In essence, the machines offer on demand burst performance and let users build up credits when the full CPU power isn’t utilized. It’s a similar tactic to AWS’s T2 instances and Google’s f1-micro, letting users spend those credits when more performance is required.
B-Series Azure VM Sizes
As usual, Microsoft is offering several different sizes in the series to meet different workload and financial requirements. A single-core ‘B1’ VM with 1 GiB of memory is $0.012 per hour on Linux and $0.017 on Windows. That scales up to an 8-core, 32 GiB machine on the high-end, setting users back $0.376 for the Standard_B8ms. Here are the full details: The machines are currently available in four regions: US – West 2, US – East, Europe – West, and Asia Pacific – Southeast. More regions will be coming ‘later this year’ according to director of compute Corey Sanders. ($ 0.006) ($ 0.012) ($ 0.024) ($ 0.047) ($ 0.094) ($ 0.188) Customers in supported regions can participate in the preview via a quota request in the Azure portal. Developers will get a 50% price reduction during this period, so it could be worth getting in early. You can find more information through the official documentation, which has further performance metrics and credit costs.
