Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Author: Ronald Fung
Creation Date: 2 June 2023
Next Modified Date: 2 June 2024
A. Introduction
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets let you create and manage a group of load balanced VMs. The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule. Scale sets provide the following key benefits:
Easy to create and manage multiple VMs
Provides high availability and application resiliency by distributing VMs across availability zones or fault domains
Allows your application to automatically scale as resource demand changes
Works at large-scale
With Flexible orchestration, Azure provides a unified experience across the Azure VM ecosystem. Flexible orchestration offers high availability guarantees (up to 1000 VMs) by spreading VMs across fault domains in a region or within an Availability Zone. This enables you to scale out your application while maintaining fault domain isolation that is essential to run quorum-based or stateful workloads, including:
Quorum-based workloads
Open-source databases
Stateful applications
Services that require high availability and large scale
Services that want to mix virtual machine types or leverage Spot and on-demand VMs together
Existing Availability Set applications
Learn more about the differences between Uniform scale sets and Flexible scale sets in Orchestration Modes.
B. How is it used at Seagen
As a biopharma research company using Microsoft Azure, you can use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to improve the performance, availability, and scalability of your cloud-based applications and services. Here are some ways you can use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets:
Automatic scaling: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets allows you to automatically scale your virtual machines based on traffic patterns, ensuring that your applications and services are always available and responsive.
High availability: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides high availability capabilities, allowing you to distribute your virtual machines across multiple availability zones, ensuring that your applications and services are always available, even in the event of an outage.
Load balancing: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides load balancing capabilities, allowing you to distribute traffic across multiple virtual machines, ensuring that your applications and services are always responsive.
Customizable scaling rules: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides customizable scaling rules, allowing you to tailor your scaling policies based on your specific needs and requirements.
Integration with Azure services: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service, allowing you to easily manage and scale your cloud-based applications and services.
Cost optimization: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides cost optimization capabilities, allowing you to dynamically adjust your virtual machine capacity based on traffic patterns, reducing costs during periods of low traffic.
Security and compliance: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides advanced security and compliance features, including role-based access control, encryption, and compliance certifications.
Overall, by leveraging Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, you can improve the performance, availability, and scalability of your cloud-based applications and services, and make sure that your users have a seamless experience, regardless of their location or traffic patterns. By using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets for automatic scaling, high availability, load balancing, customizable scaling rules, integration with other Azure services, cost optimization, and security and compliance, you can effectively manage your cloud-based applications and services and make data-driven decisions that support your biopharma research efforts.
C. Features
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets is a service in Microsoft Azure that provides a range of features to help you manage and scale your virtual machines. Here are the key features of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets:
Automatic scaling: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets allows you to automatically scale your virtual machines based on custom scaling rules, ensuring that your applications and services are always available and responsive.
High availability: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides high availability capabilities, allowing you to distribute your virtual machines across multiple availability zones, ensuring that your applications and services are always available, even in the event of an outage.
Load balancing: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides load balancing capabilities, allowing you to distribute traffic across multiple virtual machines, ensuring that your applications and services are always responsive.
Customizable scaling rules: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides customizable scaling rules, allowing you to tailor your scaling policies based on your specific needs and requirements.
Integration with Azure services: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service, allowing you to easily manage and scale your cloud-based applications and services.
Cost optimization: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides cost optimization capabilities, allowing you to dynamically adjust your virtual machine capacity based on traffic patterns, reducing costs during periods of low traffic.
Security and compliance: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides advanced security and compliance features, including role-based access control, encryption, and compliance certifications.
Custom images: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets allows you to create custom images of your virtual machines, making it easy to deploy and scale your custom applications and services.
Rolling upgrades: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides rolling upgrades capabilities, allowing you to upgrade your virtual machines in a controlled and automated manner.
Data disks and snapshots: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets allows you to attach data disks and create snapshots, making it easy to manage and backup your virtual machine data.
Overall, by leveraging Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, you can improve the performance, availability, and scalability of your cloud-based applications and services, and make sure that your users have a seamless experience, regardless of their location or traffic patterns. By using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets for automatic scaling, high availability, load balancing, customizable scaling rules, integration with other Azure services, cost optimization, security and compliance, custom images, rolling upgrades, and data disks and snapshots, you can effectively manage your cloud-based applications and services and make data-driven decisions that support your biopharma research efforts.
D. Where Implemented
E. How it is tested
Testing Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets involves verifying that the service is properly configured and that it is effectively scaling your virtual machines based on custom scaling rules. Here are some steps you can take to test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets:
Verify configuration: Verify that Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets is properly configured and integrated with your Azure account and virtual machines.
Test scaling policies: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that your virtual machines are scaling up or down based on custom scaling rules, ensuring that your applications and services are always available and responsive.
Test high availability: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that your virtual machines are distributed across multiple availability zones, ensuring that your applications and services are always available, even in the event of an outage.
Test load balancing: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that traffic is properly load balanced across all virtual machines, ensuring that your applications and services are always responsive.
Test customizable scaling rules: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that your custom scaling rules are properly configured and applied, ensuring that your virtual machines are scaled up or down based on your specific needs and requirements.
Test integration with other Azure services: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that it properly integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service, allowing you to easily manage and scale your cloud-based applications and services.
Test cost optimization: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that it dynamically adjusts your virtual machine capacity based on traffic patterns, reducing costs during periods of low traffic.
Test security: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that it provides advanced security features, helping to protect the privacy and security of your data.
Test scalability: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that it is highly scalable, allowing you to easily scale up or down as your traffic needs change.
Test custom images: Test Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets by verifying that it properly supports custom images of your virtual machines, making it easy to deploy and scale your custom applications and services.
Overall, testing Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets involves verifying that the service is effectively scaling your virtual machines based on custom scaling rules, and providing high availability, load balancing, customizable scaling rules, integration with other Azure services, cost optimization, security, scalability, and support for custom images. By taking these steps, you can ensure that you are effectively using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to manage and scale your cloud-based applications and services and make data-driven decisions that support your biopharma research efforts.
F. 2023 Roadmap
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G. 2024 Roadmap
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H. Known Issues
As with any software or service, there may be known issues or limitations with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets that users should be aware of. Here are some of the known issues with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets:
Virtual machine size limitations: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets has some limitations on virtual machine sizes, which may impact its ability to effectively scale virtual machines based on custom scaling rules.
Scaling limitations: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets has some limitations on scaling, which may impact its ability to effectively scale virtual machines based on custom scaling rules.
Custom images limitations: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets has some limitations on custom images support, which may impact its ability to support custom images of your virtual machines.
Integration limitations: Integration with other Azure services may be limited, depending on the specific services being used.
Cost optimization: Optimizing scaling costs in Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets can be complex, requiring careful management of virtual machine capacity and traffic patterns.
Security and compliance: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets provides advanced security and compliance features, but users must ensure that their virtual machines are properly secured and compliant with relevant regulations and policies.
Overall, while Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets offers a powerful and flexible virtual machine scaling solution for cloud-based applications and services, users must be aware of these known issues and take steps to mitigate their impact. This may include carefully monitoring virtual machine size, scaling policies, custom images support, integration with other Azure services, scaling costs, security and compliance, and other factors that impact the performance, availability, and scalability of their cloud-based applications and services. By taking these steps, users can ensure that they are effectively using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to manage and scale their cloud-based applications and services and make data-driven decisions that support their biopharma research efforts.
[x] Reviewed by Enterprise Architecture
[x] Reviewed by Application Development
[x] Reviewed by Data Architecture