Monday, September 18, 2017

A New VM For Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft has just announced the preview launch of a new family of virtual machines for its Azure cloud computing platform that's specifically geared toward heavy and intense workloads.

Microsoft argues that these so-called B-series machines, which are currently the lowest cost Azure machines with flexible CPU usage, should work well for workloads like web servers, small databases, and dev/test environments.

The principle behind these B-series machines is similar to AWS's T2 instances in that they offer burstable performance and that build up credits for the periods when user don't need the full power of the virtual CPU.

Google offers a similar machine type with its f1-micro and g1-small instances. This scheme of letting users bank credits as their machine idles (or only needs very little CPU power) means they end up saving money over using a traditional VM but still get access to enough power when they need it.

Microsoft will offer six different versions of these B-series, starting with a single-core VM with 1 GiB of memory for US$ 0.012 per hour, up to an eight-core machine with 32 GiB of memory for US$ 0.376 per hour. These are the prices for Linux-based machines, with Windows-based machines costing a bit more. During the preview period, developers get a 50 percet discount on these prices.

For now, these new machine types are only available in two U.S. Azure zones (West 2 and East), Europe (West) and Asia Pacific (Southeast). Developers who want to try them during this preview period also need to put in a quota request.

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