Microsoft has released seven new general purpose compute VM sizes.
The new version of its A-Series VM’s have had their RAM per vCPU raised and local disk random IOPS have also been improved to be faster than the existing A version 1 sizes.
What this means is that the company has basically given its basic (vanilla) instances a big boost and also given them a new name.
Microsoft is claiming that the new A-Series VM’s will offer local disk random IOPS that are 2-10x faster than its existing series and the RAM per vCPU is increased from 1.75GiB or 7 GiB of RAM to 2 GiB or 8GiB.
In addition to the more powerful instances, Microsoft has decided to rename them in order to explain their specifications.
Comparison: A Standard vs. A_v2 for Azure instances.
Jon Beck, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft, wrote on the company’s blog: “These new sizes use our new VM naming schema which is VM family letter followed by the number of vCPU’s of the VM. The ‘m’ identifier after the vCPU count signifies our High Memory offerings (8 GiB/vCPU). (e.g. Standard_A8m_v2)”
The company said that the A_v2-Series is now available in most regions and will be shortly available in all regions, although it doesn’t say which regions these are.
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The power boost for its vanilla instances will likely be met positively from customers, it is giving the vanilla level users more power and the blog doesn’t suggest that there will be a price increase.
Microsoft’s announcement comes shortly before Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure’s main rival, holds it re:Invent conference in Last Vegas, which CBR will be attending. AWS tends not to respond directly to the moves of its competitors but maybe we will see it soon ramp up its vanilla instances offering.
