Azure Spot VMs for cost savings - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Azure Spot VMs for cost savings

📖 Scenario: You are managing cloud resources for a small company. You want to save money by using Azure Spot Virtual Machines (VMs), which are cheaper but can be evicted when Azure needs capacity.You will create an Azure VM configuration that uses Spot VMs to reduce costs while maintaining basic settings.

🎯 Goal: Build an Azure VM configuration that uses Spot VMs with eviction policy set to Deallocate and a maximum price set to 50% of the pay-as-you-go price.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a basic Azure VM configuration dictionary

Add a configuration variable to enable Spot VM with eviction policy

Apply the Spot VM settings in the VM configuration

Complete the VM configuration with the maximum price and eviction policy

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Using Azure Spot VMs helps companies save money by running workloads on cheaper, interruptible virtual machines.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and architects often configure Spot VMs to optimize cloud costs while managing workload availability.

1

Create the initial VM configuration dictionary

Create a dictionary called vm_config with these exact entries: 'name': 'myVM', 'location': 'eastus', and 'vm_size': 'Standard_DS1_v2'.

Azure

# Create the vm_config dictionary with name, location, and vm_size
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with keys 'name', 'location', and 'vm_size' and assign the exact values.

2

Add Spot VM configuration variable

Create a variable called spot_config as a dictionary with 'eviction_policy': 'Deallocate' and 'max_price': -1.

Azure

vm_config = {
    'name': 'myVM',
    'location': 'eastus',
    'vm_size': 'Standard_DS1_v2'
}
# Create spot_config dictionary with eviction_policy and max_price
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with keys 'eviction_policy' and 'max_price'. Use -1 for max_price to indicate the default maximum price.

3

Apply Spot VM settings to the VM configuration

Add a key 'priority' with value 'Spot' and a key 'spot_config' with the variable spot_config inside the vm_config dictionary.

Azure

vm_config = {
    'name': 'myVM',
    'location': 'eastus',
    'vm_size': 'Standard_DS1_v2'
}
spot_config = {
    'eviction_policy': 'Deallocate',
    'max_price': -1
}
# Add 'priority' and 'spot_config' keys to vm_config
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'Spot' to the 'priority' key and assign the variable spot_config to the 'spot_config' key inside vm_config.

4

Set maximum price for Spot VM and finalize configuration

Change the 'max_price' in spot_config to 0.5 to set the maximum price to 50% of pay-as-you-go price.

Azure

spot_config = {
    'eviction_policy': 'Deallocate',
    'max_price': -1
}
vm_config = {
    'name': 'myVM',
    'location': 'eastus',
    'vm_size': 'Standard_DS1_v2',
    'priority': 'Spot',
    'spot_config': spot_config
}
# Set max_price in spot_config to 0.5
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Update the 'max_price' key in spot_config dictionary to 0.5.