Here comes good news from Microsoft’s Azure camp. The company has announced the preview of a new family of Virtual Machines under the name B-Series, which, according to the company, will “provide the lowest cost of any existing size with flexible CPU usage”.
The new B-Series VMs will allow users not to pay for the full CPU usage while their workloads are running at the low-point of CPU performance utilization; instead, they will get a credit which can be used when the full CPU performance is needed, which the company calls bursty points.
“With our current sizes, while running in the low points, you are still paying for the full CPU, so that you can handle the high and bursty points. The B-Series offers a cost effective way to deploy these workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously and burst in their performance. While B-Series VMs are running in the low-points and not fully utilizing the baseline performance of the CPU, your VM instance builds up credits. When the VM has accumulated enough credit, you can burst your usage, up to 100% of the vCPU for the period of time when your application requires the higher CPU performance.”
There will be 6 VM sizes during B-Series Preview.
Source: Microsoft
However, currently the B-Series VMs are in Preview and launched only in 4 regions but the company promises to extend its reach later this year.
- US – West 2
- US – East
- Europe – West
- Asia Pacific – Southeast
Well, good step Microsoft! This cost flexibility and portability of VMs will prove to be a boon to small enterprises willing to work in the cloud but afraid of high expenses. Needless to say, it will add up to a number of clients in Microsoft’s Azure client base.
More information can be collected from
here.