Virtual Machine (VM) instances

An instance is a virtual machine (VM), which is hosted on a cloud provider's infrastructure. Instances can run Linux and Windows Server images that are provided by your cloud provider or any customized versions of the same. You can also build and run images of other operating systems. Most cloud providers, such as Google Compute Engine (GCE), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and so on, also let you specify the machine properties of your instances, such as the amount of RAM and number of CPUs required, which are based on the type of machine that you use. In the following section, we'll take a look at how to set up Mesos on public cloud platforms.