and-shift’ scenarios. Other services often require a small or major application redesign or containerization. In this case this was not an option.

👨‍🦱 💬 Functions is a serverless web service hosting platform. It scales nicely and with consumption based pricing it is ideal for hosting applications with an unpredictable workload demand.

👨‍🦱 💬 App Services allow for hosting web applications by either deploying packaged code or entire containers. The Container Instances and Kubernetes Service are designed purely for container deployments.

👨‍🦱 💬 With virtual machines customers need to the manage operating system, platform updates, runtimes and the application itself. This gives them a total control over everything related to the application runtime environment. Containers are similar to virtual machines except they virtualize the operating system themselves. So there is a little bit less control over the system part but customers can still manage almost every other aspect of the environment. App Services totally abstract the underlying platform so customers only manage their code and deployment. Functions are the least configurable as they are a truly serverless solution.