What is Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets?

• A group of load balanced VMs to provide redundancy and improved performance for compute workload
• Scale sets provide the management capabilities for applications that run across many VMs, automatic scaling of resources, and load balancing of traffic
• The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule

Why to use Scale Sets?

• Easy to create and manage multiple VMs (all VM instances are created from the same base OS image and configuration)
• Scale sets support the use of the Azure load balancer and Azure Application Gateway
• Provides high availability and application resiliency
• Auto-scaling:
  • Allows your application to automatically scale as resource demand changes
  • Autoscale based on host metrics, in-guest metrics, Application Insights, or schedule
• Works at large-scale: scale sets support up to 1,000 VM instances

For additional availability, you can use Availability Zones to automatically distribute VM instances in a scale set within a single datacenter or across multiple datacenters

Creating Scale Set

• Scale set requires a load balancer, therefore create a load balancer first
• You can create load balancer while creating Scale Set (“Networking” tab while creating Scale Set)
• Go to: https://portal.azure.com/#create/microsoft.vmss
• Fillup details
• Review > Create