- Hi everyone.
and thanks for joining us today for Azure IaaS Day
I'm Paul Nash,
Head of Product for the Azure Compute
Infrastructure Platform.
We've recently announced a number of new capabilities
for Azure Compute.
And today we want to give you the opportunity to learn more
about these great new offerings.
In this track you'll get a deeper dive
on these exciting topics,
including some great demos.
In this introductory session,
I'll give you an overview of the latest innovations
that we'll be covering in more detail throughout
the Azure Compute track.
First I'll summarize the latest additions to
the Azure VM portfolio,
including new tools to help you quickly find
the ideal VM types and sizes for your workloads.
Then I'll briefly review new ways for you to manage VMs
at large scale, with Virtual Machines Scale Sets,
We continue to add new features to
the Spot Virtual Machine Service,
to help you optimize your cloud spend.
I'll highlight the latest advancements.
Then I'll discuss our new on-demand capacity
reservations capability that gives you access
to guarantee compute capacity in advance
of workload deployments.
Along the way,
I'll also present the latest products
and services we've added to help you increase
the overall security posture
of your cloud computing infrastructure.
Lastly,
I'll highlight the additional resources we're making
available to help you learn even more
including on-demand sessions.
We've got a lot to cover, so let's get started.
Our Azure Virtual Machines Portfolio
lets you deploy and run a broad range of workloads
from CI/CD pipelines to Mission Critical Applications
and everything in between.
And one of the hallmarks of cloud is the ability for
customers to access the latest and infrastructure technology
without needing to wait for refresh or purchasing cycles.
We continue to work with technology partners like Intel
and AMD to include their latest technologies
in the fabric of Azure IaaS.
In fact,
we've recently launched a set of new VM products for
general purpose and memory intensive workloads
that deliver significant price performance
improvements compared to prior generations.
Our expanded Virtual Machines portfolio now includes new
Dasv5, and Eav5 Azure VMs.
Which are based on the third generation of AMD's EPYC
or Milan processors.
These new VMs provide options without local disk storage for
a lower price of entry and better cost efficiency,
especially for stateless workloads
that don't typically require local storage.
We've also added new VMs that feature the latest
third generation Intel Xeon platinum or Ice Lake processor.
These Dv5 and Ev5 Azure VMs
can now scale up to
96 virtual CPU's and provide sizes with additional RAM
and greater network bandwidth.
All these new features contribute to delivering up to 15%
increased performance and better price performance
than the previous Dv4 and Ev4 VMs, for many workloads.
All our remote disc storage options are supported on all
these new offerings, subject to regional availability.
Additionally,
we've also recently announced a preview of our newest
Ebs v5 Azure VMs.
This new addition to our memory optimized VM portfolio is
capable of delivering enhanced remote disc storage
performance up to 120,000 IOPS
and 4,000 MBps of throughput.
These new VMs provide increased storage throughput,
which is ideal for customers most
demanding data intensive workloads,
including large relational databases, such as SQL server,
high performance OLTP scenarios
and high end data analytics applications.
With Ebs v5,
you'll be able to consolidate existing workloads onto fewer
VMs or potentially save costs by provisioning smaller VM
sizes than what you may use today to run the same workload.
The next session in our Azure Compute track
will provide a lot more details.
But to summarize,
you can see on this slide, the progressive improvements
to the remote storage performance provided
by the Azure Compute Platform.
You now have access to a wider range of
sustained storage performance levels
to help you meet your application requirements.
We've more than doubled the VM-to-disc storage throughput
with the new Dv5 and Ev5 VMs.
And with the Ebs V5 VMs we're increasing storage throughput
even further.
You can also see the increase in IOPS on the right from
80,000 up to 120,000.
We intend to continue increasing the overall system
performance of Azure IaaS to new levels to meet or exceed
the requirements of your most demanding
and business critical workloads while delivering
greater value over time.
