Size matters, says Microsoft, as it flops out fat cloud VMs

Microsoft has introduced a new virtual machine type to Azure: the G-series instances run on Xeon E5 v3 CPUs and Redmond reckons they “provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud.” Here's Microsoft's list of the new …

[thames]

How Many People use Big VMs?

How many people are running "cloud" applications where they are using a a few very large VMs as opposed to lots of smaller ones? The smaller ones are supposed to give you more fine grained control for scaling up or down with demand.

In other words, who is using this sort of thing, and why? It sounds like a very niche market.

[Fenton]

Great for in memory databases, aka SAP HANA

[Anonymous Coward]

Also great for financial models, HPC, etc.

It's quite well known that Microsoft's Hypervisor scales better than the competition (for instance first to run 1,000,000 IOPs in a single VM instance) so not surprising that they would leverage this.

[Jim 59]

...fat PHAT cloud VMs.