Azure Cobalt 100 virtual machines reach general availability

2024-10-16 · Publisher : Microsoft · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

Microsoft declares generally available its Azure VMs on Cobalt 100, its first in-house 64-bit Arm processor. It claims up to 50% better price-performance than previous Arm VMs, in fourteen regions.

### Background On 16 October 2024, Microsoft announces general availability of Azure virtual machines based on Cobalt 100, its first in-house 64-bit Arm processor. They form three series: Dpsv6 and Dplsv6 (general purpose) and Epsv6 (memory optimized). The service thus moves from the May 2024 preview to a commercial offer. ### Key facts - Up to 50% better price-performance than previous Azure Arm VMs, according to Microsoft. - Up to 1.4x CPU performance, 1.5x on Java and 2x on web servers, .NET applications and in-memory caches; four times more IOPS on local NVMe storage (vendor figures). - Available in fourteen regions, including North Europe, West Europe, Germany West Central, Sweden Central and Switzerland North; eight more are announced. - Customer feedback quoted: the Teams conversation platform (IC3) gains up to 45% in performance; Databricks makes it the primary platform for Databricks SQL Serverless on Azure; Elastic cites up to 37% improvement. - Electronic design software vendors (Cadence, Siemens EDA, Synopsys) and Rescale (about 40% reported gain) are among the testimonials quoted by Microsoft. ### Why it matters General availability makes these VMs usable in production under a service-level agreement. For infrastructure teams, this is the time to evaluate Arm porting of Linux workloads: containers on AKS, web servers, caches, open-source databases. The real gain depends on each application, and only load tests can quantify it. ### Takeaway Cobalt 100 is generally available: Azure offers an in-house Arm path for cloud-native Linux workloads.

Tags : Azure, Puces, Hyperscaler, Cloud