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For those familiar with AWS Nitro, this will sound extremely familiar. During Microsoft Ignite 2023, the cloud giant announced the general availability of their Azure Boost system.
Boost is a combination of hardware and software that physically separates the hypervisor and its operating system from the virtual machines hosted on the server. The custom Microsoft silicon handles networking, storage, and host management duties leaving more room for virtual machines, and accelerating the maximum network throughput and storage with two hardware enhancements.
Microsoft Azure Network Adapter is their next generation NIC that supports over 200Gbps of bandwidth to the VM. The Boost card also includes an FPGA for storage that boasts up to 12.5 GBps throughput and 650K IOPS. Paired with Local NVMe drives for caching, they were able to deliver 3.8 millions IOPS and 17.2GB/s of throughput.
Since Microsoft owns the whole Boost stack, they can also deliver additional security through an independent hardware root of trust, and they can update the hypervisor software and operating system independently of the VMs running on the system.
Like I said, if you’ve followed what AWS did with Nitro, none of this is news. But hey, imitation is the sincerest formation of flattery. And AWS should be very flattered. You can start using the features of Boost today on select VM size families.