Ampre Altra ARM Processors Come to Azure

High performance ARM processors are now in Azure with the Amprere Altra processors. The new Azure Virtual Machines will offer up to 64 virtual processors and up to 208 GiBs of memory, allowing the machines to handle many different types of workloads. Currently CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows 11 Professional are supported for an operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server, Debian AlmaLinux, and Flatcar support will be available soon. Apps built on .NET 5 or 6 offer ARM support and C# 10 and F# 6 include native ARM support to build apps that can run on these new Azure Virtual Machines. Details on these announcements can be found here

Why This Matters

• ARM-based servers are a major push from the leading cloud vendors as these machines consume less power, can outperform similar x86 configurations, and can be less expensive to operate. 
• While most organizations won’t have ARM-based apps today, the development tools to build these apps are available now and the expectation is an increasing number of apps will become available using the ARM architecture.