Introducing Azure Spot market

Azure Spot market offers unused Azure compute capacity (VMs) at a steep discount of up to 90% compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. Any time Azure needs the capacity to support its pay-as-you-go customers, it will evict the Spot VM with 30 seconds’ notice. Due to that fact, Spot VMs are best used with a workload that can tolerate the interruption, such as Databricks clusters, Azure Kubernetes clusters, image rendering, or batch processing jobs. There are no SLAs for Spot VMs and the excess capacity can vary between regions, VM SKUs, and time of the day.

Estimating Spot VM discounts

Before you purchase Spot VMs, let’s estimate how much discount we can get using the Azure pricing calculator:

1. Open the browser.
2. Navigate to the Azure pricing calculator site at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator.
3. Select the options CentOS, East US 2, United States – Dollars, Month, and Dsv3-series, as shown in the following...