Microsoft has introduced a new set of less expensive virtual machines (VMs) for its Azure cloud platform, with the goal of providing a cost-effective solution for small and medium-sized businesses, startups, and developers. The new VMs provide burstable CPU performance at a low cost, allowing customers to better manage their cloud spending.
The Azure Dlsv5 and Dldsv5 VMs are supplements to the Dv5 and Ev5 VMs, which were made available in November. The pitch was that it would provide a better price-performance ratio for general-purpose and memory-intensive jobs because it was scalable (up to 96 virtual CPUs) and ran on Intel’s Xeon Platinum third-generation (Ice Lake) hyperthreaded processors.
Similarly, both new VMs are hyperthreaded and run on third-generation Xeon Platinum 8370C chips. The new VMs, however, have less memory (2GB RAM) per vCPU than the Dv5, which has 8GB.
Customers can access a baseline level of CPU performance via the VMs, which can be temporarily increased when needed. This means that customers only pay for the amount of CPU power they require, rather than paying for additional performance that they may never use.
The VMs also have automatic throttling, which allows them to run at full speed when there is spare capacity on the host machine, while reducing the allocated CPU when there is resource contention. This ensures that customers receive the best performance possible while keeping costs under control.
The new VMs come in a variety of sizes, with one to 16 vCPUs and up to 128GB of memory. They also work with a variety of operating systems, such as Windows Server, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.