Introduction
Getting started with Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100, Azure Linux 3.0, and Apache Spark
Create an Azure Cobalt 100 Arm64 virtual machine
Set up an Azure Linux 3.0 environment
Install Apache Spark on Azure Cobalt 100 processors
Validate Apache Spark on Azure Cobalt 100 Arm64 VMs
Benchmark Apache Spark
Next Steps
This section introduces the key technologies you will use when running Spark applications on Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 processors. You will learn about the Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based processor, Azure Linux 3.0, and Apache Spark.
Azure Cobalt 100 is Microsoft’s first-generation Arm-based processor, designed for cloud-native, scale-out Linux workloads. Based on Arm’s Neoverse-N2 architecture, this 64-bit CPU delivers improved performance and energy efficiency. Running at 3.4 GHz, it provides a dedicated physical core for each vCPU, ensuring consistent and predictable performance.
Typical workloads include web and application servers, data analytics, open-source databases, and caching systems.
To learn more, see the Microsoft blog Announcing the preview of new Azure virtual machines based on the Azure Cobalt 100 processor .
Azure Linux 3.0 is Microsoft’s lightweight Linux distribution optimized for cloud-native workloads on Azure. It is designed for performance, security, and reliability. Azure Linux 3.0 is tailored for containers, microservices, and Kubernetes.
With native support for Arm64 (AArch64) architecture, Azure Linux 3.0 enables efficient execution of workloads on Arm-based infrastructure, making it a scalable and cost-effective choice for cloud deployments.
Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed computing system for fast, general-purpose big data processing. It provides high-level APIs in Java, Scala, Python, and R, and supports in-memory computation for improved performance.
Spark is widely used for large-scale data analytics, machine learning, and real-time data processing.
Learn more at the Apache Spark official website and in the official documentation .