Today, Microsoft launches Azure Virtual Machines (VM) based on the Ampere Altra Cloud Native Processor. This marks an important milestone as developers can now take advantage of these modern high-performance VMs for their existing and greenfield applications. The Ampere Altra processor family leads in performance across a range of broadly deployed cloud workloads and is now making available the Arm architecture on Azure.

Industry leading performance and the most sustainable solution

Cloud users who have pushed the limits of legacy x86 architectures now have a high-performance compute alternative that scales up in a linear fashion and delivers predictable performance even at full utilization. For example, Ampere Altra VMs outperform equivalently sized Intel and AMD instances from the same generation by 39% and 47%, respectively.* In addition to being the high-performance choice, Ampere Altra processors are extremely power efficient, directly reducing users’ overall carbon footprint.

Good for Developers

Through their tight collaboration on open-source initiatives and contributions, Microsoft and Ampere have enabled simple onboarding to these new modern VMs. With the broad portfolio of Microsoft’s Ampere Altra based VM configurations, developers can choose how to best utilize them across a wide variety of workloads.

Microsoft offers a comprehensive line of Azure Virtual Machines that can run a diverse and broad set of Linux workloads such as web servers, open-source databases, in-memory applications, big data analytics, gaming, media, and more. The VM configurations offered by Microsoft include:

• General-purpose (Dps v5 and Dpds v5) VMs
• Memory-optimized (Eps v5 and Epds v5) VMs

The Arm-based server ecosystem has rapidly matured over the last 5 years thanks to extensive work by Microsoft, Ampere, and other partners. Taking it a step further, Ampere and Microsoft have collaborated to add the new Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings to Ampere’s solutions website. Solutions architects and developers can create and deploy their application stacks by building on top of the reference solutions that are now available here.

As of today, more than 120 applications, tools, languages, and databases are actively running on the Ampere-based Azure VM series. This comprehensive set of software is tested and regressed daily to provide additional confidence to the developer community. We encourage everyone to utilize this site and watch for new and exciting software developments on Azure VMs soon, as well as opportunities to contribute.

Getting Started

The following resources are available to get you started on Azure’s general purpose and memory optimized Ampere based VMs:

• MSFT Blog — Now in Preview: Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere^® Altra^® Arm-Based Processors
• MSFT Azure VM Linux page https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/
• Visit amperecomputing.com/solutions to learn more about Ampere optimized tools for building cloud native solutions on Ampere^® Altra^® and Ampere^® Altra^® Max platforms.

*Based on est. SPEC CPU 2017 Integer Base for D16ps v5, D16s v5, D16as v5 Azure VMs running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and compiled with gcc 10.2.1, -O3, -mcpu=native, JEMalloc

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