The latest update to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud platform has brought with it a new infrastructure service called Dedicated Host that enables enterprises to rent out isolated servers for important applications.

Microsoft launched the offering into preview today. Normally, when a company deploys a virtual machine in Azure, the workload runs on hardware that’s shared by several other customers. In contrast, the servers available through Dedicated Host are single-tenant machines that an enterprise can reserve for its exclusive use.

The service makes it possible to isolate important workloads from the other user workloads in Azure. That can make it easier for companies to comply with cybersecurity rules, particularly in heavily regulated industries such as finance and healthcare. This isolation also provides added protection  against certain types of threats such as the Cloudborne vulnerability disclosed in February, which could be theoretically exploited by hackers to take over cloud servers shared among multiple users.

Dedicated Host machines come in two flavors. Type 1 is based on Intel Corp.’s Xeon E5-2673 v4 central processing unit, which has a top sustained clock speed of 3.4 gigahertz and provides 40 physical processing cores.

Type 2 includes several of the chipmaker’s newer Platinum 8168 CPUs for a total of 48 physical cores. This one targets performance-intensive applications, while Type 1 is aimed at workloads that consume a lot of memory such as analytics software. Companies can configure the latter server with as much as 448 gibibytes (a measure slightly larger than gigabytes) of RAM, while the Type 2 provides up to 144 GiB. 

Microsoft has also thrown in extra management options that aren’t available with standard Azure virtual machines. 

“Azure Dedicated Host gives you the option to defer host [server] maintenance operations and apply them within a defined maintenance window, 35 days,” Ziv Rafalovich, principal project manager for Azure Compute, wrote in a blog post. “During this self-maintenance window, you can apply maintenance to your hosts at your convenience, thus gaining full control over the sequence and velocity of the maintenance process.”

The addition of Azure Dedicated Host fills an important gap in Microsoft’s cloud portfolio. Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC, the company’s two biggest rivals in the cloud market, have been offering single-tenant servers for quite some time.

According to recent data from Gartner Inc., Microsoft is the second-largest player in the infrastructure-as-a-service segment with a 15.5% market share as of the end of the 2018. AWS sits comfortably in first place with control of close to half the market, while Google LLC ranks fourth behind China’s Alibaba Holdings Co. Ltd. Gartner estimates that Microsoft and Google grew their respective cloud infrastructure revenues by more than 60% last year.

Photo: Microsoft