New Arm-based cloud services from Microsoft highlight the power of choice in computing

By Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm

April 04, 2022 -- Two years ago, businesses were put to the test in how they adapted to a seemingly overnight transition to remote working. Fast forward to the post-pandemic workplace where the average employee uses more than 30 cloud-based services including file sharing and data security daily. The cloud quickly became essential to a vast number of services we rely on every day. To meet this demand, cloud service providers are seeking out the best approach to cost effectively scale while delivering the compute performance needed to process the 100 zettabytes of data expected to be stored in the cloud by 2025. In fact, the overall cost savings of migrating to cloud services is what’s expected to drive more than 85% of organizations to embrace a cloud-first principle and more than 95% of new digital workloads that will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025 (up by 65% from 2021), according to Gartner.

For organizations to achieve increased cost savings, cloud service providers want a higher performance and energy efficient computing platform like Arm Neoverse to run their modern scale-out workloads. In addition, developers want a frictionless experience. This is why Arm, alongside its ecosystem, is contributing to 100+ open-source initiatives so developers can seamlessly develop and deploy cloud-native applications on Arm-based server platforms. Microsoft has been a key partner in this collaboration, working with Arm on leading languages, compilers, libraries, frameworks and tools most commonly used by developers.

That ongoing collaboration has led to today. As a leading global provider of cloud computing services to more than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies, Microsoft announced it is building on the price performance and power efficiency gains of Arm in its preview of new Linux-based Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine (VM) offerings, powered by the Ampere Altra platform based on the Arm Neoverse N1 CPU. By providing up to 50% better price performance than comparable x86-based Azure VMs for scale-out workloads, the new Arm-based VMs will deliver better overall TCO and cleaner cloud service operations for its vast customer ecosystem which spans market segments such as retail, government, healthcare, financial services and manufacturing.

The massive scale of a company like Microsoft, which powers 60 plus datacenter regions across 140 countries, means it’s critical that the underlying hardware powering this infrastructure is sustainable –not just for the cloud service provider, but the end users as well. Gartner predicts that by 2025, carbon emissions of hyperscale cloud services will be a top three criterion in cloud purchase decisions. The power to choose an architecture that enables dense, low-cost, energy efficient servers with a small footprint, low power and performant compute silicon is important not only for the future of our planet, but to the innovators creating the technology of our future.

As the diversity of workloads increases, there can be no one-size-fits all approach to computing. It’s more important than ever that we work with industry change-makers like Microsoft to put tools in the hands of organizations around the globe to digitally transform their businesses. Together with Microsoft and Ampere, we are doing just that by delivering an improved cloud experience that enables more predictable performance, linear scalability and power efficiency along with compelling price-performance.

Additional Resources

• Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors
• Microsoft Azure preview now available for Arm Neoverse

About Arm

Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and data revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. Our energy-efficient processor designs and software platforms have enabled advanced computing in more than 215 billion chips and our technologies securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. Together with 1,000+ technology partners we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing all areas of AI-enhanced connected compute from the chip to the cloud.