9 Optimized Cloud VM Types for Heavy Workload

No one-size-fits-all when it comes to cloud virtual machines (VMs). Hence the need to select a cloud VM that can serve your workloads and applications properly. Before diving deep into the various optimized cloud VM types for heavy workload applications, let’s go over the concept of cloud VMs, uses cases, and why we need them optimized.

What is Cloud Virtual Machine?

Cloud Virtual Machine (VM) is a physical computer that runs on a remote server somewhere in the cloud, allowing users to run operating systems and applications. They simply simulate the environment of a physical device and give the users access to computing resources remotely via the internet.

Cloud VMs are much more efficient and cost-effective than physical computers because they are shared between users and not managed by the users, taking out the cost and engineering of acquiring and setting up these servers. 

Benefits of Cloud VM

Cost-effective

Cloud VMs are much more cost-effective compared to setting up physical hardware and devices. The Cloud VMs operate a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model, meaning users only pay for the resource they use and nothing more, unlike when it involves the users setting up the hardware themselves.

These services are shared among multiple users making the cost distributed and a much more economical choice for businesses and organizations.

Scalability

An essential advantage of Cloud VMs is that they are highly scalable, allowing users to increase or remove resources when needed. Businesses with varying workloads could benefit from this as they have the resources to expand when required and reduce when not. While still leveraging on paying for only services used at a particular instance.

Flexibility

Cloud VMs are used for various purposes, making them flexible. They allow users to run different operating systems and software in varying environments. This flexibility makes testing and development more accessible and helps businesses adapt to changing requirements in hardware.

Choosing a Cloud VM

The following factors are worth considering when deciding on the Cloud VM to be used on any project.

Budget

Cloud services operate a PAYG model. Nevertheless, you must consider the pricing per service before settling on the provider to use cause it could cost from a few dollars to hundreds per month depending on usage – which brings us to the next factor. 

Workload

The type of workload that you need to run will determine the type of VM you need. Different cloud VMs are optimized for certain workloads, such as:

• General purpose – Balance CPU-to-memory ratio.
• Compute-optimized – High CPU
• Memory-optimized – High memory
• Storage optimized – Higher disk space
• Cost-optimized – Low-cost priority 
• Accelerator optimized – High-performing GPU
• High performance, fastest, and most powerful CPU

A high-performance computing VM is ideal for big data companies because of the powerful CPU. A GPU-optimized VM is the best if you are a graphic designing company. Hence, the user/businesses must factor in their use case to select the right VMs

Security

Cloud VMs are secure and essential for businesses with sensitive data. Users must know the security architecture of the cloud provider of choice to learn how security issues are handled.

Ensure that your infrastructure can withstand attack and fight it off without losing sensitive data to malicious actors. Also, consider the provider’s reputation, SLAs, failover strategy, and other critical elements that impact your data’s security.

Different Cloud VMs are optimized based on certain functionalities. In this section, we will go through some VMs and learn their specification and best-fit use cases. 

Google Cloud Tau VMs

Google Cloud Tau VMs are a new generation of virtual machines that offer improved performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The latest Intel and AMD processors power these VMs, and their features make them suitable for various workloads.

C2 VM has up to 56vCPUs, 12TiB of memory, 60TB of storage, and up to 10Gbps networking capability. The C2 VM suits machine learning, big data processing, and high-performance computing applications. Generally, any compute-intensive workload will work well on this VM.

M2 VM  has up to 64vCPUs, 256GB of memory, 60TB of storage, and up to  10Gbps networking capability. The M2 VM is designed for memory-intensive applications such as databases, web servers, and media streaming.

A2 VM is designed for applications with memory-intensive workloads such as databases, web servers, and media streaming. It has up to 96vCPUs, 48TiB of memory, 60TB of storage, and up to 10Gbps networking capability. 

AWS EC2

AWS EC2 Accelerated computing and HPC Optimized are optimized with solutions that could accelerate workload and deploy high-performance computing and are highly scalable, cost-effective, and easy to use. 

AWS Accelectrate computing provides VM solutions using hardware accelerators or co-processors to perform functions. AWS accelerated computing instances are powered by NVIDIA GPUs and Intel Xeon Scalable Processor.

They are designed to handle graphic-intensive workloads(machine learning, video rending, and scientific computing) and compute-intensive workloads(financial modeling, signal processing, and genomics) and are connected to a high-speed InfiniBand network.

AWS HPC Optimized instances are ideal for applications that benefit from data-intensive high-performance processors and are memory-bound, such as large, complex simulations and deep learning workloads.

It is powered by Third-Generation AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable processors suitable for computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, weather forecasting, crash simulations, seismic reservoir simulations, and structural simulations.

AWS offers various pricing models, including on-demand and savings plans and more. To get an estimate, use the AWS pricing calculator or contact their sales team for quotes.

DigitalOcean Premium Droplet

DigitalOcean Premium Droplet offers improved performance and reliability for heavy workloads. It is powered by Intel Cascade Lake or AMD EPYC Rome process and has NVMe SSD Storage.

Premium droplets have a number of features that makes them suitable for heavy workloads, such as: up to 40vCPUs, 256GB of RAM, NVMe SSD Storage, Dedicated Hyper threading (for better parallel processing), and up to 10Gbps network bandwidth.

They suit workloads like media streaming, online gaming, machine learning, big data processing, and high-performance computing.

