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Today, Azure has expanded its confidential computing offerings with the general availability of the DCasv6 and ECasv6 confidential VM series in regions UAE North and Korea Central. These VMs are powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors and feature advanced Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) technology.

These confidential VMs offer:

• Hardware-rooted attestation


• Memory encryption in multi-tenant environments


• Enhanced data confidentiality


• Protection against cloud operators, administrators, and insider threats

You can get started today by creating confidential VMs in the Azure portal as explained here.

Highlights:

• 4th generation AMD EPYC processors with SEV-SNP


• 25% performance improvement over previous generation


• Ability to rotate keys online


• AES-256 memory encryption enabled by default


• Up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB RAM for demanding workloads

Streamlined Security

Organizations in certain regulated industries and sovereign customers migrating to Microsoft Azure need strict security and compliance across all layers of the stack. With Azure Confidential VMs, organizations can ensure the integrity of the boot sequence and the OS kernel while helping administrators safeguard sensitive data against advanced and persistent threats. The DCasv6 and ECasv6 family of confidential VMs support online key rotation to give organizations the ability to dynamically adapt their defenses to rapidly evolving threats.

Additionally, these new VMs include AES-256 memory encryption as a default feature. Customers have the option to use Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) in Windows, which is currently in preview to protect private keys from exfiltration via the Guest OS or applications. With VBS enabled, keys are isolated within a secure process, allowing key operations to be carried out without exposing them outside this environment.

Faster Performance

In addition to the newly announced security upgrades, the new DCasv6 and ECasv6 family of confidential VMs have demonstrated up to 25% improvement in various benchmarks compared to our previous generation of confidential VMs powered by AMD. Organizations that need to run complex workflows like combining multiple private data sets to perform joint analysis, medical research or Confidential AI services can use these new VMs to accelerate their sensitive workload faster than ever before.

“While we began our journey with v5 confidential VMs, now we’re seeing noticeable performance improvements with the new v6 confidential VMs based on 4th Gen AMD EPYC “Genoa” processors. These latest confidential VMs are being rolled out across many Azure regions worldwide, including the UAE. So as v6 becomes available in more regions, we can deploy AMD based confidential computing wherever we need, with the same consistency and higher performance.”

— Mohammed Retmi, Vice President – Sovereign Public Cloud, at Core42, a G42 company.

“KT is leveraging Azure confidential computing to secure sensitive and regulated data from its telco business in the cloud. With new V6 CVM offerings in Korea Central Region, KT extends its use to help Korean customers with enhanced security requirements, including regulated industries, benefit from the highest data protection as well as the fastest performance by the latest AMD SEV-SNP technology through its Secure Public Cloud built with Azure confidential computing.”

— Woojin Jung, EVP, KT Corporation

Kubernetes support

Deploy resilient, globally available applications on confidential VMs with our managed Kubernetes experience – Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). AKS now supports the new DCasv6 and ECasv6 family of confidential VMs, enabling organizations to easily deploy, scale and manage confidential Kubernetes clusters on Azure, streamlining developer workflows and reducing manual tasks with integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. AKS brings integrated monitoring and logging to confidential VM node pools with in-depth performance and health insights, the clusters and containerized applications.

Azure Linux 3.0 and Ubuntu 24.04 support are now in preview. AKS integration in this generation of confidential VMs also brings support for Azure Linux 3.0, that contains the most essential packages to be resource efficient and contains a secure, hardened Linux kernel specifically tuned for Azure cloud deployments. Ubuntu 24.04 clusters are also supported in addition to Azure Linux 3.0. Organizations wanting to ease the orchestration issues associated with deploying, scaling and managing hundreds of confidential VM node pools can now choose from either of these two for their node pools.

General purpose & Memory-intensive workloads

Featuring general purpose optimized memory-to-vCPU ratios and support for up to 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB RAM, the DCasv6-series delivers enterprise-grade performance. The DCasv6-series enables organizations to run sensitive workloads with hardware-based security guarantees, making them ideal for applications processing regulated or confidential data.

For more memory demanding workloads that exceed even the capabilities of the DCasv6 series, the new ECasv6-series offer high memory-to-vCPU ratios with increased scalability up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB of RAM, nearly doubling the memory capacity of DCasv6.

You can get started today by creating confidential VMs in the Azure portal as explained here.

Additional Resources:

• Quickstart: Create confidential VM with Azure portal


• Quickstart: Create confidential VM with ARM template


• Azure confidential virtual machines FAQ