Hello, this is David Tucker. And welcome to Azure This Week. This week is all about the
VMs. So I've got three announcements that could greatly impact how you leverage and
how much you pay for VMs on Azure. This includes one of the announcements that I've been waiting
for for a very long time. What is it? Well stick around to find out. To the news! Oh and
while you’re here, if you want to keep up to date with that news, hit that subscribe button below.
It has finally arrived. This is the announcement that I've been waiting for.
The much anticipated Arm64-based virtual machines are now available as a public preview in Azure.
Now, if you're not familiar with Arm-based processors, let me explain to you why this is such
a big deal. And the first key is cost. According to Microsoft, these virtual machines can deliver
up to 50% better price performance than comparable x86-based VMs. Yes, I said 50%. Second,
because these processors use significantly less power as opposed to their x86 counterparts, these
processors can also help your organization meet its sustainability goals. Now, as the industry as
a whole continues to add support for Arm-based processors now is the perfect time to try out
these processors for your cloud-based workloads. We've seen increased support for Arm with both
.NET and Java, and even developer tooling support has increased for arm-based machines.
Now you will be able to access these virtual machines in the Dpsv5, Dpdsv5, Dplsv5,
and Epsv5 VM series. I just wanted to see if I could say all of those in a row without messing
up. Now, these different series are designed to tackle both general purpose and memory intensive
workloads, depending on the specific options that you configure. Now, all of these new VMs
are leveraging Ampere Altra Arm-based processors and are available in a handful of regions. Check
the link in description for information on how you can sign up for this public preview.
Did you know that you can access some of our courses for free? Yes. Free. All the cloud
learning for none of the cost. There's a couple of new courses that you can try for free right now.
On A Cloud Guru, we have Identity and Access Management for Azure,
and on Pluralsight I think you might like our AWS Developer: Getting Started course.
The best bit is you don't even need a credit card to sign up. So you can
just jump straight in and start. I'll leave the links in the description.
Next up, you now have a new option that you can leverage for backing up your production
VMs. And that is the vault archive tier with Azure Backup. While this has been in preview,
this is now generally available in a handful of regions. This means you can take those backups and
put them in a lower cost tier with Azure Backup. And this release even support SQL server and SAP
HANA with Azure Virtual Machines. Now in most situations, this will result in significant cost
savings for your backups. Now, if you want some guidance on this Azure Backup will even recommend
which recovery points should be moved to the archive tier to optimize your savings. Check
the link in the description for details on which regions are currently supported with this update.
In addition to the Arm64 VM series that we announced earlier in the episode, we have another
new series. The Ebsv5 series, which joins the Ev5 family. Why does this matter? How about this? It
supports up to 120,000 IOPS with 4,000 megabytes per second of storage throughput. For those of you
keeping track at home, this is a 3x improvement over previous generations when it comes to dealing
with remote storage. Now, if you're dealing with storage-intensive workloads for your data,
such as databases, analytic workloads, or real-time processing systems, you will want to
test this series out to see how much it improves the performance of your workloads. Now, if all of
this talk of a new VM series is a bit confusing, don't forget that you can leverage the VM Selector
from Microsoft to help navigate the ever-changing collection of VM series that you can pick from.
Well, I'm all out of virtual machine announcements for you for this week. If you have any questions
or comments, let us know below and see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.