Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Automate the creation and deployment of your VMs and automatically issue OS updates for improved compliance and security. Centralize your templates for a consistent rollout of your applications. Increase your focus on the application and avoid additional storage configuration or network management tasks. Deploy Virtual Machine Scale Sets using Azure Resource Manager templates—with support for Windows and Linux platform images and custom images and extensions.

Increase application uptime by using availability zones and availability sets to automatically distribute VMs in a scale set within a single datacenter or across multiple datacenters. Scale sets run multiple VM instances of your application. Therefore, if one of these instances has a problem, your customers will continue to access your application with minimal disruption. Virtual Machine Scale Sets guarantee up to 99.99% service-level agreements (SLAs) for your VMs.

Optimise costs by minimizing the number of unnecessary VM instances that run your application when demand is low. Use your existing licenses to run Windows Server VMs on Azure with Azure Hybrid Benefit and combine Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances with Azure Hybrid Benefit to achieve additional savings. Run interruptible workloads with Azure Spot Virtual Machines on scale sets and realize up to 90% cost savings versus pay-as-you-go rates.

Get full control of the individual VMs within your scale set and ensure high availability at scale with Virtual Machines Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode. Change VM sizes without redeploying your scale set for increased operational agility. Mix Azure Spot Virtual Machines and pay-as-you-go VMs in the same scale set to optimise your costs. Manage VMs and VM scale sets using the same APIs. Accelerate your deployments by defining fault domains during the VM creation process.

Use only the compute resources your application needs at any time without pre-provisioning your VMs. Be future-ready and let Azure autoscale your cloud infrastructure to meet your changing performance requirements. Scale sets are elastic and designed to support your scale-out workloads, including stateless web front ends, container orchestration, and microservices clusters. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Service Fabric run on Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

Take advantage of the integration of Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Azure networking resources, such as Azure Load Balancer, to reduce cloud infrastructure management costs. Easily spread your workloads across the virtual machines in your scale sets and configure network address translation (NAT) rules to connect to specific virtual machine instances for troubleshooting. Focus more on what matters—your application—and less on the infrastructure.