Azure Spot Virtual Machines
Azure spot virtual machines are the VMs that are unused at the time and one can take advantage of Azure’s this spare compute capacity for their needs at a very low cost as compared to the Pay-As-You-Go pricing model. Azure has enough cloud servers in their inventory and that inventory doesn’t get used enough by customers, so Azure rent them to customers as a spot Virtual Machine. If demand for virtual machines or compute capacity increases from on-demand (pay-as-you-go) customers then Azure can take back their servers by just giving a short warning. Therefore, Azure spot virtual machines are not recommended to work that needs fewer interruptions.
The amount of spare server computes capacity of Azure can vary based on various factors like region for VM deployment, size of VM, time of day, etc. When there is capacity available the Azure will allocate Virtual Machine. But for these VMs there is no Service Level Agreement(SLA). SLA is basically a commitment that Azure provides to their customers for servers’ uptime and connectivity. Azure spot virtual machines are a great solution for the workloads that can handle interruptions. According to Azure, up to 90% of the cost can be saved using spot VMs than the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Microsoft Azure – Introduction to Spot Virtual Machines
In this article, we will see what are Spot Virtual Machines and how can one save costs using these virtual machines.