Managing VMs at scale in Azure can be a pain. Subscription throttling can prevent your operations from being received, and having to track and retry intermittent failures adds extra overhead. Scheduled Actions reduces the complexity of managing concurrent API requests in Azure at scale and allows for scheduling actions at a time in the future.
What is Scheduled Actions?
Scheduled Actions is a separate resource provider that sits above our REST API and makes calls on your subscription’s behalf at the time that you specify. Schedule Actions gives the ability to manage the lifecycle of VMs at high scale on a periodic basis. Subscription throttling and retries due to transient errors are handled automatically to ensure that your operations succeed without additional overhead.
Scheduled Actions supports the following VM operations:
- Stop
- Start
- Hibernate
Key Benefits
Scheduling
You can schedule actions to occur immediately or at a time you specify in the future.
Scale
Scheduled Actions supports up 5,000 concurrent operations for a single action.
Throttling
Scheduled Actions knows your subscription’s throttling limits and makes sure to send operations to Azure at your subscription’s limit until all operations have been received.
Retries
Scheduled Actions automatically tracks and retries errors that are transient in nature and likely to succeed with a retry.
How it Works
Scheduled Actions sits above the APIs for VM power state operations and sends actions on your behalf. Scheduled Actions ensures maximum operational throughput for your subscription on large-scale concurrent requests. Operations that fail due to intermittent or transient errors are automatically retried.
You can use batch calls of up to 100 VMs at a time to submit up to 5000 VMs for a single action. Scheduled Actions will generate an operation ID for each VM which can be used for checking the status of those operations. Actions can be executed immediately or can be submitted to trigger at a specified time. Actions scheduled at a future time can be cancelled.
Use Case – Contoso’s Event
Contoso needs 3,000 existing Azure VMs ready to use for a big weekend launch. The VMs need to be ready at 8am and be hibernated by 6:30pm.
Using Scheduled Actions, Contoso sends 30 batches of 100 VM IDs to start at 7:45am so they are available by 8. They do not need to have someone to submit the requests manually or create a custom application to send the requests.
They send another 30 batches of 100 VM IDs to Hibernate at 6:15pm so that all the VMs are Hibernated by 6:30pm. Scheduled Actions allows Contoso’s cloud infrastructure team to save time and effort in managing their Virtual Machines.
Getting Started
Visit the Scheduled Actions doc page here. - https://aka.ms/ScheduledActionsDocs
Microsoft