Azure Scale Sets Standby Pools
Have VMs ready to go in a pool of standby machines for your VMSS
Standby Pools for Azure Scale Sets are now in public preview
Public preview: Standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with flexible orchestration | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure
Standby Pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration provides the ability to reduce scale out latency and increase scale out performance.
This is potentially great news if you have VM images that are slow to start up or post processing steps in your provisioning pipeline that take time to complete.
Of course there are a couple of gotchas. Machines in the standby pool can be in either a deallocated or running state so if you actually plan to save any money make sure they are deallocated.
Secondly, the documentation states that this can't be used with spot capacity. That is quite the let down!
