Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition

9 Applications that scale

In the previous two chapters, we examined how to build highly available applications and use load balancers to distribute traffic to multiple VMs that run your app. But how do you efficiently run and manage multiple VMs, and run the right number of VM instances when your customers need them most? When customer demand increases, you want to automatically increase the scale of your application to cope with that demand. And when demand decreases, such as in the middle of the night, when most people without young children are asleep, you want the application to decrease in scale and save you some money.

In Azure, you can automatically scale IaaS resources in and out with virtual machine scale sets. These scale sets run ...