Microsoft has released pricing for a new kind of virtual machine in Azure, called the B-Series. The key traits of this VM type are:
- It is 1/4 the price of a similar A_v2-Series machine.
- The CPU runs at a low rate, and “bursts” on demand for higher capacity jobs.
I’d love to have more information to share, but all we have is all I stumbled upon in the pricing pages last week:
As you can see in the names, they comply with the “new” format. That S in the names suggests that these machines support Premium (SSD) storage disks.
These are low end machines, as you can see by the entry level 1 core & 1 GB RAM model. The Microsoft VM pricing page says that they are good for:
… development and test servers, low traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers, and code repositories.
The costs are really low. The B2S is just €20.71 per month, compared with €85.33 for the A2_v2 – both having 2 cores and 4 GB RAM. If you want a low end web server, then that’s a seriously cheap offering!
AWS does have something called T2 Instances. These are VMs that offer CPU burst-ability based on credits earned for low CPU utilization. The rough language of suitable roles is similar to that of the Azure B-Series. However, we have no detailed information on the B-Series yet – my bet is that will be published on September 25th (Ignite day 1).
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