Autoscaling Now Available in Azure API Management v2 Tiers
Gateway-Level Metrics: Deep Insight into Performance Azure API Management now exposes fine-grained metrics for each Azure API management v2 gateway instance, giving you more control and observability. These enhancements give you deeper visibility into your infrastructure and the ability to scale automatically based on real-time usage—without manual effort. Key Gateway Metrics CPU Percentage of Gateway – Available in Basic v2, Standard v2, and Premium v2 Memory Percentage of Gateway – Available in Basic v2 and Standard v2 These metrics are essential for performance monitoring, diagnostics, and intelligent scaling. Native Autoscaling: Adaptive, Metric-Driven Scaling With gateway-level metrics in place, Azure Monitor autoscale rules can now drive automatic scaling of Azure API Management v2 gateways. How It Works You define scaling rules that automatically increase or decrease gateway instances based on: CPU percentage Memory percentage (for Basic v2 and Standard v2) Autoscale evaluates these metrics against your thresholds and acts accordingly, eliminating the need for manual scaling or complex scripts. Benefits of Autoscaling in Azure API management v2 tiers Autoscaling in Azure API Management brings several critical benefits for operational resilience, efficiency, and cost control: Reliability Maintain consistent performance by automatically scaling out during periods of high traffic. Your APIs stay responsive and available—even under sudden load spikes. Operational Efficiency Automated scaling eliminates manual, error-prone intervention. This allows teams to focus on innovation, not infrastructure management. Cost Optimization When traffic drops, auto scale automatically scales in to reduce the number of gateway instances—helping you save on infrastructure costs without sacrificing performance. Use Case Highlights Autoscaling is ideal for: APIs with unpredictable or seasonal traffic Enterprise systems needing automated resiliency Teams seeking cost control and governance Premium environments that demand always-on performance Get Started Today Enabling autoscaling is easy via the Azure Portal: Open your API Management instance Go to Settings > Scale out (Autoscale) Enable autoscaling and define rules using gateway metrics Monitor performance in real time via Azure Monitor Configuration walkthrough: Autoscale your Azure API Management v2 instanceIncrease availability at scale with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode
Today customers can deploy and manage their stateful and stateless applications on Azure using Availability Sets and/or Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Availability sets provide fault isolation guarantees and the ability to manage VMs individually, whereas Virtual Machine Scale Sets simplifies large-scale deployments and provide rich application runtime features. In various situations, large scale customers must choose between scale or high availability. However, availability sets only offer up to 200 VMs making it hard for customers to scale and meet customer demands, whereas VM scale sets can scale up to 1000 VMs but offer individual access to VMs or their resources for customization (if required). VMs created within a VM scale set also have a slightly different resource model compared to individual VMs provisioned individually outside of a scale set, additionally VMs cannot be attached or detached to the VM Scale Sets. As more workloads move to the cloud - like open-source databases, large-scale web services, stateful or stateless workloads, batch processing etc. - customers require high scale, autoscaling, agility, high availability, elasticity, in addition to greater ease of management and configuration, rich app management tools to successfully meet an ever-changing environment. Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode We are thrilled to announce the evolution of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets with a new orchestration mode, now in public preview, that delivers a richer and more powerful platform for customers to easily run a variety of workloads at high scale and with high availability. The new Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode or VMSS-flex offer new capabilities and can provide best in class experience for Quorum-based workloads Open-Source databases Stateful applications Services which require high availability and large scale Services which want to mix virtual machine types, or leverage Spot and on-demand VMs together. Existing Availability Set applications We recognize that a lot of customers have been using Virtual Machine Scale Sets to successfully run their applications. Customers will still be able to access/create/manage their existing scale sets using the existing APIs with the current orchestration mode now called “uniform orchestration mode” which is Generally Available and remains the default. Both uniform and flexible orchestration modes will move forward and will be supported. By selecting the Uniform Orchestration mode, customers can continue using VMSS without disruption. The preview announced today for Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode (VMSS-flex) provides high availability guarantees and large scale up to 1000 VMs per AZ. You can chose to deploy your VMs across fault domains in a region or within an Availability Zone. This enables you to scale seamlessly along with fault isolation constraints to achieve High Availability, which are essential to run quorum-based or stateful workloads. In addition, scale sets also offer ‘sticky’ Fault Domains i.e. Fault Domains that do not change during a VM’s lifecycle until the VM is deleted. You can also specify a Fault Domain as part of a VM deployment, which makes it simpler to replace VMs without impacting workload configurations. This is specifically relevant for open-source databases like Cassandra or other quorum-based applications. E.g. az vm create –vmss “myVMSS” –-platform_fault_domain 1 We are also unifying the VM experience across our offerings. VMs which are created with VMSS-flex are Azure Resource Manager (ARM) based VMs. The VM and its resources are individually addressable like any other VM unlike the existing uniform orchestration mode. This enables far more flexibility for you to manage your infrastructure either as a set with VMSS-flex or individually. Here are more details about today’s preview: Supported VM series: General purpose: B, Dsv3, Dv3, Dasv4, Dav4, DSv2, Dv2, Av2, DC, DCv2, Dv4, Dsv4, Ddv4, Ddsv4 Compute Optimized: F, Fs, Fsv2 Memory Optimized: Esv3, Ev3, Easv4, Eav4, Ev4, Esv4, Edv4, Edsv4, DSv2, Dv2 Remaining series like memory optimized Mv2, M, storage optimized (Lsv2), GPU (NC, NCv2, NCv3, NCasT4_v3 (Preview), ND, NDv2 (Preview), NV, NVv3, NVv4) and high-performance compute (HB, HBv2, HC, H) are not supported and will be added to VMSS-flex in the future. Fault Domain availability: same as region provides. 1 when deployed in an Availability Zone Since VMSS-flex is unlocking significant value for you and providing high availability at large scale. To provide a more complete picture and transparency regarding future product enhancements, I’m happy to pre-announce some of the upcoming features that will be added to Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode. In the near future VMSS-flex will also offer: Elasticity profile – ability to provide VM configuration and set instance count Ability to mix Spot and On-demand VMs in the same scale set Metrics based autoscaling – ability to automatically scale out or scale in based on aggregate CPU usage, disk IO performance, etc. Instance repair – automatically remove and replace instances with unhealthy application state Terminate notification – receive instance termination notifications and set a pre-defined delay timeout to the terminate operation Resources to get you started Virtual Machine Scale Sets Learn how to deploy and manage VMSS Flex
