Efficient Scaling: An Introduction to Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS

INTRODUCTION

Imagine running a fast-food outlet. On regular days, a small team of staff handles the usual flow of customers efficiently. But during busy periods, like weekends or events, you bring in extra staff to manage the increased demand, and once the rush is over, you scale back to your core team.

Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) work the same way for IT resources. They automatically scale up virtual machines to handle high traffic during peak times and scale down when demand drops, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency.

Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) are a Microsoft Azure service that allows you to manage and deploy a group of identical virtual machines (VMs) with ease. They are designed to provide scalability, high availability, and load balancing for applications.

Key Features of VMSS:

1. Automatic Scaling:
   • VMSS can automatically increase or decrease the number of VMs based on demand or a defined schedule.
2. Load Balancing:
   • It distributes traffic evenly across all VMs in the scale set to ensure high availability.
3. Integration with Azure Services:
   • Works seamlessly with Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway, and Autoscaling features.
4. Uniform or Flexible VM Sizes:
   • Supports both uniform VM configurations and flexible orchestration for diverse instance types.
5. Cost Efficiency:
   • You only pay for the resources you use, and scaling down reduces costs.

Common Use Cases:

• Hosting stateless applications like web servers or APIs.
• Batch processing tasks where the workload changes dynamically.
• Big data or parallel compute workloads requiring multiple VMs to process data simultaneously.

Steps to create a VMSS

1. Sign in to the Azure portal
2. Click “Create a resource” in the top left corner of the portal.
3. Search for “Virtual Machine Scale Set” in the search bar
4. Click on the “Virtual Machine Scale Set” result.
5. Click the “Create” button.
6. In the Basic Tab, The first section is that of Project details select the “subscription”, “resource group”.
   • If there are multiple subscriptions, select the one that you would like to use. Also, If resource group already is not already created. Click on the “create” button and create one.
7. The next section is the Orchestration that allows us to select the “orchectration mode“ and also “security”
   • You have the option of uniform and flexible select uniform as an example and for security select standard from the list of options
8. The next section is instance details.
   • You have the option of selecting an “image( operating system)”,“size”, and “number of instances” for your scale set.
9. In the Administrator account section, select your “authentication type.”
10. Check the “Licensing” option.
11. Click on the Blue “Review+Create” Button.
12. Wait for the deployment to be completed.
    • Deployment will take some time to be completed typically between 3-5 minutes.
13. Go to Resource.
    • Click on the “go to resource” button to access the newly created Azure VMSS.
14. Check the status of the VMSS.
    • This is supposed to show succeeded.