Systems-level approach drives optimal performance and power efficiency for Linux and open-source workloads

As more organizations create or adopt new cloud-native workloads, new requirements for cloud infrastructure are emerging. There is a greater need to optimize across the tech stack and take a systems-level approach. Yet as businesses pursue these new cloud-native workloads utilizing technologies like containers, microservices, and open-source software, they must seek solutions that achieve the highest performance while still prioritizing environmental sustainability.

Microsoft is introducing a solution that balances performance and power efficiency for a range of Linux-based and open-source workloads. This solution is the new Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by the Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based processor which delivers optimal performance, scalability, and a more sustainable path for customers to scale their computing footprint.

“These new Azure VMs represent Microsoft’s dedication to deliver innovative infrastructure systems—from silicon to hardware and software—that have been designed to be optimized for customer workloads, delivering higher performance while improving power efficiency,” says Arpita Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft. “This fully integrated approach lets us deliver these innovations in a timely manner and with more flexibility to meet customer needs.”

Noah Wood, Product Manager at Microsoft, adds, “while cloud-native or modern workloads cover a wide range of scenarios that may have different requirements, they all need to be highly scalable and run efficiently at scale. Businesses need platforms that are engineered to empower them to scale out further than they ever have before in a cost-effective manner without compromising performance.”

The VMs are optimized specifically for scale-out, cloud-native workloads and offer a full physical core per vCPU. This allows workloads to benefit from both linear performance scaling and performance consistency at scale.

They also reduce the environmental impact of a customer’s workload due to the greater power efficiencies delivered by these Cobalt 100 VMs. And, as Wood says, “organizations won’t have to worry about adjusting their infrastructure management practices because in addition to the benefits in performance and efficiency these VMs can be deployed like any other Azure VM. And these VMs achieve up to 40% higher performance compared to Azure’s previous generation of Arm-based VMs.”

The new VMs are ideal for a variety of businesses, including those modernizing existing applications or building cloud-native applications with target workloads that typically run Linux and other open-source software. The VMs are also optimal for:

• Open-source databases, applications, and web servers
• Containerized applications that can be leveraged by Arm developers in CI/CD pipelines, development, and test scenarios
• Media encoding, gaming servers, and microservices

Businesses can select from a range of Azure VMs that meet the CPU performance and memory needs of the workloads.

• The new Dpsv6-series offers up to 96 vCPUs with 384 GiBs of RAM (4:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio)
• The new Dplsv6-series offers up to 96 vCPUs with 192 GiBs of RAM (2:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio)
• The new Epsv6-series offer up to 96 vCPUs with up to 672 GiBs of RAM (up to 8:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio) for more memory intensive workloads.

These VMs are available both with and without local NVMe SSDs. All the VMs series are available to deploy for free in several regions now during the preview period.

For more information on these VMs, visit us here.