Droplets pricing varies based on your chosen instance. Basic Droplets regular plan starts from $4 per month, while the premium intel starts from $7 per month. To get the actual pricing for your use case, explore the Droplets pricing page for quote data.

Azure VM

Azure VM series (M, H, and Mv2 series) offer optimized benefits that suit heavy workloads. 

M Series VMs are memory-optimized and are ideal for heavy memory workloads. The M-Series provides up to 4 TB of RAM on a single VM and a up to 128 vCPUs on a single VM to enable high-performance parallel processing.

They are ideal for workloads/applications like databases, web servers, media streaming, big data processing, and high-performance computing.

H Series VMs offers up to 128vCPUs and 12TiB of memory per instance. They are best suited for machine learning, big data processing, and high-performance computing. It includes:

• HB-Series VMs are optimized for HPC applications and feature up to 120 AMD EPYC 7003-series CPU cores and 448 GB of RAM
• The HC-series VMs are optimized for HPC applications driven by intensive computation. They feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores and 8 GB of RAM per CPU core.

Mv2 Series VMs The Azure Mv2-series virtual machines are hyper-threaded and feature Intel Xeon Platinum 8180M 2.5GHz (Skylake) processors. This is the largest-memory virtual machine on Azure and provides unparalleled computational performance to support memory-intensive workloads.

Azure H, M, and Mv2 series price starts from $581.08 per month, $1,121.28 per month, and $16,286.30 per month, respectively.

Linode Dedicated CPU

Linode Dedicated CPU is suited for CPU-intensive workloads/applications such as video encoding, ML, data analytics, and more. This is possible because every instance is allocated its dedicated CPU cores.

Linode recommended workload includes:

• Pro web and e-commerce sites
• CI/CD toolchains and build servers
• Game servers
• Audio and video transcoding
• Big data (and data analysis)
• Machine learning and AI
• High traffic databases

Linode offers up to 512GB RAM, 64 CPU cores, and 7,200 GB Storage SSD. Pricing for this tool starts from $36 per month or $0.054 per hour for 4 GB RAM, 2 CPUs, and 80 GB storage.

Vultr Optimized Cloud Instances

Vultr Optimized Cloud Instances are designed to serve as EC2 alternatives. Its optimized cloud instances are created for various enterprise use cases. 

• General purpose instance: This instance balances CPU, RAM, and NVMe SSD resources. It’s ideal for web and application servers, e-Commerce, game servers, video and audio streaming, API serving, and relational databases.
• CPU optimized instance: Designed for compute-bound applications, it offers more CPU capacity than RAM and NVMe SSD. This instance is best suited for video encoding, batch processing, CI/CD, high-performance computing (HPC), ad serving, and analytics processing.
• Storage optimized instance: Organizations working with large nonrelational databases like Cassandra and MongoDB, plus high-frequency online transaction processing (OLTP), will find the extensive NVMe SSD storage capacity combined with moderate CPU and RAM capacities beneficial for their use cases.
• Memory-optimized instances: Designed for memory-bound applications such as open source databases like MySQL, in-memory databases and caches, and real-time analytics – these VMs offer more RAM capacity compared to CPU and NVMe SSD.

Vultr VMs has about 32 server locations and support various OSes, including CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, and FreeBSD. The amount you will pay for this solution depends on your selected instance type.

General purpose starts from $30 per month, CPU optimized starts from $28 per month, memory-optimized starts from $40 per month, and the storage-optimized VM starts from $75 per month.

OVHcloud IOPS

Built for database servers and big data applications, OVHcloud IPOS instance helps improve disk transactions performance in the Public Cloud to make it faster. These instances offer up to four NVMe drives, each with 1.9TB storage and a minimum of 400,000 IOPS.

OVHcloud IPOS infrastructures and services are compliant with industry standards and are ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, and 27701 certified.

OVHcloud IOPS pricing starts from $0.488 per hour. This includes 45 GB of memory, 8 vCore, 50 GB SSD storage, and 1.9 TB NVMe disks.

UpCloud Cloud Servers

UpCloud Cloud Servers offers high CPU and memory-optimized VMs suitable for workloads with a lot of processing and memory requirements.

An Intel Xeon scalable processor powers it and offers up to 64 vCPUs and 384GB of memory. UpCloud is a good choice for workloads such as databases, web servers, CDNs, HPC, AI, and ML.

Pricing for this solution depends on your selected plan. UpCloud general-purpose plans start from €7 per month or €0.0104 per hour; high CPU plans start from €130 per month or
€0.1935 per hour, and high memory plans start from €40 per month or €0.0595 per hour. For your actual rate, contact their sales team for quotes.

IBM Cloud Virtual Server

IBM Cloud Virtual Server ultra-high memory VMs are optimized for data-intensive workloads. It provides high-performance computing and unparalleled memory capacity, making it a good choice for businesses requiring large memory without compromising computing performance.

IBM cloud ultra-high memory is powered by an Intel Xeon process with 28 GB of RAM per vCPU to serve in-memory OLTP databases. It also comes with NVMe SSD storage faster than traditional hard drives. It is best f as web servers, databases, CDNs, HPC, ML, and AI workloads.

Conclusion

Cloud VM providers are continuously improving their services to meet the growing need of businesses. Using an optimized VM offers many benefits, from cost savings to scalability to flexibility and more.

The best VMs for you depends on your unique workload needs and preferences. Analyze your needs and ensure you select the right VMs for your workload, factoring in the strengths and weaknesses.

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