Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the latest Azure Virtual Machines powered by the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. Starting September 1, customers can access these new virtual machines across 10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones worldwide. Additionally, these Arm-based virtual machines can now be included in Kubernetes clusters managed with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), transitioning from preview to general availability in the coming weeks in all regions offering the new virtual machines.

Earlier this year, we introduced the preview of the new general-purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory-optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series, built on the Ampere Altra processor. Designed to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads, these virtual machines have been tested by hundreds of customers, demonstrating excellent price-performance for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and .NET applications, gaming, media servers, and more. Starting today, all Azure customers can deploy these new virtual machines via the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI).

Azure serves a diverse range of customer workloads, from digital transformation and modernization to building innovative new apps and services. Customers are focused on maximizing operational efficiency and are increasingly considering sustainability and the impact of their technological choices. Azure’s Ampere Altra Arm-based virtual machines offer a cost-effective and power-efficient option without compromising performance.

For instance, Amadeus, a leading IT provider for the global travel industry, highlighted the benefits of these new instances:

“The preview of the Ampere Altra Arm-based Dpsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series on Azure was the perfect opportunity to explore improvements for our Amadeus Search and Shopping products. Our tests showed a mature Arm ecosystem and seamless Azure integration, with high throughput and reduced energy consumption making this series essential for enhancing both performance and sustainability. We now plan to use these instances in production to run our Cloud workloads at scale.” — Antoine Collier, Cloud Engineer at Amadeus

A growing partner ecosystem

Microsoft’s extensive experience with Arm-based technologies positions us to help customers innovate by collaborating with software and hardware companies globally. This collaboration includes working with companies like Ampere and Arm to help customers deploy high-performance workloads efficiently.

“Ampere’s Cloud Native Processors meet the high performance and power efficiency needs of the cloud. Our partnership with Microsoft brings Ampere Altra processors to Azure Virtual Machines, enabling end-users to deploy next-generation cloud applications sustainably.” — Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer, Ampere

“The general availability of Microsoft Azure VMs on Arm marks a milestone in cloud computing, offering scalable efficiency and innovation freedom. Arm Neoverse enables Azure customers to handle diverse workloads with better TCO and cleaner cloud operations.” — Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm

We have collaborated with the open-source community and various independent software vendors (ISVs) to make Linux OS distributions such as Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian available on the new Arm-based Azure Virtual Machines. Support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux will be added in the future.

“Companies see Arm-based architectures as a way to reduce costs and energy consumption. They are ideal for computing workloads including microservices, application servers, machine learning, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. We are pleased to partner with Microsoft to announce the general release of Ubuntu images on Azure.” — Alexander Gallagher, VP of Cloud, Canonical

“Red Hat is committed to providing customers with architecture choices that meet their unique needs. Supporting Ampere Altra Arm-based VMs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure adds to our hybrid cloud offerings, helping drive efficiencies with cloud-based Arm processors.” — Maryam Zand, VP, Cloud Partners, Red Hat

“SUSE recognizes the significant opportunities with Arm in cloud and edge environments. We are excited to support the Dpsv5 and Epsv5 Azure VM-series based on Ampere Altra Arm-based servers in our SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4. These Arm-optimized solutions offer significant market potential as enterprises scale out cloud environments with Azure VMs.” — Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO, SUSE

We have also partnered with companies like Avanade, Datadog, Elastic, and many others to build innovative solutions on Azure.

“Ansys simulation tools use distributed compute resources from cloud providers like Azure to analyze advanced electronic and optical designs. Collaborating with Arm and Microsoft, we’ve made Ansys products available on Ampere Altra Arm-based VMs in Azure, providing customers with superior solutions for distributed computing.” — John Lee, VP and GM of electronics, semiconductor, and optics business unit, Ansys

“Arm-based virtual machines deliver great price performance for cloud-native workloads, and their low power consumption per core helps Avanade meet clients’ sustainability goals by reducing their carbon footprint.” — Steve Hunter, Global Azure Platform Services lead, Avanade

“Datadog is proud to be a monitoring partner for the launch of Arm-based architectures on Azure VMs. We provide full visibility into Ampere Altra Arm-based VMs, aiding migration planning and performance monitoring.” — Yrieix Garnier, VP of Product, Datadog

“At Elastic, we provide customers with the ability to use our solutions on Arm-based architecture. The new Azure VMs featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor will offer better throughput and improved price-performance for observability, security, and search use cases.” — Uri Cohen, VP, Product Management, Elastic

Support for Arm nodes in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is also becoming generally available. We’re deploying updates across Azure to enable AKS support for Arm nodes, with full availability expected within two weeks. To check the status in your region, visit the AKS release tracker.

