Azure Boost Accelerates Networking, Storage

• Azure Boost, now in general availability, provides hardware-based network and storage acceleration for select Azure Linux VM series for no additional cost.
• Boost is in development, so customers should approach with caution.

Azure Boost, announced in July 2023 and generally available in Nov. 2023 for select Linux Azure VM series, is an intelligent PCIe card incorporating custom silicon programmed to accelerate network and storage functions. For example, by parsing network packet headers or managing low-level storage protocols such as NVMe in hardware, these functions can be offloaded from the hypervisor or the customer’s host OS, thus improving performance, particularly for workloads involving massive amounts of data, such as machine learning or data analytics.

The Boost hardware consists of the following:

• An Arm-based system-on-a-chip (SOC) which runs a local version of Linux. Microsoft has stated the current Linux distro on Boost is based on Yocto (which allows developers to create