Stretching Your Cloud Budget with Azure Spot VMs

Microsoft Azure – Designed by MVT Systems – powered by First Distribution

South African businesses increasingly rely on cloud computing power but rising costs remain a serious concern.

Azure Spot Virtual Machines (Spot VMs) present an innovative solution, access to unused Azure capacity at savings of up to 90% compared to pay-as-you-go rates.

• To see how Spot VMs could fit into your cloud strategy, click here.

Here’s how your business can benefit.

What Are Spot VMs?

Azure Spot VMs use surplus compute capacity within Azure data centres, offering it at significantly reduced rates sometimes up to 90% off, depending on region and demand.

• For interruptible workloads only: Your VMs may be evicted if Azure needs the resources back or if market prices exceed your defined maximum.
• Advance notice: Evictions come with around 30 seconds’ warning, allowing time to gracefully shut down or create checkpoints.

Ideal Use Cases

Spot VMs are best suited to workloads that can tolerate interruptions.

• Dev/Test environments: Perfect for CI/CD pipelines and ongoing software testing
• Batch and high-performance computing: Great for ETL jobs, video rendering, analytics, and AI workloads
• Stateless and container-based apps: Excellent for scaling non-critical services where downtime is acceptable

Managing the Trade-Offs

• Set a maximum price: Define the highest rate you’re willing to pay, VMs will stop running once prices rise above this threshold
• Choose an eviction policy: Opt for ‘Deallocate’ (retain disks and restart later) or ‘Delete’ (remove VM and disks completely)
• No SLA coverage: Spot VMs don’t come with a Service Level Agreement, evictions can occur at any time
• Monitor actively: Tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Resource Graph help track evictions and fine-tune deployments

Why South African Businesses Should Pay Attention

• Affordable compute at scale: Ideal for organisations needing bulk capacity during specific periods, like month-end data processing
• Leverage Azure’s local footprint: With data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, you benefit from lower latency and data residency compliance
• Supports FinOps strategies: Spot VMs work well alongside reserved instances and pay-as-you-go options to help manage cloud budgets effectively

How MVT Systems Can Help

We assist businesses in

1. Assessing workload suitability for Spot VMs
2. Designing resilient, interruption-ready infrastructure
3. Automating eviction handling
4. Monitoring costs and optimising usage
5. Providing local deployment expertise and support

Getting Started

• Explore price history and eviction rates on the Azure portal
• Define a realistic maximum price and select the most suitable eviction treatment
• Design systems for automated fault tolerance
• Consider Spot VMs for use cases like Databricks clusters, high-performance computing, and rendering pipelines

Final Thought

For South African businesses wanting to scale computing power without ballooning cloud costs, Azure Spot VMs are a powerful option, offering major savings on workloads that can handle pauses.

With the right planning, monitoring, and automation, the risk of interruptions becomes manageable.

At MVT Systems, we’re dedicated to helping local organisations unlock the full value of Azure Spot VMs strategically, cost-effectively, and reliably.

Keen to save up to 90% on your cloud spend?

Visit www.mvt-systems.co.za/azure to see how Spot VMs could fit into your cloud strategy or contact us for a detailed review and pricing discussion.