General Availability: Standby Pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration

Today we are announcing the general availability of standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration.

Standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets enables you to increase scaling performance by creating a pool of pre-provisioned virtual machines. The virtual machines in the standby pool complete all post provisioning processes such as installing applications, downloading data packages, etc. Once the virtual machines have been fully provisioned, they can be maintained in a running or a stopped (deallocated) state. Whenever a scale out event is triggered, the instances in the standby pool are automatically moved into the scale set.

Key Benefits

• Significantly reduce the time it takes to scale out a Virtual Machine Scale Set.
• Complete all post provisioning steps in the standby pool.
• Maintain a pool of deallocated instances to reduce costs while still significantly reducing scale out latency.
• Works alongside your scale set to maintain the desired capacity.

Create a standby pool

1. Navigate to your Virtual Machine Scale Set.
2. Under Availability + scale select Standby pool.
3. Select Manage pool.
4. Provide a name for your pool, provisioning state and maximum and minimum ready capacity.
5. Select Save.

You can also configure a standby pool during Virtual Machine Scale Set creation by navigating to the Management tab and checking the box to enable standby pools.

Once the standby pool is created and the instances have successfully reached the desired power state, any scaling events triggered on the scale set will automatically use instances from the standby pool. If at any point in time more instances are requested than available in the standby pool, the scale set will default to creating new instances directly in the scale set. 

Available now

Standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration is available in all public Azure regions. Learn more about standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets.