We are thrilled to announce the availability of B-series VM's, burstable VM's in Azure Container Service (AKS).
Burstable VM's (B-series) are significantly cheaper compared to standard and optimal recommended VM's like Standard_DS2_V2. B-series VM's are particularly suited for development and test environments where performance requirements are bursts rather than consistent. In fact, B-Series provides the cheapest cost with bursts CPU usage and thus reduces development and test environment costs significantly. We hope that this addition will significantly reduce the cost of learning Kubernetes AKS, building proof of concepts on Azure Container Service (AKS), running dev/test workloads, etc.
The following configurations are available today.
| SKU | Type | VCPUS | GB Ram | Data Disks | Max IOPS | Local SSD |
| B1s | Standard | 1 | 1 | 2 | 800 | 2GB |
| B1ms | Standard | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1600 | 4GB |
| B2s | Standard | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3200 | 8GB |
| B2ms | Standard | 2 | 8 | 4 | 4800 | 16GB |
| B4ms | Standard | 4 | 16 | 8 | 7200 | 32GB |
| B8ms | Standard | 8 | 32 | 16 | 10800 | 64GB |
In comparison, a Standard_DS2_V2 node costs greater than five times the B1/B2 SKU's today. Check the latest VM pricing.
To get started log on to the Azure portal and search for Container Service (managed). As you follow the AKS create cluster workflow, you will be able to select B-series VM's in the Node Agent VM configuration section. Read more about burstable VM's.
Please let us know how it works for you by commenting in the section below!