Azure Scale Set vs Availability Set

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Why Was I Worried?

I have been habitually using scale sets for all of my needs as long as my requirements only involved needing multiple copies of a VM image running safely. Then I started to worry about the difference between a scale set and an availability set… were my scale set VMs not safe?

TLDR; I actually read Azure and Azure CLI documentation and made a simple but cool command below that put my mind at ease for scale sets, so feel free to skip to that if you like.

Research

There is a good stack overflow right here which I added to just now.  It has quite a few good answers about availability sets vs scale sets, including some info about a scale set by default having 5 fault domains.  So, I recommend starting there if you’re interested in digging in.

A good summary of what I found is that:

  • Availability sets by default will spread your resources over fault domains to ensure that outage of one due to a power or network issue, etc does not affect another.
  • Availability sets also allow mixing of resources; e.g. 2 VMs with different configuration.
  • Scale sets only allow you to have an identical image deployed and they provide the ability to scale it out linearly.
  • Scale sets implicitly have one “placement group”.  If you want to go over 100 VMs, you have to remove that restriction.
  • A placement group has 5 fault domains and is similar (or maybe the same as) an availability set.

Validation

As I’m responsible for highly available infrastructure, I wasn’t keen on just accepting this.  So, I fiddled around with the Azure CLI for scale sets and made this simple command which indeed shows my 10 instance scale set is indeed spread across multiple fault domains – I hope you find it useful too.

az vmss get-instance-view --subscription "your-subscription-id" \ 
--resource-group "your-rg" --name "your-scale-set-name" \
--instance-id "*" | grep platformFaultDomain

    "platformFaultDomain": 0,
    "platformFaultDomain": 1,
    "platformFaultDomain": 2,
    "platformFaultDomain": 4,
    "platformFaultDomain": 0,
    "platformFaultDomain": 1,
    "platformFaultDomain": 3,
    "platformFaultDomain": 4,
    "platformFaultDomain": 2,
    "platformFaultDomain": 3

Here are some additional good resources:

 

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