GA: Azure Boost

Today we are introducing the general availability of Azure Boost, one of Microsoft Azure’s latest infrastructure innovations.  Azure Boost is a new system that offloads server virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS - such as  networking, storage, and host management - onto purpose-built hardware and software optimized for these processes.  By moving hypervisor and host OS functions from the host infrastructure to optimized hardware and software, Azure Boost enables greater network and storage performance at scale, improves security by adding another layer of logical isolation, and reduces the maintenance impact for future Azure software and hardware upgrades.

Azure Boost enables customers to achieve a remote storage throughput up to 12.5 GBps and 650K IOPS and a local storage throughput of up to 17.3 GBps and 3.8 million IOPS, enabling the fastest storage workloads available today. In addition, Azure customers can to achieve a up to 200 Gbps networking throughput.  Some of these numbers can be accesssed by signing up for experimental SKUs.  These experimental SKUs will be important for many customers and partners to integrate critical components of Azure Boost into their current VM solutions, ensuring smooth operation on this new system in the future.

While Azure Boost is generally available today, Azure Boost has already been providing benefits to millions of existing Azure VMs in production, such as enabling the exceptional remote storage performance of the Ebsv5 VM series and networking throughput and latency improvements for the entire Ev5 and Dv5 VM series.  Azure Boost will continue to innovate and provide benefits for Azure infrastructure users going forward.

Azure Boost marks a significant leap forward in Azure infrastructure innovation.  To learn more about Azure Boost, watch our product video, read our blog, and documentation.