We’re excited to announce that the new Azure Cobalt 100-based virtual machines (VMs) are now generally available. These VMs use Microsoft’s first 64-bit ARM-based Azure Cobalt 100 CPU, designed entirely in-house. This launch constitutes a major step forward in how we build and improve our cloud infrastructure, with improvements at every level—from hardware to services. By integrating hardware and software, Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs demonstrate our commitment to delivering the right balance of performance, power efficiency, and scale for our customers.
The Cobalt 100-based VMs include our new general-purpose DPSv6 series and DPSLV6 series, as well as the memory-optimized EPSV6 series. They deliver up to 50% better price-to-performance than our previous ARM-based VMs. This makes them a great choice for many cloud-native Linux workloads, such as data analytics, web applications, servers, open-source databases, caches, and more.
Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs offer up to 1.4x better CPU performance and 1.5x better Java performance, with twice the web.net and cache app performance compared to prior ARM-based VMs. They also provide up to 4x local storage IOPS and 1.5x bandwidth.
The new VMs are now available in many regions, including Canada Central, Central US, East US 2, East US, Germany West Central, Japan East, Mexico Central, North Europe, South East Asia, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, UAE North, West Europe, and West US. We plan to add more regions in 2024 and beyond, such as Australia East, Brazil South, France Central, India Central, South Central, US, UK South, and West US. 3 and the West US. Microsoft Teams is serving its growing customer base more efficiently, attaining up to 45% better performance on Cobalt 100-based VMs.
We also offer Cobalt 100-based VMs to independent software vendors providing PaaS and SaaS on Azure.
The Journey to ARM: Adopting Innovation and Customer Benefits
Microsoft has a long-standing history of working with ARM architecture and technology. This experience helped us develop key industry standards to prepare for data center scale computing. We are also partnering with others to launch initiatives such as Silver Ready and System Ready, earning industry recognition. Our move to ARM-based VMs stems from our goal to deliver better price-performance and power efficiency. The Cobalt 100-based VMs reflect this goal by delivering strong performance and cost savings for our customers. STEM for ARM has continued to thrive and has seen tremendous progress over the last couple of years. Major developer platforms and languages, such as C++, .NET, and Java, offer ARM-native versions. We have invested in ARM-specific optimizations for each of these platforms and languages, enabling us to fully leverage the capabilities of the ARM architecture.
Many popular infrastructure and deployment tools now support Arm natively. GitHub Actions, which many developers use for continuous integration and delivery, is now available for Arm in two ways: self-hosted runners that run on an Arm VM or local Arm hardware, and GitHub-hosted runners.
Containers are a popular method for application deployment due to their support for workflow streamlining, isolation, security, resource efficiency, portability, and reproducibility. Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) extends the ARM ecosystem by enabling users to create ARM agent nodes and supporting mixed deployments of both X86 and ARM nodes within the same cluster, emphasizing ARM’s flexibility.
Specifications
You can choose from several Azure virtual machines with three different memory ratios for each vCPU size. This gives you the flexibility to choose the setup that best fits your CPU and memory needs. All VM series are available with or without local disks, so you can choose the option that best suits your workload. The Dpsv6 series and the dpdsv6 series offer up to 96 vCPUs, 384 GB of RAM, and a 4:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio. They suit scale-out workloads, databases, applications, and web servers, and ARM-based development tasks. The Dplsv6 and dpldsv6 series VMs have up to 96 vCPUs and 192 GiB of RAM (2:1 ratio) and are suited for media coding, encoding, small databases, gaming servers, and lighter workloads. The Epsv6 and epdsv6 series offer up to 96 vCPUs and 72 GiB of RAM (8:1 ratio) for memory-intensive workloads such as large databases and data analytics.
The new VMs support all remote disk types, including standard SSD, HDD, premium SSD, and ultra disks. For more on disk types and locations, see Azure Managed Disk Types. Disk storage is billed separately. Deploy VMs via portal, SDKs, APIs, PowerShell, or CLI.
You can learn more about the new Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs by reading the documentation. Embrace this new breakthrough and unlock new possibilities for innovation, performance, and cloud transformation with Azure.
Source: Azure Cobalt 100-based Virtual Machines are now generally available
