Today I want to talk with you about Azure Spot virtual machines, I think that it’s a very interesting alternative to save money in dev/test environments.
What Microsoft says about Spot VMs: Using Azure Spot VMs allows you to take advantage of our unused capacity at a significant cost savings. At any point in time when Azure needs the capacity back, the Azure infrastructure will evict Spot VMs. VMs can be evicted based on capacity or the max price you set. For virtual machines, the eviction policy is set to Deallocate which moves your evicted VMs to the stopped-deallocated state, allowing you to redeploy the evicted VMs later.
Important characteristics of Azure Spot VMs are:
- Azure does not offer SLA for this type of VM.
- If Azure needs the capacity for “pay as you go” workloads, Azure’s infrastructure will evict the Spot virtual machines with a 30-second warning.
- VMs can be evicted based on capacity or the max price you set.
- The amount of available capacity can vary based on size, region or time of day.
Features not compatible with ephemeral disks at the time of publication of this article:
- B-series
- Promo versions of any size
- Ephemeral OS disks
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