Autoscaling IaaS VMs in ARM mode from a template
I created a pattern-based deployment that overloads a number of Linux VMs. I would like to autoscale them according to classic examples, where Azure will enable / disable instances based on CPU load.
Is this possible with ARM mode? And if not, is there a suggested alternative method? The only examples I can find are using Application Insights and PaaS features. I have a Python application running in Docker on Ubuntu hosts.
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To do this, you first need to create an availability group for the virtual machines. A resource declaration in an ARM template looks like this:
{
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/availabilitySets",
"name": "[variables('availabilitySetName')]",
"apiVersion": "2015-05-01-preview",
"location": "[parameters('location')]",
"properties": {
"platformFaultDomainCount": "2"
}
}
Then, for a VM resource, the declaration in the ARM template would look something like this:
{
"apiVersion": "2015-05-01-preview",
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines",
"name": "[concat(variables('vmName'), '0')]",
"location": "[parameters('location')]",
"dependsOn": [
"[concat('Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/', parameters('newStorageAccountName'))]",
"[concat('Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces/', variables('nicName'), '0')]",
"[concat('Microsoft.Compute/availabilitySets/', variables('availabilitySetName'))]"
],
"properties": {
"availabilitySet": {
"id": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Compute/availabilitySets', variables('availabilitySetName'))]"
},
...},
Quckstart templates are a good ref: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/azure/azure-quickstart-templates/master/201-2-vms-2-FDs-no-resource-loops/azuredeploy.json
Once you have two or more VMs of the same size in an availability set, you should set up autoscaling with microsoft.insights / autoscalesettings, which I believe you are linking to in the question. This is done on a cloud service, so it will work similarly to PaaS ... like this:
{
"apiVersion": "2014-04-01",
"name": "[concat(variables('vmName'), '-', resourceGroup().name)]",
"type": "microsoft.insights/autoscalesettings",
"location": "East US",
...},
Pretty good example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/6abc9f320e39d9d75dffb60846e88ab80d3ff33a/201-web-app-sql-database/azuredeploy.json
I also set up autoscaling using the portal and parses ARMExplorer to get a better understanding of how things should look in my code. ARMExplorer is located here: Azure Resource Explorer
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