Microsoft Corp.’s Build conference in Seattle this week will launch several enhancements to the company’s Azure public cloud.

Azure Compute Fleet is a new service in preview intended to simplify the provisioning of Azure compute capacity across different virtual machine types, availability zones and pricing models. Microsoft said it should dramatically simplify how Azure compute capacity is currently provisioned and managed.

Customers of Azure can quickly deploy larger workloads and maintain their desired Spot VMs’ target capacity more efficiently and cost-effectively through new programmatic and automated capabilities. Spot VMs are deeply discounted instances that don’t have guaranteed availability.

Azure Compute Fleet will automatically find an optimal mix of VMs based on customer requirements while matching them to the available compute capacity based on speed of deployment, cost of operation or a balance of both.

Up to 10,000 VMs

Customers can meet their compute capacity requirements by easily deploying and managing up to 10,000 VMs with a single API call. The new service will scale up Spot VMs more efficiently for potential cost savings.

Azure Compute Fleet will offer dozens of options for automatic and programmatic control of VM groups to respond to changing variables such as pricing, capacity availability and Spot VM evictions, which are instances that are closed down because they were reserved by another customer.

Azure Migrate and Azure Container Storage are getting new features aimed at modernization and rapid scaling. Azure Migrate will support Azure Hybrid Benefits – a feature that allows customers to migrate on-premises licenses to Azure in exchange for a discount — during assessments and business cases for Linux workloads. That translates into higher savings for Linux workloads moving to Azure through Azure Migrate.

Software-defined Kubernetes storage

Microsoft also said its fully managed, software-defined storage service for the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers will be available next month. Azure Container Storage provides simple and consistent volume management for operators and developers using Azure Kubernetes Service. Storage options include Azure Disks, Ephemeral Disks and Azure Elastic storage area networking.

Vaulted backups in Azure Container Storage, now in preview, protect data stored in Azure Files against some data loss scenarios. Soft-delete support for NFS file shares allows recovery of data lost due to unintended deletion. Geo-redundancy for large file shares improves capacity and performance for standard server message block file shares.

Microsoft also said a new Cobalt 100 Arm-based virtual machine based on the company’s custom silicon processor series (pictured) announced last November is now in preview. Cobalt VMs are custom-built on an Arm architecture and optimized for efficiency and performance when running general-purpose and cloud-native workloads.

They offer performance consistency and linear performance scaling with workloads like web apps, microservices and open-source databases. Performance is up to 40% better compared to the previous generation of Arm-based VMs on Azure.

Photo: Microsoft