Microsoft will stop offering long-term rentals for 17 Azure instance types – most of them powered by CPUs Intel released in the 2010s – again showing that cloud computing isn’t always a seamless and easy choice.
The fun starts on July 1st when Microsoft will stop taking orders for one-year reservations for 13 instance types – Av2, Amv2, Bv1, D, Ds, Dv2, Dsv2, F, Fs, Fsv2, G, Gs, Ls, Lsv2 – meaning it won’t be possible to book a server for a year. Microsoft will retire these instance types in May and November 2028.
For another four instance types – Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, Esv3 – Microsoft won’t allow any more reservations for one or three years, however they’ll remain operational beyond 2028. Redmond’s Retired VM Sizes Migration Guide lists all the details.
Microsoft launched these instance types in the mid-to-late 2010s, so the machines it is retiring are no spring chickens. The newest of the retirees are third-gen VMs and Redmond is now offering seventh-gen machines.
The software giant has published several pages offering advice on what to do, but none of them explain why it’s decided to retire these instance types.
The Register thinks it’s because they run old Xeon CPUs from Intel’s Haswell, Skylake and Cascade Lake generations – which debuted in 2013, 2015, and 2019.
More recent processors outperform these oldies and few Xeons have major backward-compatibility roadblocks, so very few cloudy workloads won’t be able to move. Users should therefore quite enjoy the move to newer Azure instances. Microsoft’s guidance of course recommends different Azure instance types as the ideal migration target.
Microsoft will certainly like the move because newer CPUs offer more cores and almost certainly consume less energy than Intel’s oldies, meaning Redmond can pack more VMs into fewer servers while incurring lower operating costs.
Perhaps Redmond will even free up some datacenter space it can use to host some AI hardware.
Some Azure customers, however, face a job they could probably see coming but which will still be unpleasant.
Organizations with applications running on Haswell, Skylake and Cascade Lake processors, and servers that can host them, are probably finding spare parts hard to come by and therefore must endure heightened risk. But they can choose to address that risk whenever they want to, unlike users of the 13 Azure instance types that will go away in 2028. ®
