For Microsoft Azure, we have a long standing promise of making our prices comparable with AWS on commodity services such as compute, storage, and bandwidth. In keeping with this commitment, we are happy to announce price reductions of up to 69% on our storage-optimized virtual machines, L Series. We are also excited to share more about our next generation of Hyper-Threaded virtual machines for general purpose and memory optimized workloads that are up to 28% lower in prices than the current generation.
Price reductions on L Series
We are reducing prices by 60% to 69% on our newly-launched L Series virtual machines, effective April 1st to match recent price changes from AWS. These VMs are storage optimized sizes, best suited for low latency workloads such as NoSQL databases including Cassandra and MongoDB. L Series offers virtual machines from 4 to 32 vCPUs, based on Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3 family with 32 to 256 GiB memory, and from 678 GB to 5.6TB of SSD disk.
New Hyper-Threaded VMs and Dv2 limited time promotion
In the next few months, Microsoft will be introducing a new generation of Hyper-Threading Technology virtual machines for general purpose workloads, Dv3, and a new family for memory optimized workloads, Ev3. This shift from physical cores to virtual cores is a key architectural change in our VMs that enables us to unlock the full potential of the latest processors. This new generation will introduce sizes with 64 vCPUs on Intel® Broadwell E5-2673 v4 2.3 processor and with 432 GiB of memory on the largest Ev3 sizes. By unlocking more power from the underlying hardware, we are able to harness better performance and efficiency, resulting in cost savings that we are passing on to our customers.
As our new Hyper-Threaded VMs become generally available in the coming months, we would like to give our customers the opportunity to take advantage of these savings early. These new Hyper-Threaded VMs will be priced up to 28% lower than Dv2 Series VMs, matching the comparable AWS instance prices. Starting today, you can provision a Dv2 Promo VM on our current generation hardware at the lower Dv3 and Ev3 VM prices, allowing you to take advantage of these cost savings now.
This promotion will be available until the launch of the Dv3 and Ev3 VMs later this year. We encourage you to deploy the Dv2 Promo VMs using Azure Resource Manager to simplify migration to the new VMs in the future.
