How to autoscale virtual machines(IaaS approach) in azure

Question

How to autoscale virtual machines(IaaS approach) in azure instead of web/worker role autoscaling in azure?

Answer 1

You can now Autoscale Virtual machines in Azure directly in the Azure Management Portal. ScottGu has a post about it on his blog.

The important thing to autoscale VM's is you must proactively provision the Max # of VM's you think you'll need to handle your peak capacity, and add them to the same availability set.

For example, if on the busiest day of the week it takes 6 machines to handle all of your traffic, then you need to create 6 instances and install your application on it, configure it to handle traffic etc.... and then add it to an availability set with the other 5 machines.

Once you've done this, you can navigate to the Cloud Service that contains all of your virtual machines and click on the Scale tab. You should see a list of your availability sets, and it should tell you the # of machines you can scale over. Choose a metric (either CPU or Queue today), and then range of machines you want to scale between. You can scale between 1 and the total # of machines.

When load is low -- Azure will turn off machines (so you don't have to pay for them), and when load is high, Azure will turn those machines back on.