What is flexible orchestration mode in VMSS ?

Question

can you explain in detail what is the use of flexible orchestration mode in VMSS ?

Answer 1

Hello Bruce Wayne,

The orchestration mode is defined when you create the scale set and cannot be changed or updated later. Optimized for high availability and scalability with identical or mixed virtual machine types. Flexible Orchestration is the reccomended orchestration mode when deploying scale sets in Azure.

Flexible orchestration mode in Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) is designed to offer a higher degree of customization and control over how virtual machines are deployed and managed within a scale set. Unlike the traditional uniform orchestration mode—which is optimized for large-scale deployments of identical, stateless VMs—flexible mode allows users to run VMs with varying configurations, sizes, and roles in the same scale set. This makes it particularly well-suited for complex or stateful applications, such as databases or tiered microservices, where each instance may have different resource requirements or serve different purposes.

One of the main advantages of Flexible orchestration is that it provides orchestration features over standard Azure IaaS VMs, instead of scale set child virtual machines. This means you can use all of the standard VM APIs when managing Flexible orchestration instances, instead of the Virtual Machine Scale Set VM APIs you use with Uniform orchestration.

When to Use It? If your application requires high availability, scalability, and the ability to manage VMs in a more flexible way, then flexible orchestration mode is the recommended choice. It's especially useful for workloads like quorum-based applications and open-source databases

For detailed information, please check: VMSS orchestration modes

If you have any further queries, let me know. If the solution is helpful, please click on Upvote and Accept Answer on it.