Azure Updates: Dev Box; Managed Lustre; Network issues

Principal program manager Anthony Cangialosi shared the general availability of Microsoft Dev Box. Microsoft first launched Azure DevTest Labs in 2016, enabling development teams to create templatized VMs for development and testing purposes. Microsoft then expanded capabilities with the introduction of Visual Studio Codespaces in 2019.

“Dev Box combines developer-optimized capabilities with the enterprise-ready management of Windows 365 and Microsoft Intune. And as we work to improve Dev Box, we’ve continued to partner with other teams at Microsoft. Most recently, we worked closely with the Visual Studio team to add built-in integrations that optimize the Visual Studio experience on Dev Box,” he wrote.

Initially, Microsoft adopted a pure consumption model. However, this resulted in unwanted variability for administrators. As a result, Microsoft changed to pay-as-you-go pricing. A monthly price cap applies to prevent unpredictability.

Microsoft announced the launch of Managed Lustre, now generally available. The offering is a managed file system intended for HPC and AI workloads, set up in a pay-as-you-go model. The parallel file system provides hundreds of GBps storage bandwidth and solid-state disk latency, that readily integrates with other Azure systems and handles computationally intensive workloads.

Two persistent durable instances are available for customers, based on solid state drives with a provisioned Tebibyte of capacity: AMLFS Standard – 125 MB/s and AMLFS Premium – 250 MB/s.

“Azure Managed Lustre serves diverse businesses and organizations who have the need for high throughput storage access within energy, life sciences, meteorology, automotive, healthcare, and public sector industries. Azure Managed Lustre has you covered whether you are running tools to simulate 3D product models to accelerate time-to-market, serving thousands of users querying financial information on data analytics platforms, or building the next AI supercomputer for your generative AI solution,” wrote a Jurgen Willis, VP of Product Management for Azure Storage. So far, customers like Petronas and Duke Clinical Research Institute are using the offering to accelerate research.