Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra processor, based on the Arm architecture.
From 1 September 2022, Azure customers can launch the virtual machines (VMs) in ten regions and include them in Kubernetes clusters managed with the Azure Kubernetes Service.
The Azure Arm-based VMs feature up to 64 vCPU cores, 8GB of memory per core, and 40Gbps of networking bandwidth.
They also feature fast local-SSD storage, and additional storage can be attached to the VMs.
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“Ampere’s Cloud Native Processors are uniquely designed to meet both the high performance and power efficiency needs of the cloud,” Ampere chief product officer Jeff Wittich said.
“Through our strong partnership with Microsoft, Ampere Altra processors are now generally available as Azure Virtual Machines, bringing new cloud-focused processor technology to end users.”
Microsoft says the Azure Arm-based VMs were engineered to run scale-out, cloud-native workloads, including open-source databases, Java and .NET applications, gaming, web, app, and media servers.
Preview releases for Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise and Linux OS versions such as Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian will be available at launch.
Microsoft said support for Alma and Rocky Linux would follow.
“The general availability of Microsoft Azure VMs on Arm marks an important milestone in redefining what is possible in cloud computing,” Arm’s senior vice president and general manager for its infrastructure line of business, Chris Bergey, said.
“Through market-leading scalable efficiency and the liberty to innovate, Arm Neoverse is enabling Azure customers to embrace the increasing diversity of workloads with better overall TCO and cleaner cloud service operations.”
Source: My Broadband
