Canonical Ubuntu now available on Ampere® Altra® Arm-based Azure virtual machines

Azure-optimised images of the developer-favourite operating system to enter general availability 1 September, with a fully functional preview already live

Canonical today announces the general availability of optimised Ubuntu images on Ampere® Altra® Arm-based Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. General availability begins 1 September, with a fully functioning preview live right now.

These images provide the familiar Ubuntu experience, with an Azure-optimised kernel and configurations. Users will benefit from running the most popular operating system for public cloud, with one of the largest collections of Arm-based applications, on Azure’s secure, scalable, and highly cost-effective cloud infrastructure. 

Arm-based architectures are ideal for computing workloads, including microservices, application servers, Machine Learning (ML), open-source databases, and in-memory caches.

By combining the benefits of Ubuntu with the excellent price-performance of Azure’s new offering, enterprises can run traditional workloads in an energy-efficient and cost-optimised fashion.

“We see companies using Arm-based architectures as a way of reducing both cost and energy consumption. It’s a huge step forward for those looking to develop with Linux on Azure. We are pleased to partner with Microsoft to offer Ubuntu images,” said Alexander Gallagher, Vice President of Public Cloud at Canonical.

In addition to running general purpose compute workloads with improved price-performance, the Ampere® Altra® Arm-based platform is also suited for new Arm64-native use cases such as Anbox Cloud, which allows organisations to run Android in the cloud securely and at scale.

“Arm-based technologies are especially well suited to run modern scale-out and cloud-native workloads. We appreciate the close collaboration with Canonical, and we are thrilled to include the general availability of Ubuntu images for the Ampere® Altra® Arm-based VMs. Customers can now deploy production Linux workloads on the new Azure VMs.” said Paul Nash, VP of Product, Azure Compute Platform at Microsoft. 

“Ubuntu is a core ingredient of any use case, whether on VMs or in containers. Our collaboration with Canonical extends from the silicon to the application, allowing customers to develop and implement their workloads with the support and functionality they have come to expect,” said Sean Varley, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Ampere.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (with Arm support) is the default Linux distribution for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which will also  provide support for Arm-based VMs in the near future. 

For more information about the Ampere® Altra® Arm-based Azure Virtual Machines including regional availability, please refer to Microsoft’s blog.

Launch today via the Azure portal

Deploy and preview Ampere Arm-based Ubuntu instances on Azure today

1. On the quick launch page, select “See all images”.
2. Search for “Canonical” 
3. Choose the desired Ubuntu version. Versions that support Arm64 are Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS and 22.04 LTS. 
4. Click on “Select” and choose “Ubuntu Server XX.04 LTS – Arm64”.

With an Azure Resource Manager template

Download these files

• Template file
• Parameter file

Create a resource group in Azure.

Use the template and the parameters to deploy an instance in your resource group using PowerShell or the Azure CLI

Example with the Azure CLI:

az group create --location 'westus2' --resource-group arm-preview-rgaz deployment group create --resource-group arm-preview-rg --template-file template.json --parameters parameters.json