Batch Account Pool Nodes - Available VMs

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to find the least expensive VM to use for running a Python script. The current VM size is : standard_d2s_v3 an the operating system is microsoft-dsvm dsvm-win-2019 winserver-2019 (latest). This is costing around $10/day to run a very small job (about 4 minutes) and then is idle for the rest of the day.

$10 seems very steep so I tried to use a different VM but I always get the quota error and I'm unable to find a cheaper solution.

Can someone please recommend a better VM that is available in the pay-as-you-go subscription.

Thank you!
Jon

Answer 1

Hello @Jon Carlisle ,

Welcome to the MS Q&A Forum!

Azure Spot VM could be the great solution to save cost for you.

Azure spot VMs allow customers to purchase VMs from a pool of unused spare capacity at a significantly lower price—up to 90% less—than pay-as-you-go. The lower cost comes with the provision that these Azure spot instances can be taken away with minimal warning if demand for capacity increases or instances are needed to service reserved instances or pay-as-you-go customers. While the risk of disruption can make Spot VMs challenging for mission critical, production workloads that can’t afford a service interruption, significant cost savings can be achieved by running many kinds of workloads, from stateless, non-production applications to big data, on Spot VMs.

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.

The amount of available capacity can vary based on size, region, time of day, and more. When deploying Azure Spot Virtual Machines, Azure will allocate the VMs if there's capacity available, but there's no SLA for these VMs. An Azure Spot Virtual Machine offers no high availability guarantees. At any point in time when Azure needs the capacity back, the Azure infrastructure will evict Azure Spot Virtual Machines with 30-seconds notice.

Below references to articles where you could find more detailed information on this type of deployment:

• Use Azure Spot Virtual Machines
• Find the Spot VM that is right for you
• and steps how to create Azure Spot VM

Hope above answers your question and concern :) Let me know if you need additional assistance. If the answer was helpful, please accept it and complete the quality survey so that others can find a solution.

Sincerely,
Olga