What I Did

I needed a cloud server to test things without using my local machine. I spun up an Ubuntu 20.04 VM on Azure and connected via SSH. Here’s the exact process I followed.

Create the VM

  1. Log in to Azure
  2. Click Create a Resource
  3. Pick Ubuntu 20.04 LTS → Create
  4. Name the VM
  5. Under Administration Account, choose SSH Public Key
  6. Set a username and key pair name
  7. Under Inbound Port Rules, open SSH (22) and HTTP (80)
  8. Click Review and Create → Create
  9. Download the key pair file when prompted
  10. Wait for deployment, then click Go to Resource

Connect via SSH

cd ~/Downloads
chmod 400 pair_key_name.pem
ssh -i pair_key_name.pem username@your_ip

Type yes when SSH asks about the fingerprint.

Log Out

logout

Done

That’s it — a running Ubuntu box in the cloud, reachable from my terminal. I use this kind of setup when I need a clean Linux environment for testing.