Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Azure Cobalt 100-based virtual machines (VMs), marking a major milestone in the company’s hardware development journey to design and build out its cloud infrastructure. It is now available in the cloud for public consumption. These VMs run on Microsoft’s first 64-bit Arm-based Azure Cobalt 100 CPU, designed in-house to deliver optimized performance, power efficiency, and scale.
Cobalt is Microsoft’s first custom-designed CPU, optimized for high-performance applications and already powering critical services like Microsoft 365’s video processing and permissions management. Notably, Cobalt supports a range of Linux distributions and, surprisingly, Windows 11 via virtualization, making it an attractive option for developers.
Client application developers can use this Azure scalable and secure platform to run cloud-based builds and test workflows with an insider preview of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise available for Azure Cobalt VMs. The working of Microsoft’s Arm-based Cobalt is up to 50% better price performance than previous Arm-based VMs. The CPU performance has improved up to 1.4 x CPU performance.
The Java performance is up to 1.5x performance now with 2x web server workloads. It also has an improved feature of four times the local storage IOPS (with NVMe) and up to and up to 1.5 x network bandwidth. It can support Linux-based workloads, including data analytics, web and application servers, open-source databases, and caches.
Microsoft’s Arm-based Cobalt is available in 17 regions, such as Canada Central, Central US, East US 2, East US, and Germany. West Central, Japan East, Mexico Central, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Sweden Central, Switzerland, North, UAE, North, West Europe, and West US 2.
The number of regions will continue to expand in 2024 and beyond, with Australia East, Brazil South, India Central, South Central US, France Central, UK South, West US 3, and West US coming soon, along with other expansions planned for 2024 and beyond.
Microsoft has been working with internal and external customers during the preview period, including IC3, which powers Microsoft teams. Customers have reported many performance gains, with IC3 achieving up to 45% better performance on cobalt 100-based VMs. Microsoft’s experience with Arm architecture and technology has enabled the development of industry standards for data center-scale computing.
The company has worked closely with Arm on initiatives like ServerReady and SystemReady. The developer ecosystem for Arm continues to develop, with major platforms and languages like C++, NET, and Java providing Arm native versions. The Azure Cobalt 100 can support all sorts of remote disks, such as standard SSD, premium SSD, standard HDD, and ultra disk storage.
The disk storage will be billed separately according to the disk type you choose. You can also install these new VMs by already existing methods such as SDKs, APIs, PowerShell, the Azure portal, and command-line interfaces (CLI).
Microsoft has invested in arm-specific optimizations, and popular infrastructure solutions now offer native Arm support. The general availability of Azure cobalt 100-based VMs marks the beginning of a new era in Azure, delivering exceptional price performance and power that is efficient to the customers. Microsoft is committed to bringing even better solutions to its customers in the future.
