Azure Spot Virtual Machines

A spot VM’s hardware and software are the same as a standard VM, but it is priced at discounted rates with variations in availability. When an extra standard VM is free (not running any workloads), it can be temporarily provisioned as a spot VM at a lower rate, until that VM’s capacity is reclaimed by a customer who has purchased a VM reservation.

Workloads are evicted when Azure no longer has available compute capacity and must reallocate its resources. Workloads will also be evicted when the current price exceeds the maximum price that you agreed to pay before the spot virtual machines were allocated. Additionally, when you subscribe to scheduled events, you get a notification 30 seconds before your workload is evicted. Refer to the documentation for more information.

Spot Virtual Machines replaced Azure low-priority VMs and includes new capabilities, such as variable pricing. Spot Virtual Machines pricing is also available on both single VMs and VM scale sets.

For Spot Virtual Machines pricing transparency across all Azure regions and to ensure fairness when allocating available compute capacity, all customers will enter maximum prices in US dollars. You may pay your Azure bill in the local currency for the Euro Zone, Switzerland, Australia, Denmark, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom, India, or Brazil.

The behavior of an evicted spot virtual machine depends on the eviction policy that you select. If the eviction policy is set to Deallocate, only the VM is deallocated, and no VM-associated charges are incurred. However, other resources, such as disk or network, continue to run and accrue charges. Conversely, if the eviction policy is set to Delete, the VM and all associated resources are deleted. If your spot virtual machine is evicted because of capacity and it's part of a scale set, Azure will try to restore it to maintain a target instance count.

If the eviction policy is set to Deallocate, any data stored on disk storage is not deleted. However, all the temporary data that is local to the spot virtual machine is deleted. If the eviction policy is set to Delete, data that's stored on local disks and on any attached persistent disk storage is deleted.

There is no guaranteed minimum run time for a spot virtual machine. Allocation is based on available unused capacity.

If the eviction policy is set to Deallocate, you manually restart the spot virtual machine either in the Azure portal or by using a CLA, such as Azure PowerShell. Depending on the available Azure capacity, the spot virtual machine might be reallocated. Single spot virtual machines are always deallocated by Azure. If your spot virtual machine is evicted because of capacity and is part of a scale set, Azure will try to restore the evicted spot virtual machine to maintain a target instance count. Learn more.

Spot Virtual Machines pricing is available for most Azure VMs, except for suppressed core VMs, promo VMs, and burstable VMs (B-series).

Yes. However, there are two important differences. First, spot virtual machines can be evicted, but they give you access to unused Azure compute capacity (VMs) at deep discounts compared to pay-as-you-go prices. Also, unlike regular VMs, a service-level agreement (SLA) isn't available for spot virtual machines. See the product terms for more information.

Run workloads that can be interrupted and that don’t have to be completed within a specific amount of time.

No. You can only set the spot pricing flag when you create a scale set.

No. This option isn’t supported at this time.

Spot Virtual Machines have a separate quota pool, like pay-as-you-go VMs.

Yes. Use the standard quota increase process—the same that you use for pay-as-you-go VMs—to submit a request to increase your quota for Spot Virtual Machines.

To review Spot Virtual Machines availability across the various Azure channels—including cloud service providers (CSPs)—refer to the documentation. Visit Partner Center and contact your Microsoft partner account manager if you have any additional questions.

Spot Virtual Machines will only be supported for 'virtualMachineConfiguration' pools and not 'cloudServiceConfiguration' pools. Learn more about Spot Virtual Machines on Batch.

Yes, this capability is available to customers in the Azure portal.

Spot Virtual Machines already have discounted pricing, and the cost of these virtual machines are also variable in nature. Therefore, there is no additional discount for Spot Virtual Machines under the Enterprise Agreement (EA) and billed at pay-as-you-go rates.