We are happy to announce that Accelerated Networking (AN) is generally available (GA) and widely available for Windows and the latest distributions of Linux providing up to 30Gbps in networking throughput, free of charge!
AN provides consistent ultra-low network latency via Azure's in-house programmable hardware and technologies such as SR-IOV. By moving much of Azure's software-defined networking stack off the CPUs and into FPGA-based SmartNICs, compute cycles are reclaimed by end user applications, putting less load on the VM, decreasing jitter and inconsistency in latency.
Read about it in the Azure blog.