With hybrid work environments becoming the norm
and the ever expanding and distributed attacks surface,
security is top of mind for most of you,
especially if you operate in a regulated industry.
Microsoft has been at the forefront of
Confidential Computing and we continue to grow our
Confidential Computing portfolio.
This technology helps customers meet their data privacy,
security and compliance needs by encrypting data in use.
Azure Confidential Computing helps you move from computing
in the clear to computing confidentially in the cloud
and the edge.
We offer a full range of solutions to meet your
organization and workloads needs.
In fact, we offer more options,
standing hardware and software than any other cloud vendor.
Azure Confidential Computing is built on a solid foundation
including, a hardware root of trust to ensure data is
protected right from the Silicon.
Remote at attestation for customers to directly verify
the integrity of the computing environment.
Memory encryption to ensure data is protected
while being processed
and Trusted Launch,
to ensure your VMs boot with legitimate code.
We believe these four capabilities are essential
and that anything less is not truly Confidential Computing.
We're also onboarding more Azure confidential services you
can leverage within your solutions.
And this now includes Azure Confidential Ledger in preview,
SQL always encrypted,
Azure key vault managed hardware, security modules
and Microsoft Azure attestation all running
on Azure Confidential Compute.
We also have new VMs for Confidential Computing to announce.
You can now use Azure Confidential VMs with enclaves built
on Intel SGX technology to optimize for confidentiality at
the application level.
The DCsv3 series now in preview
offers up to six times the
number of VCPUs and 1500 times as much encrypted memory
compared to our prior DCsv2 products.
Coming soon in November,
we'll offer a preview of Azure Confidential Virtual Machines
built on third generation AMD EPYC processors featuring
SEV-SNP memory encryption.
These VMs will enable customers to seamlessly lift and shift
existing workloads to be confidential without changing any
code.
We're now also offering support for worker nodes in
Azure Kubernetes Service to secure your confidential
containers using Intel SGX available in preview.
AKS support is also coming to AMD EPYC Platforms
before the end of the year.
Again,
allowing you to encrypt the memory of your containers with
AMD, SEV-SNP technology.
Finally,
we've partnered with Canonical to offer Ubuntu OS
support for all our confidential offerings.
Earlier this year,
we also introduced Trusted Launch in public preview.
Trusted Launch verifies the firmware and drivers to ensure
that only Trusted code is running on your Virtual Machine.
In fact,
all of our Windows 365 cloud PC machines running in Azure
have Trusted Launch enabled both for
Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Customers who have tested,
Trusted Launch tell us that they love the improved security
posture of their Virtual Machines.
And we're excited to announce that Trusted Launch
is now generally available.
It can be enabled for all Azure Gen2 Virtual Machines
with secure boot and vTPMs to protect against root kits
and boot kits.
And best of all,
these Trusted Launch features are enabled with a simple
change in deployment code or a checkbox in the Azure portal.
As we grow the number of VM options available to you in
Azure,
we recognize that a broader set of choices can also increase
complexity, making it more challenging
to find the ideal product for your use case.
To help you simplify and accelerate your
decision-making process.
We built the Virtual Machine Selector tool.
We'll show this new tool in action in a separate session
later in the program, so I hope you'll check it out.
Now many customers need to manage hundreds,
if not thousands of VMs in complex and dynamic scale-out
environments without compromising the resiliency of their
applications.
For the last few years,
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets has been the service
that lets you create and manage a group of
identical load balance VMs.
The number of VM instances can automatically increase or
decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule.
Scale Sets help you centrally manage, configure
and update large numbers of VMs.
With this capability,
you can easily build large scale services
and distributed systems for areas such as
big data, e-commerce and container workloads.
We've recently announced the general availability of the new
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets,
Flexible Orchestration Mode.
This new mode gives you access to a set of capabilities
that you can rely on to further simplify the deployment,
management and scalability of your applications in Azure.
