How to do autoscaling with Azure VMs?

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It's pretty easy to do autoscaling with Azure web apps, and there's something called Virtual Machine Scale Sets (but that's still in beta and not working properly yet), so I'm wondering: how can we do autoscaling using normale Azure VMs?

1) I was thinking we could create a load balancer, availability set and VMs, pre-provision them and turn some off. But aside from using the API to build a DIY scaler: how can I automatically turn on more machines if the current set exceeds a certain threshold? Does Azure offer anything for this? How do big companies that use Azure handle this?

2) How can I make sure that the machines are all consistent and have the latest version of our software installed on it? Even if the machine has been offline for months?

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azurevirtual-machineautoscaling

1 Answers

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Well, those are 2 separate questions. Nonetheless:

  1. You can use VM Scale Sets to do that. Here's a nice compilation of resources
  2. VM Scale sets can kinda achieve that, but not exactly. If the VM was offline nothing can configure it (at least in Azure). You can use Powershell DSC\Ansible\Chef\whatever to configure VM once it comes up. If you are using plain VM Scale Sets you would need to upgrade VM before bringing it up.