Microsoft Azure on Arm Servers Keynote at Linaro Connect Hong Kong 2018

HKG18-300K1 – Keynote: Leendert van Doorn “Microsoft Azure: Operating at Hyper-Scale”

At scale everything changes. It is one thing to operate a datacenter of 10K nodes, it’s an entirely different thing to operate millions of nodes across 100’s of datacenters around the world. What works well for enterprises doesn’t necessarily work at scale.

Microsoft is currently deploying their 6th generation platform designs and at each generation their insights improve and in some cases entirely change leading to many specific requirements to silicon vendors, ODMs and system integrators. Over the years Microsoft effectively had to become its own OEM where they manage the entire system design from sheet metal, motherboards, firmware, hypervisors, operating systems, management stacks and corresponding higher-level services. They do this so they can control cost, quality, reduce complexity and drive their innovations.

In this talk he takes people through some of the lessons learned when Microsoft Azure’s scale increased over the years. He presents some of the rationale behind their ARM64 server plans and specifically the rational behind some of their ARM64 silicon requirements.

Leendert van Doorn is a distinguished engineer in Microsoft’s Azure organization where he is running a set of hyper-scale incubation projects. Before joining Microsoft he was a Corporate VP/Fellow at AMD driving various software and hardware initiatives. Leendert holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.