Very similar to AWS EC2 spot instances, Microsoft have now released Azure Spot VM’s into preview.
Spot VM’s offer you big discounts in terms of the compute cost to run the VM, however a spot VM can be deallocated at any time. As soon as Azure no longer has available compute capacity and needs to reallocate its resources this is when your spot instances will be deallocated.
The ideal workloads your looking to run on Spot Instances are:
- Test Environments – That will cause no downtime when unavailable and can be spun back up when Azure Resource is available.
- Stateless Applications that can scale up/down with no issues
- Batch Jobs
Before a VM is evicted/deallocated you will get a 30 second warning notifying you of the deallocation.
For more information on Spot instances and pricing please see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/
