Clients of the Microsoft Azure service are in for a treat today. The Redmond giant today had many new important announcements to make. The biggest of which include unveiling of the new GS-series of virtual machines (VMs), a price cut for its existing D-Series and DS-Series VMs backed by fast solid state drives and a new tier of its Azure Service Bus service dubbed the Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging, as well as new diagnostic capabilities for VMs.
The new series of VMs, the tech giant is referring to as the GS-series, is based on the highly popular G-series that was released earlier in January, Microsoft says. This new series is, by far, the most powerful set of VMs that is available currently on the Azure Cloud services. These are slices of servers in Microsoft’s data centers on which companies and clients could run their applications.
The VMs will initially be available in only three regions around the world: East US 2, West US, and West Europe.
The high performance of the new GS-series of VMs is the result of high-end specifications which include more storage and higher throughput which will allow you to run large-scale, database-driven applications in the Microsoft Azure cloud. The new VMs, powered by the Intel Xeon E5 v3 family processors, will offer up to 64 terabytes of storage, will provide 80,000 IOPs and can deliver 2,000 MB/s of throughput to the backend storage. Here are the detailed specs of the newly announced VM series:
The second big announcement made by the tech giant today was regarding a new wave of price cuts for its existing D-Series and DS-Series VMs which were released last year. The price cuts in VMs in both series go up to as much as 27 percent, which is quite a bit, if we say so ourselves. Microsoft has recently been making many moves to outdo its public cloud competitors and this could be one of them. Keeping its cloud prices in line with those of the top public cloud whilst providing high quality services simultaneously.
Adding to the announcements list is another small but significant feature to the cloud service from Microsoft. The tech giant today introduced a new tier of its Azure Service Bus service called Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging, as well as new diagnostic capabilities for VMs that allows administrators to see manage the output from a running VM, which can assist in troubleshooting.. For a more insight on the last two services, you can visit the Azure blog.
