Implement Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

  • 2 minutes

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets are an Azure Compute resource that you can use to deploy and manage a set of identical virtual machines. When you implement Virtual Machine Scale Sets and configure all your virtual machines in the same way, you gain true autoscaling. Virtual Machine Scale Sets automatically increases the number of your virtual machine instances as application demand increases, and reduces the number of machine instances as demand decreases.

With Virtual Machine Scale Sets, you don't need to pre-provision your virtual machines. It's easier to build large-scale services that target large compute, big data, and containerized workloads. As workloads increase, more virtual machine instances can be added. As workloads decrease, virtual machines instances can be removed. The process of adding and removing machines can be manual or automated, or a combination of both.

Things to know about Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Review the following characteristics of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

  • All virtual machine instances are created from the same base operating system image and configuration. This approach lets you easily manage hundreds of virtual machines without extra configuration tasks or network management.

  • Virtual Machine Scale Sets support the use of Azure Load Balancer for basic layer-4 traffic distribution, and Azure Application Gateway for more advanced layer-7 traffic distribution and SSL termination.

  • You can use Virtual Machine Scale Sets to run multiple instances of your application. If one of the virtual machine instances has a problem, customers continue to access your application through another virtual machine instance with minimal interruption.

  • Customer demand for your application might change throughout the day or week. To meet customer demand, Virtual Machine Scale Sets implements autoscaling to automatically increase and decrease the number of virtual machines.

  • Virtual Machine Scale Sets support up to 1,000 virtual machine instances. If you create and upload your own custom virtual machine images, the limit is 600 virtual machine instances.