Steps On Creating And Connecting to a Linux Virtual Machine Scale Set
Have you ever thought, “wouldn’t it be great if I could spin up the same image across many identical VMs, keep them consistent and scale them up or down whenever I need (even when traffic spikes)?“- Well, if so, then you are in the right place.
That’s what Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) are built for. Think of VMSS as your Cloud “fleet manager“. Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets are a way to deploy and manage a set of identical, auto-scaling virtual machines. They provide high availability and allow you to centrally manage, configure and update a large number of VMs: you define a template and Azure takes care of creating, scaling and managing the identical VMs for you. Whether you’re running web servers, batch jobs or micro-services, VMSS helps keep things both elastic and easy to manage.
In this guide, we’ll go step by step - from creating a scale set to connecting to an instance. Let’s get started.
Step 1: Log in to your Azure portal
Go to https://portal.azure.com.
Sign in with your Azure account.
You’ll land on the Azure homepage.
Step 2: Search for Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS)
In the search bar, type “VMSS“.
Click on Virtual Machines Scale Set.
You will then land on the “VMSS“ page.
Click Create.
Step 3: Configure the Basics settings
You’ll now see a Basics tab with these fields:
- Choose your subscription
- Resource Group — Create a new one or select an existing one (e.g., myResourceGroup).
- Virtual Machine Scale Set Name — E.g., (vmss01), choose the region nearest to you and configure your Availability Zone to none.
For the Orchestration section:
- Choose Uniform for the orchestration mode and Standard for the security type.
- Choose Autoscaling and Configure scaling options.
Choose the Operating system of your choice and pick VMSS size.
For the Administrator section:
Choose SSH public key as the authentication type and type in a username
Generate new key pair, Select RSA SSH format and type in a key pair name
Then, Click Review + Create
After, you’ll land on this page.
- Click Create.
Step 4: Generate new key pair
- Click on Generate new key, after which it will download.
Step 5: Deployment
After downloading the key, deployment would start (2-5 minutes)
You should get a notification that your deployment is initializing and submitting.
Once complete, you’ll see “Your deployment is complete“.
Click Go to resource group.
Step 5: Go to Command prompt or powershell
- Go to command prompt or powershell and run as administrator
- type “ssh -i (the path to the private key) username@your ip address”
Then you’re good to go!!!!
Virtual Machine Scale Sets are one of those feature that help to power huge production workloads. they give flexibility, consistency and ability to grow on demand without losing sleep over managing individual VMs
Now it’s your turn - go spin up a fleet of Linux VMs. once you get the hang of it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed scaling without it.
