Mar 10 2023 11:55 AM - edited Mar 15 2023 03:42 PM
Today we’re excited to announce the General Available of Spot Priority Mix, a new feature that allows you to mix Spot and virtual machines (VMs), for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) flexible orchestration mode. In this blog post, we’ll explain what Spot Priority Mix is, how it works, and how you can use it to optimize your cloud costs and availability.
Spot Priority Mix is a feature that enables you to leverage the low prices of Spot virtual machines, while ensuring the reliability of standard virtual machines. Spot VMs are VMs that are run on unused Azure capacity and offer up to a 90 percent discount compared to standard VMs. However, Spot VMs may be evicted at any time if there is no available capacity or if the VM price exceeds your max price. Standard VMs are not subject to eviction, as the full price of the VM is paid for.
With Spot Priority Mix, you can specify a minimum number of standard VMs to guarantee a baseline level of performance and capacity. You can also integrate with Azure Autoscale to specify a percentage split of Spot and standard VMs for scaling in and out above your baseline standard VMs.
Key benefits of Spot Priority Mix include:
There are two new parameters specifically for Spot Priority Mix:
Spot Priority Mix can be configured through Azure Portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, ARM templates, or SDKs for VMSS Flexible orchestration mode. To get started with Spot Priority Mix:
First, navigate to the Azure Portal and go to the create screen for a new VMSS:
Ensure the following:
Next, move to the Spot tab and select the Scale with VMs and Spot VMs checkbox:
Once the Scale with VMs and Spot VMs checkbox is selected, you will be able to edit the Base VM (uninterruptible) count and Instance distribution parameters. The total of the % VMs (uninterruptible) and % Spot VMs (interruptible) must add up to 100%.
In this example, we are creating a VMSS flexible orchestration mode with 200 instances. The first 100 instances are standard Base VMs. The next VMs will be 60 standard VMs and 40 Spot VMs, following our percentage split in Instance distribution.
Learn more and get started with Spot Priority Mix by going to the documentation.
Mar 14 2023 07:14 PM
@brittanyrowe Please fix the title of the page which is exhibited as "eneral Availability " missing the G.
=> By the way, congrats by the new feature!