Today I am excited to announce the preview of the B-Series, a new Azure VM family that provides the lowest cost of any existing size with flexible CPU usage. For many workloads that run in Azure, like web servers, small databases, and development and test environments, the CPU performance is very bursty. These workloads will run for a long time using a small fraction of the CPU performance possible and then spike to needing the full power of the CPU due to incoming traffic or required work. With our current sizes, while running in these low points, you are still paying for the full CPU, so that you can handle the high and bursty points.

The B-Series offers a cost effective way to deploy these workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously and burst in their performance. While B-Series VMs are running in the low-points and not fully utilizing the baseline performance of the CPU, your VM instance builds up credits. When the VM has accumulated enough credit, you can burst your usage, up to 100% of the vCPU for the period of time when your application requires the higher CPU performance.

These VM sizes allow you to pay and burst as needed, using only a fraction of the CPU when you don’t need it and burst up to 100% of the CPU when you do need it (using Intel® Haswell 2.4 GHz E5-2673 v3 processors or better). This level control gives you extreme cost flexibility and flexible value.

The B-Series comes in the following 6 VM sizes during preview:

Size vCPU's Memory: GiB Local SSD: GiB Baseline CPU Performance of VM Max CPU Performance of VM US East Linux Price / Hour (Price during preview) US East Windows Price / Hour (Price during preview) Standard_B1s 1 1 4 10% 100% $ 0.012 ($ 0.006) $ 0.017 ($ 0.009) Standard_B1ms 1 2 4 20% 100% $ 0.023 ($ 0.012) $ 0.032 ($ 0.016) Standard_B2s 2 4 8 40% 200% $ 0.047 ($ 0.024) $ 0.065 ($ 0.033) Standard_B2ms 2 8 16 60% 200% $ 0.094 ($ 0.047) $ 0.122 ($ 0.061) Standard_B4ms 4 16 32 90% 400% $ 0.188 ($ 0.094) $ 0.229 ($ 0.115) Standard_B8ms 8 32 64 135% 800% $ 0.376 ($ 0.188) $ 0.439 ($ 0.219)

Get more information on the Burstable VM sizes. To participate in this preview, request quota in the supported region that you would like. After your quota has been approved, you can use the portal or the API’s to do your deployment as you normally would.

Available today in most regions.

See ya around,

Corey