Azure Virtual Machines Scale Sets (VMSS) is an IaaS that allows you to create and manage a group of Virtual Machines (VM) behind a load balancer. Scale sets provide you the ability to increase and decrease the number of VMs based on the workload's requirement and user's demand. VMSS allows you to build large-scale infrastructure suitable for big data and compute.

VMSS helps improve the performance and redundancy of applications requiring a VM with a dedicated OS for hosting the workloads. Since the application is accessed through a load balancer, the requests are distributed to multiple workloads without overloading a single host.

In this hands-on lab, you will create a Scale Set and run an Nginx web server using VM Extension.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this intermediate-level lab, you will be able to:

• Understand the Virtual Machine Scale Set offering
• Configuring VMSS service in Azure
• Understand and configure VM Extension to install a web server on VMSS host

Intended Audience

• Candidates for Azure Administrator Exam (AZ-104)
• Cloud Architects
• DevOps Engineers
• Software Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

• Azure Virtual Machines
• Azure Storage Accounts

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisite:

• Start Your First Azure Virtual Machine
• Managing Azure Storage Accounts

Updates

October 5th, 2023: Updated instruction to resolve custom script error and missing load balancer