Preview: Azure Boost

Today we are introducing the preview Azure Boost, one of Microsoft Azure’s latest infrastructure innovations.  Azure Boost is a new system that offloads virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS onto purpose-built hardware and software, such as networking, storage, and host management. By separating hypervisor and host OS functions from the host infrastructure, 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.

This innovation enables Azure customers participating in the preview to achieve a 200 Gbps networking throughput and a leading remote storage throughput up to 10 GBps and 400K IOPS, enabling the fastest storage workloads available today.

Azure Boost allows preview users to achieve this performance through access to experimental SKUs.  This preview 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 we are announcing the preview of Azure Boost today, Azure Boost has been providing benefits to millions of existing Azure VMs in production today, 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.  We invite Azure partners and customers with high-performance network and storage needs, particularly those using the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), to take part in the preview.

Take part in our preview today to experience the future of Azure firsthand. Request access to the Preview.

To learn more about Azure Boost, read our blog.