VM Applications are a resource type in Azure Compute Gallery (formerly known as Shared Image Gallery) that simplifies management, sharing, and global distribution of applications for your virtual machines.

Application packages provide benefits over other deployment and packaging methods:

* Grouping and versioning of your packages

* VM applications can be globally replicated to be closer to your infrastructure, so you don’t need to use AzCopy or other storage copy mechanisms to copy the bits across Azure regions.

* Sharing with other users through Azure Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

* Support for virtual machines, and both flexible and uniform scale sets

* If you have Network Security Group (NSG) rules applied on your VM or scale set, downloading the packages from an internet repository might not be possible. And with storage accounts, downloading packages onto locked-down VMs would require setting up private links.