Azure Spot Instance - Limits Network Resources

Question

Hi,

I am using azure spot instances and processing big data in a real-time. I am seeing chunks drops at different times for different pods running on azure spot instances. When I put this pods on regular instances, I did not see any drops. Is there any limitation on network or performance with Azure Spot instances?

I am using Kubernetes version: 1.24.6

Can anyone suggest?

Thanks,

Laukik

Answer 1

Hi ,

Yes , thats the normal behavior for workloads deployed on Spot instances . Spot VMs are spare VMs that Azure offers at a heavy discount and they are mostly suitable for HA load and not for prod environment , since whenever there is a demand for capacity , Azure will take back those VMs and evict it , hence this drop outs that you see,

Answer 2

Hi @Laukik Pachanekar,

Thank you for your question.

Spot instances are like any other VM, they only differ in availability.

If you are facing performance issues, I recommend creating a support ticket to troubleshoot and resolve the issue.

Thank you.

Answer 3

Hello, @Laukik Pachanekar !

Echoing what has been said, I wanted to provide some links so you can better understand Spot Virtual Machines in Azure. They are a great way to save money as long as your workloads can be interrupted but for tasks that can't be interrupted (like production environments), you'd want to look into something like reserved instances for VM savings:

Microsoft Docs: Use Azure Spot Virtual Machines

Using Azure Spot Virtual Machines allows you to take advantage of our unused capacity at a significant cost savings. At any point in time when Azure needs the capacity back, the Azure infrastructure will evict Azure Spot Virtual Machines. Therefore, Azure Spot Virtual Machines are great for workloads that can handle interruptions like batch processing jobs, dev/test environments, large compute workloads, and more.

Product Page: Azure Spot Virtual Machines

Run recommended workloads On spot VMs, run only applications that can handle interruptions and don't need to be completed within a specific timeframe. Spot VMs are ideal for the following types of workloads:

• Dev/test environments, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workloads.
• Select high-performance computing scenarios, batch processing jobs, or visual rendering applications.
• Big data, analytics, container-based, and large-scale stateless applications.

I hope this helps!