Advanced Azure Cloud Computing Series - Part 1

When it comes to advanced workloads in Azure like CAx engineering or cloud based gaming some people are not really convinced about the overal performance. Some meaning that the performance cant reach the end user. To show you that this is not the case here a few examples in my series about advanced Azure cloud computing performance.

This is a high performance benchmark example. You will see at the end a demo video based on a rendering benchmark and also a demo video with a CAD program (Demo version of Autodesk Inventor 2019).

For a better understanding you see below also an illustration about the setup used for this demonstration. When you do your own tests and you are working with "RDP only" then the the performance on the WAN will be very poor for this benchmark.

Therefore I added a Citrix Netscaler and optimized the HDX protocol (Kudos to my colleague Dennis Reimer!)

To get a great performance for heavy graphic workloads (e.g. CAD) or cloud gaming you would need the Microsoft Azure NV-series machines. The server running the VMs have additional NVIDIA graphic cards and their performance is directly accessible from the VM itself. More information you will find here.

To get a real world impression from what you get - see here a locally captured video from the benchmark which was running in the cloud!

(These videos are uploaded to Youtube. So please ensure you have setup in Youtube fix resolution with HD1080p60 and a good internet connection!)

And to see the real world behaviour of a CAD program running in the cloud - see here also a locally captured video from Autodesk Inventor 2019. To ensure you that this is no fake have a clooser look to the RDP Connection Analyzer in the beginning which reveals that this is truely a remote computer using HDX (Thinwire) protocol for optimal graphics. In the middle of the video you can see also shiny metal surfaces with realtime reflection rendering.

(These videos are uploaded to Youtube. So please ensure you have setup in Youtube fix resolution with HD1080p60 and a good internet connection!)

As you can see you can benefit from high performance machines without having huge investments under your own desk. (And no I get not paid by MS for this. I am an Azure fan and want to make you frenetic as I am :-) )

PS: In one of my next blogs I plan to write about cloud gaming with Azure. There are different free tools available to make this working with DirectX as well.