Microsoft has announced the public preview of its new Azure VM family – the B-series, which will offer cost efficiency and burstability to workloads that are running in Azure.
These VMs are best suited for workloads that do not need a continuous CPU performance like web servers, small databases and development/test environments.
The B-series VMs are designed to optimize performance during less workload, and burst capacity during increased workloads.
The concept is quite similar to what AWS and Google have been offering through T2 instances and f1-micro and g1 small instances, respectively.
During less workloads, the B-series VMs will run in low points without utilizing the full capacity of the CPU. However, the user will pay for the full CPU only. Once the VM accumulates enough credits, it can burst above its baseline up to 100% when any application requires high performance.
Thus, these VM sizes will give cost flexibility to the end-users, who can adjust CPU usage during less and heavy workloads.
The company has introduced 6 VM sizes of B-series during preview:
Source: Microsoft
The VM size ranges from single core VM with 1 GiB memory for $0.012 per hour (in case of Linux) to eight core VMs with 32 GiB memory for $0.376 per hour (Linux). Prices for Windows are on a bit higher side.
Microsoft has previewed the VM in US – West 2, US – East, Europe – West and Asia Pacific – Southeast. The company plans to extend regions later this year.
Developers, who want to participate in the preview need to put status quota request in the supported regions.
