Virtual Machines

What it is

Think of renting a whole apartment instead of a hotel room: it's an empty space that is entirely yours, and you furnish and run it however you like. A virtual machine (VM) is that apartment in software — a complete computer that exists as software, running on a provider's hardware. You get an operating system you fully control: you log in, install whatever you want, and run your app exactly as you would on a physical machine. It's the most hands-on of the hosting options.

Strengths

• Total control — full operating system, any software, any configuration.
• Predictable performance; the machine is yours for as long as you rent it.
• No execution-time or runtime limits, unlike serverless or edge.
• Runs anything: databases, legacy software, custom daemons, long jobs.
• Mature, well-understood model with decades of tooling.

Trade-offs

• You manage everything: OS (operating system) updates, security patches, backups, monitoring.
• You pay for the machine whether it's busy or idle.
• Scaling is manual — you resize or add machines yourself.
• More moving parts means more ways for things to break.
• Slowest to provision compared to functions or containers.

When to use it

Use a VM when you need full control or have requirements that lighter options can't meet: specialized software, persistent state, a self-hosted database, GPU (graphics-processing-unit) workloads, or migrating an existing app without rewriting it.

Vibe coding fit

VMs give an AI agent the widest canvas, but also the most responsibility, so lean on infrastructure-as-code rather than manual clicking. Have the agent write a provisioning script (a cloud-init file or a shell setup script) so the whole machine is reproducible and reviewable, instead of configuring the server by hand over SSH (Secure Shell — an encrypted remote login to the machine). Tip: ask the agent to script the setup into a single bootstrap file and to set up automatic security updates — that way you can destroy and recreate the VM at any time without losing your configuration.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# bootstrap.sh — provision an Ubuntu VM
set -euo pipefail

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y
apt-get install -y nginx
systemctl enable --now nginx

# enable unattended security updates
apt-get install -y unattended-upgrades
dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive unattended-upgrades

# Run the bootstrap on a fresh server
scp bootstrap.sh user@my-server:/tmp/
ssh user@my-server "sudo bash /tmp/bootstrap.sh"