We’re thrilled that customers can leverage so many partner solutions with Arm-based VMs on Azure and will continue working closely with the software and partner ecosystem to bring more packages, partners, and services to Arm on Azure in the coming months.

Accelerating developer productivity with Arm in the cloud

The Arm ecosystem continues to benefit from the contribution of the global community for most major developer platforms and languages such as Java, Python, Rust, PHP, .NET, and more.

Java has played a critical role in democratizing cross-platform development. Java developers can enjoy the development experience they are familiar with while building and running their applications with the Microsoft build of OpenJDK. Microsoft provides Java 11 and Java 17 binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS. With Microsoft’s recent JEP 388 contribution to OpenJDK, Java applications can now run on a wider range of Arm systems with no additional code changes.

Native support for the Arm architecture is available in .NET 6 on both Windows and Linux. With C# 10 and F# 6, .NET 6 delivers language improvements that simplify your code. Native support for Windows on Arm64 is now also available for the .NET Framework starting with the recent 4.8.1 release for Windows 11 and with Visual Studio 2022 17.3 generally available. The vast ecosystem of .NET Framework apps can receive the benefits of running on Arm now. The latest Microsoft Visual C++ tools (currently in preview and available as part of Visual Studio 17.4 preview) allow you to not just run your apps, but also build natively for Arm, on Arm. Visual Studio 17.4 previews support the desktop (C++ and C#), Web, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) workloads and will be generally available later this year. The totally free Visual Studio Code editor running natively on Arm enables you to harness the power of the cloud—not just for your production environment, but now also for your development environment.

Outside the datacenter, the Arm hardware landscape continues to expand beyond mobile to a variety of client devices for customers looking for the battery life and performance benefits of Windows on Arm PCs and tablets. Until now, developers and software-provider partners building for Windows on Arm devices have had to build and test their software on physical devices or resort to cross-compilation and inefficient emulation solutions. To support their work, we’ve made Insider Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise available to run on Arm-based Azure VMs. Client application developers can now take advantage of Azure’s highly available, scalable, and secure platform to run cloud-based software and build and test workflows that help them increase their agility. NortonLifeLock was part of the preview:

“We are using Azure VMs featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processors to run and test Norton products supporting Windows 11 on Arm. We have found them appealing not only for performance and scalability, but from a cost perspective as well. Microsoft has made it easy for their customers to use their VMs seamlessly across different scenarios.”—Leena Elias, Vice President of Product, NortonLifeLock

Azure Arm-based virtual machines support a broad range of workloads

The Azure Arm-based virtual machine families now include:

• Dpsv5 series: Up to 64 vCPUs with 4 GiBs of memory per vCPU, totaling up to 208 GiBs.

• Dplsv5 series: Up to 64 vCPUs with 2 GiBs of memory per vCPU, totaling up to 128 GiBs.

• Epsv5 series: Up to 32 vCPUs with 8 GiBs of memory per vCPU, totaling up to 208 GiBs.

All these new virtual machine sizes support up to 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth and can attach Standard SSDs, Standard HDDs, Premium SSDs, and Ultra Disk Storage. Additionally, the Dpdv5, Dpldv5, and Epdv5 series include fast local-SSD storage. These virtual machines also support Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

With Azure Monitor, you can easily collect key metrics to track the performance of your resources using the Azure Monitor agent. You can correlate infrastructure issues for your Arm-based virtual machines with VM insights, and for your Arm-based Kubernetes clusters with container insights. Both VM insights and container insights for Arm-based offerings are currently in preview.

The Ampere Altra Arm-based Azure virtual machines are now available in the US (West US 2, West Central US, Central US, East US, East US 2), Europe (West Europe, North Europe), Asia (East Asia, Southeast Asia), and Australia (Australia East) Azure regions. We plan to expand Azure regional availability after September 1.

Spot Virtual Machines are available today. Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances pricing will be offered when the Virtual Machines become generally available on September 1, with prices varying by region.