Microsoft Azure progresses through the delivery of powerful services that enable customers to scale swiftly and reduce their cloud bills. The new Azure Compute Fleet service is now available for general use because it brings straightforward VM deployment capabilities for thousands of machines across different SKU types and pricing models and Availability Zones.

The foundational Azure Compute Fleet service allows organizations to execute automated compute infrastructure deployments effortlessly for data system infrastructures and batch processes as well as stateless applications and financial risk models and massive image generation tasks.

What is Azure Compute Fleet?

Azure Compute Fleet allows users to effortlessly deploy and operate between 10,000 VMs belonging to various SKU and type combinations and price options. Through Azure Compute Fleet you can state your requirements regarding capacity and VM types and pricing choices while the system manages the process automatically.

Key Benefits

1. Deploy up to 10,000 VMs in a single operation.
2. Mix multiple Azure pricing models (Standard, Spot, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Pay-As-You-Go).
3. Mix multiple VM SKUs and sizes.
4. Real-time capacity aware allocations for improved success rates.
5. Automated Spot VM capacity maintenance, even during evictions.
6. Price and capacity optimization strategies to balance cost and availability.

How is Azure Compute Fleet Different from Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets?

The Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) helps manage a VM group but Azure Compute Fleet delivers enhanced flexibility and scale capabilities.

• This solution enables administrators to manage vast amounts of VMs reaching a maximum of 10,000.
• Users can customize with multiple VM SKUs even when adding different sizes and selecting different pricing models.
• Real-time capacity and pricing optimizations.
• The platform enables scaling of resources that covers multiple Azure regions without regional limitations.

Compute Fleet operates optimally when you need to combine flexible infrastructure and diverse purchasing arrangements with dynamic scaling that requires minimal manual control.

VM Management Capabilities Introduced with Azure Compute Fleet

Azure Compute Fleet brings features to scaling services which were inaccessible using conventional methods:

• The service lets you indicate multiple pricing choices (Standard, Spot, Reserved Instances) inside one operation.
• Settings should be established to define the separate target capacities that exist for both on-demand and Spot VMs.
• The system will immediately create new capacity when it replaces evicted Spot VMs.
• The solution generates VM configuration suggestions through analysis of user-defined storage elements and processor units together with memory resources.
• The maximum spend parameter gives you effective management of your costs.
• You should select separate allocation methods for Standard fleet on-demand instances and Spot fleet instances.
• The deployment scale should reach up to 10,000 VMs within each individual fleet.

How Can You Save Money with Azure Compute Fleet?

Azure Compute Fleet provides several methods to help you maximize cloud financial optimization:

• Your desired capacity will be reached through automatic selection of inexpensive VM types.
• A system that automatically manages Spot VM evictions and price thresholds and capacity availability will minimize operational expenses.
• Advanced workload optimization occurs through the combination of Reserved Instances with Savings Plans and Spot pricing.
• The system saves operational costs by doing away with human labor to choose and allocate VMs.

The automatic selection of best-fit VM combinations together with dynamic price adjustments made Azure Compute Fleet able to reduce operational expenses as well as cloud expenses significantly.

Supported VM Types

Azure Compute Fleet operates with every Azure Virtual Machine size together with their applicable SKUs. With this flexible capability you can customize your computer fleets using VMs from different B-series burstable to F-series compute-optimized and M-series memory-optimized families.

Additional Capabilities

Exploring the Azure Compute Fleet Dashboard

After deployment Azure gives you access to a single dashboard through the Azure portal to monitor the configuration and health as well as check performance of your fleet. When you deploy your fleet the dashboard shows a clean and complete picture of your most important deployment elements.

Key Elements of the Azure Compute Fleet Dashboard

🟦 Essentials Pane
At the top of the dashboard, you’ll find high-level metadata:

• Resource group, Subscription, and Region (e.g., westsus2)
• Status of deployment (e.g., how many VMs successfully deployed)
• Operating System, VM types, and SKU sizes

🟦 Compute Fleet Properties
This section offers insights into the specific configuration:

• Regions: The target region for deployment (westsus2)
• Availability Zones: Zone-redundant for resilience
• Image details: Publisher (MicrosoftWindowsServer), offer, and plan used for VMs
• Fleet ID: A unique identifier for your Compute Fleet instance

🟦 VMs Configuration
Details specific to VM deployment strategy:

• Target capacity: Number of VMs you requested (e.g., 2 instances)
• Minimum starting capacity: Minimum VMs that must be successfully deployed to initiate (e.g., 1 instance)
• Current capacity: Real-time number of active instances
• Allocation strategy: e.g., “Lowest price” (used to optimize for cost)

🟦 Networking
Shows VM connectivity configuration:

• Virtual network/subnet: e.g., vnet-westsus2-1/snet-westsus2-1
• NSG (Network Security Group): e.g., basicNsgvnet-westsus2-1-nic01
• Public IPs and Accelerated Networking settings

🟦 Security Settings

• Trusted Launch is enabled for secure VM boot
• vTPM, Integrity Monitoring, and Secure Boot status shown for compliance and security auditing

🟦 Disk Configuration

• OS Disk type: e.g., Premium SSD LRS
• Encryption, Managed disks, and Ephemeral disk status

🟦 Spot VM Section
Though not used in this example, this section would display:

• Eviction policies
• Capacity preferences
• Spot-specific capacity and allocation configurations

Final Thoughts

The transformative Azure Compute Fleet service enables organizations to expand their computing infrastructure at high speed while attaining better cost efficiency and improved simplification. Cloud-scale Azure computing power becomes accessible through Compute Fleet when you need to operate big data analytics with financial simulations and batch processing or web services.

The Azure Compute Fleet service delivers a modern solution for all businesses seeking to simplify their compute environment while increasing their capacity at optimal costs.

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