Microsoft Announces up to 69% Discount on Azure L-Series VMs

Microsoft is constantly battling in the cloud industry to provide the best price, despite assertions that the real competition is in features. Today the company is looking to match AWS once more with a price reduction of up to 69% on its L-Series virtual machines. Those VMs represent Microsoft's storage-optimized line, launched recently for workloads that require low latency. The VMs are available in five regions currently, Canada Central, Canada East, East US 2, West US, and US Gov Virginia.

Azure L-Series VM Prices

Though the amount varies depending on your instance, general savings are in the 60-69% range. That's a very considerable decrease and should help to draw in new customers. The currently monthly estimates for Azure L-Series are as follows:

INSTANCE	CORES	RAM	DISK SIZES 1	PRICE
L4	4	32.00 GiB	678 GB	$0.343/hr
L8	8	64.00 GiB	1,388 GB	$0.686/hr
L16	16	128.00 GiB	2,807 GB	$1.373/hr
L32	32	256.00 GiB	5,630 GB	$2.746/hr

Dv3 and Ev3 VMs

Microsoft has also taken the opportunity announce its new, Hyper-Threaded VMs. The Dv3 line is for general purpose workload, while a new Ev3 line offers memory optimized workloads. “This shift from physical cores to virtual cores is a key architectural change in our VMs that enables us to unlock the full potential of the latest processors,” says Senior Director Brian Hillger. “This new generation will introduce sizes with 64 vCPUs on Intel® Broadwell E5-2673 v4 2.3 processor and with 432 GiB of memory on the largest Ev3 sizes.” The latest generation offers a price cut of up to 28% over the previous one, meaning further cost reductions and matching AWS. Though the new VMs won't be available for a couple of months, users can provision Dv2 Promo VMs at the same, lower prices today. You can find more information on Microsoft's latest price drops at the Azure blog.