Hello, this is David Tucker. And welcome to  Azure This Week. This week is all about the   VMs. So I've got three announcements that  could greatly impact how you leverage and   how much you pay for VMs on Azure. This includes  one of the announcements that I've been waiting   for for a very long time. What is it? Well  stick around to find out. To the news! Oh and   while you’re here, if you want to keep up to date  with that news, hit that subscribe button below.

It has finally arrived. This is the  announcement that I've been waiting for.   The much anticipated Arm64-based virtual machines  are now available as a public preview in Azure.   Now, if you're not familiar with Arm-based  processors, let me explain to you why this is such   a big deal. And the first key is cost. According  to Microsoft, these virtual machines can deliver   up to 50% better price performance than  comparable x86-based VMs. Yes, I said 50%. Second,   because these processors use significantly less  power as opposed to their x86 counterparts, these   processors can also help your organization meet  its sustainability goals. Now, as the industry as  

a whole continues to add support for Arm-based  processors now is the perfect time to try out   these processors for your cloud-based workloads.  We've seen increased support for Arm with both   .NET and Java, and even developer tooling  support has increased for arm-based machines. Now you will be able to access these virtual  machines in the Dpsv5, Dpdsv5, Dplsv5,   and Epsv5 VM series. I just wanted to see if I  could say all of those in a row without messing   up. Now, these different series are designed to  tackle both general purpose and memory intensive   workloads, depending on the specific options  that you configure. Now, all of these new VMs  

are leveraging Ampere Altra Arm-based processors  and are available in a handful of regions. Check   the link in description for information on  how you can sign up for this public preview. Did you know that you can access some of our  courses for free? Yes. Free. All the cloud   learning for none of the cost. There's a couple of  new courses that you can try for free right now.   On A Cloud Guru, we have Identity  and Access Management for Azure,   and on Pluralsight I think you might like  our AWS Developer: Getting Started course.  

The best bit is you don't even need  a credit card to sign up. So you can   just jump straight in and start. I'll  leave the links in the description. Next up, you now have a new option that you  can leverage for backing up your production   VMs. And that is the vault archive tier with  Azure Backup. While this has been in preview,   this is now generally available in a handful of  regions. This means you can take those backups and   put them in a lower cost tier with Azure Backup.  And this release even support SQL server and SAP  

HANA with Azure Virtual Machines. Now in most  situations, this will result in significant cost   savings for your backups. Now, if you want some  guidance on this Azure Backup will even recommend   which recovery points should be moved to the  archive tier to optimize your savings. Check   the link in the description for details on which  regions are currently supported with this update. In addition to the Arm64 VM series that we  announced earlier in the episode, we have another   new series. The Ebsv5 series, which joins the Ev5  family. Why does this matter? How about this? It  

supports up to 120,000 IOPS with 4,000 megabytes  per second of storage throughput. For those of you   keeping track at home, this is a 3x improvement  over previous generations when it comes to dealing   with remote storage. Now, if you're dealing  with storage-intensive workloads for your data,   such as databases, analytic workloads, or  real-time processing systems, you will want to   test this series out to see how much it improves  the performance of your workloads. Now, if all of   this talk of a new VM series is a bit confusing,  don't forget that you can leverage the VM Selector   from Microsoft to help navigate the ever-changing  collection of VM series that you can pick from. Well, I'm all out of virtual machine announcements  for you for this week. If you have any questions  

or comments, let us know below and see you  next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.