Adopting cloud computing has the potential to transform company processes and operations. However, are you harnessing its true potential or simply spending more than what is required? Azure Spot Instances can prove to be an invaluable asset when looking to reduce cloud costs. By providing advanced flexibility and automating savings with unparalleled reduction, they are immensely popular among companies looking to save more while being smarter with their cloud spending.
This guide revolves around Azure spot instances, discussing how to unlock their potential, what they are, and how they save costs.
What are Azure Spot Instances and Why Should You Care?
Azure Spot Instances, also known as Spot Virtual Machines, take advantage of a large compute capacity that goes unused in Azure at a much lower price than the standard VMs, often underutilized by Azure for VMs. Bypassing standard payment structures for virtual machines, offering discounts of up to 90%, companies are now able to run workloads effortlessly by taking advantage of Azure surplus resources.
Why Does This Matter?
The cost of performing cloud computing services, for a large volume of data, batch jobs, or machine learning models, grows at a node's rate. For these types of workloads, continual availability of computational resources is essential. Azure Spot VMs help companies deliver uninterrupted services through expensive infrastructure without sacrificing capability.
Key Characteristics of Azure Spot Instances:
Eviction Policy: Spot VMs are subject to eviction at any time with as little as 30 seconds' notice. This can happen due to a loss of capacity or reclaiming of instances for other workloads. Also, due to demand, price increases, and capacity needs. Spot VMs should run in a manner that gracefully handles interruptions.
Discounted Rates: Compared to standard VMs, their rates are drastically lower and range between 30-80% lower than the price. The rate is discounted by region, currently available VM, and demand.
Cost Control: Ensure to stay within budget by setting a maximum price for the cloud resources used.
Flexibility: Ideal for testing workloads that are non-critical and easy to adapt, like rendering and analytics.
Differences Between Spot VMs and Regular VMs:
Aspect | Spot VMs | Regular VMs |
Pricing | Up to 90% cheaper | Standard market rate |
Availability Guarantee | None | High |
Eviction Risk | Evicted based on demand or price cap | Always available (based on SLA) |
How Azure Spot Instances Save Costs
Wondering how Azure Spot Instances help save more costs with their discounts in the real world? Companies can now spend less with more workloads by enabling scaling and recovering on Azure Spot Instances.
Cost Optimization in Action:
- Batch Processing
Use Case: Run large datasets or scheduled jobs.
Savings: Compared to taking jobs during peak hours or during normal company hours, put jobs to run during off-peak hours. Taking this approach will result in savings of 60% or more and additional savings of 70-90% with Spot Instances.
- Machine Learning and AI
Use Case: Train models or run AI workloads.
Savings: As training jobs can be checkpointed and resumed, training interruptions are not an issue. Spot Instances are effective in reducing the overall training costs.
- Big Data Analytics
Use Case: Perform descriptive or predictive analyses.
Savings: Run the computations that can be done on spot instances and save significantly on the computations that have lower uptime.
- Video Rendering and Transcoding
Use Case: Render or transcode video files.
Savings: Spot Instances are ideal for these tasks, as they can be restarted if interrupted, offering much lower costs per hour.
Example: Spot vs. Regular VM Pricing
D2sv4 VM in East US Region
Regular Price: $0.096/hour
Spot Price: $0.013/hour
Savings per Hour: $0.083/hour
Monthly Savings (24/7 Usage)
Regular Cost: $0.096 × 720 = $69.12
Spot Cost: $0.013 × 720 = $9.36
Monthly Savings: $69.12 − $9.36 = $59.76
Annual Savings
$59.76 × 12 = $717.12
Scaling Up: Multiple VMs (e.g., 10 VMs)
$717.12 × 10 = $7,171.20
Savings Percentage: ~86.5%
Best Practices for Using Azure Spot Instances
Even though Azure Spot Instances can help reduce company costs, their implementation needs careful strategy and planning. In this section, we provide guidance on the effective use of Spot VMs while mitigating their concerns.
1. Be Prepared for Evictions
When an Azure Partitions service needs capacity, Spot VMs can be terminated at any moment. To help ease interruptions, these evictions must be handled in a certain way:
Automate Re-deployments: Use tools like Azure Resource Manager templates or PowerShell scripts to prompt the automated redeployment of Spot VMs upon eviction. This guarantees service recovery without manual steps.
Use Azure Scheduled Events: Subscription to Spot VM Scheduled Events provides a 30-second eviction alert. Use this time to perform automated redundant tasks, including state saving and reallocation of work to other resources, before the VM halts.
2. Select Suitable Workloads
These are the most suitable for less-critical workloads. They focus on the following, including, but not limited to:
Testing and Development: They make an excellent candidate for inexpensive, swift temporaries–a sandbox ecosystem where novel features or code are subjected to experimentation.
Parallelizable Processes: Independent tasks such as data mining or scientific simulations are well adapted to the use of multiple Spot VMs, greatly diminishing interruption effects.
3. Monitor and Automate for Efficiency
To fully use Azure Spot Instances, monitoring and automation are crucial:
Keep Track of Pricing and Usage: Monitoring trends in demand helps to predict and plan for costs effectively and avoid exceeding budget constraints.
Set Up Alerts and Scaling: Establish alerts tied to budget constraints and enable auto-scaling workloads based on instance availability.
Simplified Step-by-Step Guide to Deploy Azure Spot Instances
Step 1: Sign In to the Azure Portal
Log in to your Azure account.
Navigate to Virtual Machines under Azure Services and click Create.
Step 2: Configure the VM with Azure Spot Discount
Fill in basic details (name, region, resource group, etc.).
Choose the VM size, architecture and image.
In the Instance Details section, check Azure Spot Instance or Run with Azure Spot discount.
Select the Eviction Type:
Capacity only: VM is evicted only when Azure needs capacity.
Price or capacity: Eviction occurs if the Spot price exceeds your max price or Azure needs capacity.
Set your Maximum Price to control costs (use -1 to pay up to the standard price but not more).
Step 3: Define the Eviction Policy
Choose the Eviction Policy:
Deallocate: VM stops but retains resources, allowing later restart.
Delete: VM and attached disks are permanently removed.
Step 4: Automate Deployment
Use automation tools like Azure CLI, PowerShell, Terraform, or Bicep for efficient and repeatable deployments.
Example (Azure CLI):
az vm create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name mySpotVM --image UbuntuLTS --priority Spot --max-price -1 --eviction-policy Deallocate |
Step 5: Scale with VM Scale Sets (VMSS)
Go to Virtual Machine Scale Sets and click on Create a VMSS in the Azure Portal.
Configure Spot VMs using the same steps as above.
Set the priority to Spot for all VMs in the scale set.
Enable scaling rules to adjust VMs automatically based on workload demand.
Step 6: Monitor and Manage
Track VM performance, evictions, and costs using Azure Monitor and Cost Management tools.
Set up alerts for evictions or cost thresholds to stay informed.
Case Study: How Finova Saved 70% on Azure Using Spot Instances
Excessively high cloud computing costs resulting from development and testing phases, as well as the need for reliable environments that support stateful workloads.
Finova optimize the usage of Azure Spot VMs ,which required automated fallback to standard VMs, stateful support, and continuous monitoring of the Spot market.
Results:
70% savings on Azure compute spend
Reliability of Spot VMs reached up to 98.5%
Reallocation of budget towards innovation
Higher developer satisfaction after improving testing capabilities
Conclusion
With the utilization of Azure Spot Instances, your company’s cloud spending can be optimized to an entirely new level. Companies can take advantage of relaxed constraints and automated scaling for flexible workloads to optimize costs without losing automation or scale. Stop managing your clo
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