series A is the classic among the offers and also the only series that is at least partly (in the instances A0 and A4) exists in two versions:
- Version 1 (basic): This is only intended for workloads in the development and test area
- Version 2 (standard): This supports the full feature scope of Azure VMs
Instances A8 and A11 are high-end solutions based on an Intel Xeon E5 hardware architecture that is especially suited for data intensive workloads (for example, video encoding, cluster processing, and so on).
Instances A8 and A9 are also network optimized, this means you get a fast network with InfiniBand support.
In detail, each A8 or A9 instance has two network adapters as standard:
- A 10 GBps Ethernet adapter (to connect to Azure services, such as Azure Storage)
- An InfiniBand 32 GBps network adapter and remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology (as a way to communicate with low latency and high throughput between instances in a single Cloud Service or in a single availability...