Azure Spot Virtual Machines Preview Announced

Microsoft Azure has announced a public preview of Spot Virtual Machines, Azure’s method of consuming excess capacity, formerly known as Low-priority VMs.

Spot Virtual Machines are allocated from Microsoft Azure’s excess compute capacity, enabling several types of workloads to run for a significantly reduced cost than “Pay as you go” (On-Demand).

Spot Virtual Machines Anatomy

With Spot Virtual Machines, Microsoft effectively allows you to “borrow” and leverage unused capacity for a significantly lower price. However, in case there is a rise in demand, Azure can reclaim these VMs at any given moment due to higher priority allocations.

Microsoft grants access to their spare capacity in every one of their regions. The amount of spare capacity varies by region and VM size according to multiple factors, including day of week, time of day, and demand for different VM sizes.

Pricing

Unlike low-priority Virtual Machines, prices for Spot Virtual Machines will vary based on the capacity for size or SKU in an Azure region.

If with Low-priority VM’s the discount was fixed for Linux and Windows machines, with Spot Virtual Machines, the prices will change gradually (up to 90% Discount) according to various specifications such as VM Type, OS, and Region.

Spotinst & Spot Virtual Machines

We are excited to announce a private preview support for MS Azure Spot Virtual Machines, integrated into Spotinst Elastigroup. Based on VMs’ preemption rate, availability statistics and trends in the Azure compute markets, Elastigroup will provision and manage the most cost-effective and highly available compute clusters.

In addition to that, Elastigroup bundles a designated layer 7/4 Load Balancer to enable Web Applications to run on Spot Virtual Machines, including HTTP/TCP connection draining, dynamic node scaling and insightful reporting.

If an interruption is predicted by the algorithm, Elastigroup will pre-emptively provision a new VM prior to the termination. Elastigroup will fall back to On-Demand (Pay as you go) when necessary (in order to provide high-availability) and will opportunistically revert back to Spot Virtual Machine when possible.

We are looking forward to helping you get started and leverage Spot Virtual Machines on Microsoft Azure and achieve business agility, cost savings, and scale.

To enable your Spotinst account for Azure private preview please contact azure@spotinst.com.