We’re excited to announce that new Azure Cobalt 100-based virtual machines (VMs) are now generally available. These VMs use Microsoft’s first sixty-four-bit Arm-based Azure Cobalt 100 CPU designed in-house. This launch is a major step forward in building and improving our cloud infrastructure with careful optimization at every level. Through integrating hardware and software, Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs highlight our efforts to deliver the right balance of performance, power efficiency, and scale for our customers.
The Cobalt 100-based VMs include our new general-purpose DPS v6 series and DPLS v6 series, as well as the memory-optimized EPS v6 series. They deliver up to 50% better price-to-performance than our previous ARM-based VMs, making them a strong choice for many Linux-based workloads, such as data analytics, web and app servers, open-source databases, and caches.
The new Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs offer significant improvements over previous Azure ARM-based VMs: up to 1.4 times better per-CPU performance, 1.5 times better Java workload performance, and double the performance for web server .NET apps and in-memory cache apps. NVMe local storage IOPS increase fourfold, and network bandwidth grows up to 1.5 times.
These new VMs are available in regions like Canada Central, Central US, East US 2, East US, Germany West Central, Japan East, Mexico Central, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, UAE North, West Europe, and West US 2. Additional regions are coming in 2024 and beyond, including Australia East, Brazil South, France Central, India Central, South Central US, UK South, West US 3, and West US.
Customer Adoption and Scenarios
During the preview, we worked with both internal and external customers. For example, IC3, the platform behind Microsoft Teams conversations, now serves its growing user base more efficiently and has seen up to 45% better performance on Cobalt 100-based VMs
We are also providing Cobalt 100-based VMs to many independent software vendors (ISVs) who offer PaaS and SaaS solutions on Microsoft Azure.
The Journey to ARM: Adopting Innovation and Customer Benefits.
Microsoft’s experience with Arm technology shaped data center scale industry standards and earned industry recognition. Our transition to Arm-based VMs is driven by the goal of improving price performance and power efficiency for our customers, as demonstrated by the Cobalt 100-based VMs.
Developer Ecosystem
The developer ecosystem is growing quickly and has made great progress in recent years. Major platforms and languages such as C++, .NET, and Java now offer native ARM versions. We have made ARM-specific improvements for each of these, enabling us to fully leverage the strengths 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 running on an Arm VM or local Arm hardware, and GitHub-hosted runners.
Containers are a popular choice for deployment because they deliver a streamlined workflow, isolation, security, efficient resource use, portability, and reproducibility. Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now lets you create ARM agent nodes and mix ARM and x86 nodes within the same cluster.
Specifications
You can choose from several Azure virtual machines with 3 memory ratios per vCPU size, giving you the flexibility to meet your workload, CPU, and memory needs. All VM series are available with or without local disks, so you can select the best fit. New Dpsv6 series and Dpdsv6 series general-purpose VMs offer up to 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB of RAM. They are ideal for scale-out workloads, cloud-native solutions such as AKS, small to medium-sized open-source databases, application servers, and web servers. ARM developers can use these VMs in CI/CD pipelines, development, and test scenarios.
- The new Dpslsv6 and Dpldsv6 series VMs provide up to 96 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 192 GiB of RAM, with a 2:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio (2 GiB RAM per vCPU). They are ideal for media encoding, small databases, gaming servers, microservices, and workloads that do not require much RAM per vCPU.
- The new Eps v6 and Epds v6 series memory-optimized VMs provide up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB of RAM with an 80:1 memory-to-CPU ratio. They are built for memory-intensive work, such as large databases and in-memory CA. The new Epsv6 and Epdsv6 series memory-optimized VMs provide up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB of RAM, with an 8.1:1 memory-to-CPU ratio. Disk storage. For more details about disk types and where they are available, see Azure Managed Disk Types. Disk storage is billed separately from VMs. You can deploy these VMs using the Azure portal, SDKs, APIs, PowerShell, and/or the command line interface.
To find out more about the new Azua Cobalt 100-based VMs, please read the documentation.
Pricing
To learn more about the pricing of Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs, please visit the Azure Virtual Machine pricing and pricing calculator pages.
You can save money with reserved instances. The Azure savings plan for compute and spot virtual machines. Reserved VM instances help lower costs and make budgeting easier with one-year or three-year commitments. For a limited time, you can save up to fifteen percent more on one-year Azure reserved VM instances for select Linux VMs from October one, twenty twenty-four, to thirty-one March, twenty twenty-five. The Azure savings plan for compute lets you save across several Azure services, including VMs. Spot virtual machines can also cut costs for workloads that can handle interruptions and variable timing.
A New Era of Price, Performance, and Power Efficiency.
The launch of Azure Cobalt Boost VMs denotes a new chapter for Azure’s infrastructure. Our custom silicon program delivers outstanding price-performance and power efficiency to our customers. We look forward to seeing how these innovations help your business and to supplying even better solutions in the future.
Thank you for taking part in this exciting trip with us.
Source: Azure Cobalt 100-based Virtual Machines are now generally available
