Fundamental
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Fundamental
Prepare and test your skills
Azure Spot Virtual Machines for Low Cost Batch Processing
Free sample question, answered and explained below. The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam practice bank has 688 more like it. Try 10 free: instant score, no account.
An analytics company needs to run large-scale batch processing jobs overnight. The workload has the following requirements:
- The compute cost must be minimized as much as possible
- The workload is non-critical and can tolerate sudden interruptions or delays
- The virtual machines do not require high availability guarantees or service level agreements (SLAs)
Which virtual machine pricing option should the company choose to meet these requirements?
Explanations
Pay-as-you-go Virtual Machines
Pay-as-you-go Virtual Machines
What Pay-as-you-go Virtual Machines Are
Pay-as-you-go is the standard on-demand pricing model in Azure where customers pay for compute capacity by the second or hour without any upfront commitment or termination fees. It provides standard uptime service level agreements (SLAs) and guarantees that instances remain active until explicitly stopped or deallocated by the user.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
While pay-as-you-go provides full flexibility and standard availability, it charges full retail prices for compute resources. For interruptible, overnight batch processing, paying standard rates results in unnecessarily high operational expenditures compared to discounted capacity options.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Standard baseline rates: Charges full retail hourly pricing without the deep discounts provided by spot capacity.
- High availability and SLAs: Includes standard infrastructure uptime SLAs, which this non-critical workload does not require.
- No eviction risk: Compute capacity is reserved for the tenant and cannot be preempted by Azure for other workloads.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The workload were mission-critical, required predictable continuous uptime with an SLA, and could not tolerate interruptions or sudden evictions.
Additional Context
Pay-as-you-go serves as the baseline reference price against which Spot VM discounts and Reserved Instance savings are measured.
Azure Hybrid Benefit
Azure Hybrid Benefit
What Azure Hybrid Benefit Is
Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing program that lets organizations apply existing on-premises software licenses—such as Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with active Software Assurance—to Azure virtual machines and cloud database services, significantly reducing software licensing fees.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing discount mechanism rather than a compute capacity pricing model. It helps discount software license costs for supported operating systems and database engines, but it does not address the purchase of unused infrastructure capacity or solve the requirement for compute cost minimization on stateless batch workloads.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- License mobility: Reuses existing on-premises Windows Server or SQL Server licenses in the cloud.
- Software cost focus: Primarily reduces the OS or software surcharge rather than the underlying base compute infrastructure rate.
- Prerequisite requirements: Requires active Software Assurance or qualifying subscription licenses.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The company possessed existing on-premises Windows Server or SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance and wanted to migrate them to Azure to avoid paying retail licensing fees.
Additional Context
Azure Hybrid Benefit can be combined with standard or reserved instances, but on its own, it does not represent an interruptible compute model.
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery
What Azure Site Recovery Is
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) service that orchestrates the replication, failover, and recovery of physical and virtual machines across regions or between on-premises datacenters and Azure.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery and replication management tool, not a virtual machine pricing model. It incurs additional costs to replicate and protect workloads rather than reducing the compute costs of running primary batch analytics.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Disaster recovery service: Maintains secondary replicas of virtual machines for failover during regional or site outages.
- Replication focus: Keeps data consistent and synchronized between source and target environments.
- Separate billing mechanism: Incurs licensing and storage costs per protected instance or target physical core count.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization needed an automated disaster recovery solution to replicate production virtual machines to a secondary site to ensure business continuity during an outage.
Additional Context
While ASR is vital for high-availability enterprise architectures, non-critical batch processing workloads typically do not require disaster recovery replication.
Azure Spot Virtual Machines
Azure Spot Virtual Machines
What Azure Spot Virtual Machines Are
Azure Spot Virtual Machines allow organizations to purchase unused Azure compute capacity at significant cost discounts compared to standard pay-as-you-go rates. Because this model relies on surplus datacenter capacity, Azure can evict (deallocate or delete) these instances whenever the infrastructure requires the capacity back for regular workloads or when the spot market price exceeds the user's defined maximum price.
How It Meets the Requirements
- Cost minimization: Spot VMs provide substantial cost reductions by utilizing unallocated compute capacity.
- Tolerates interruptions: The batch processing workload is non-critical and can handle sudden pauses, making it resilient to the standard 30-second eviction notification.
- No SLA needed: Spot VMs carry no uptime SLA or high availability guarantees, aligning directly with the organization's acceptance of interruptions.
Key Advantages and Capabilities
- Significant cost savings: Delivers deep discounts for high-compute, non-time-sensitive workloads.
- Flexible eviction policies: Allows users to choose between deallocating (retaining disks) or deleting instances upon eviction.
- Configurable maximum pricing: Enables users to set a maximum price cap per hour or opt for market price up to standard rates.
- Scheduled event alerts: Provides up to a 30-second notice prior to eviction via in-VM Scheduled Events.
Why This Is Optimal
Azure Spot Virtual Machines are specifically designed for fault-tolerant, stateless, and interruptible workloads such as batch analytics, rendering, and dev/test environments. Because the organization does not require uptime guarantees and prioritizes lowest compute cost, Spot VMs are the ideal choice.
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