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The Computeschedule APIs allow you schedule one-off batch operations (Start/Deallocate/Hibernate) on your virtual machines. It also provides other endpoints to get the status of these operations and cancel scheduled operations.
What is ScheduleActions
Schedule Actions gives the ability to manage the lifecycle of resources (VMs mostly) at high scale on a periodic basis. Scheduled Actions provides the following key benefits:
- Scheduling API to schedule operations in the future
- Batch API to submit and process Operations at scale
- Shields the customer from having to deal with throttling
- Higher availability with optimized retry strategies
- Higher throughputs as it automatically adapts to higher scale as Azure improves with no additional changes needed by the customer
- Improves the customer COGS (cost of goods) by using various signals to minimize the time resources are up vs when they are needed
Why use ScheduleActions
- To schedule power operations on resources in future
- When a higher scale is needed and spreading out call volume is too cumbersome or it's not an option
- To gain higher availability
- To not have to deal with the complexity of handling throttling issues from the compute stack
- To offload complexity of determining if the error is transient in nature and needs to be retried.
How it works
- Customers submit their schedules to ScheduleActions with their list of resources. So, say a customer wants to start 5000 VMs at 10AM tomorrow. The customer would make 50 batch calls of 100 VMs each to submit the schedule of all 5000 VMs
- Scheduled Actions will generate an operation for each VM scheduled and return them to the customer, customers are supposed to persist these IDs for checking status of operations or cancelling them.
- Customers can cancel the scheduled operation if needed via the "Cancel Operation" API
- At the desired schedule, ScheduleActions will trigger the operations with the maximum concurrency supported by Azure, ScheduleActions will handle all throttling issues that arise, and Scheduled Actions will also do retries on transient errors to ensure high reliability
- Customers can check the status of their operations by polling the ScheduledActions "Get Operations status" API and passing the operations Ids