Azure now has two Arms: the familiar Azure Resource Manager infrastructure description language and tools, and now a family of Azure VMs running on Ampere Arm-based processors. This new hardware option is a big change for Microsoft’s cloud, as it aims to catch up with AWS’s custom Graviton systems.
The arrival of Arm hardware in Azure is as much an economic decision as a technology one. If you’ve ever visited one of its hyperscale data centers, you’ll have been taken around huge rooms in stadium-size buildings full of racks packed with servers, storage, and networking hardware.