These new capabilities also combine the functionality of our
previously separate availability set
and Virtual Machines Scale Set products.
As a result,
you will now be able to easily manage your business critical
applications more effectively while ensuring high
availability at massive scale.
In fact,
you can now deploy thousands of VMs across fault domains,
balanced VMs across fault domains
and availability zones automatically,
run different VM families in the same scale set
and much more.
The number of new capabilities we're introducing with
Flexible Orchestration Mode is substantial.
Our team will walk you through some demos and a detailed
review in a session dedicated to Virtual Machine Scale Sets
later in this track.
Another important topic of discussion with customers
is cost optimization.
Whenever possible,
we want to use our economics of scale to pass on savings to
customers.
An example of that is how we make available spare
Azure Compute Capacity at deeply discounted rates.
Of course,
I'm referring to Azure Spot Virtual Machines that let you
run workloads that can tolerate interruptions on both
Windows and Linux while achieving significant cost savings.
We continue to add new features to
Azure Spot Virtual Machines.
For example, you can view eviction rates and price history,
right in the Azure portal.
You can also use new REST APIs to simulate evictions
and test the behavior of your workload
to make sure that it can adequately handle interruptions
when deployed on spot VMs.
You can now also improve the runtime of your workloads using
Spot VMs, even if they experience evictions
due to Azure capacity limitations.
This new capability applies when a Spot VM is part of a
Virtual Machine Scale Set.
The platform will now automatically try to redeploy an
evicted VM to maintain the predetermined number of VMs
that you've specified.
Spot VMs are a great solution for many workloads,
but not all applications can or should tolerate
interruptions.
For example,
many mission critical environments need to be highly
available to ensure business continuity.
That's why we've also introduced another important new
feature which is currently in public preview.
On-demand Capacity Reservations for Azure Virtual Machines.
This new feature allows you to deploy and manage the
compute capacity required to run Azure VMs separately
from deploying the VMs themselves.
After successfully creating a capacity reservation,
customers can assign VMs to the reserve capacity at their
convenience and be sure that that space is theirs to use.
The reservation is on-demand because no term commitment is
required.
You can delete on-demand capacity reservations whenever
they're no longer needed.
Within the Azure billing system,
any available term discounts such as
Purchased Reserved VM instances
or RIs will be applied automatically.
With on-demand capacity reservations,
we're giving you the ability to reserve compute capacity
for Azure VMs with SLA guarantees.
Until now the only way to
obtain an SLA for Azure VMs capacity had been to deploy the
VMs, whether they're running or stopped.
This feature is particularly important for organizations
that want to ensure high levels of availability
when running mission critical applications on Azure.
Think of expected spikes in demand or plans growth over
time.
It can also be very useful to implement disaster recovery
and business continuity scenarios.
On-demand capacity reservations, give you more options.
They also ensure that you can still control the capacity,
even if you temporarily stop the VMs.
For instance,
this helps customers safely push new deployments to
production during peak usage periods,
without needing to worry about keeping that capacity.
There's a deeper dive session coming up dedicated to
on-demand capacity reservations,
including demos and specific real life scenarios.
And speaking of upcoming sessions.
In addition to the sessions that are part of the
Azure Compute Track,
you can also watch these
three additional on-demand sessions.
The first focus is on Azure Data Explorer,
a fantastic Microsoft solution that delivers
enterprise IT monitoring capabilities.
We also have two sessions hosted by our partners,
one with Avanade and the other with Intel.
These are great opportunities to tap into the expertise of
the broader ecosystem that Azure offers.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed this overview.
Now you have a roadmap for all the great sessions ahead
and a wider perspective on the innovation
and enhancements we're bringing to you in
Azure Compute Infrastructure.
I leave you with a few final resources that include
websites, documentation,
and videos that I hope you'll explore to continue learning
more.
Thanks again for your interest and your questions
and for joining us for Azure IaaS Day.