In September 2017 we introduced Azure Availability Zones, enabling resiliency and high availability for mission-critical workloads running on Azure. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Zone Redundant Virtual Machine Scale Sets, bringing the scalability and ease of use of scale sets to availability zones.

Deploying your infrastructure across zones has never been easier. You just specify the availability zones you would like to use for your scale set. It’s as simples as:

az vmss create -n  -l  --image  -g  --zones 1 2 3

With Zone Redundant Virtual Machine Scale Sets, your Virtual Machines are automatically spread across availability zones. You don’t need to worry about distributing VMs across zones, choosing which VMs to remove when scaling in, etc. Zone Redundant Virtual Machine Scale Sets support the same capabilities as Regional Virtual Machine Scale Sets, including but not limited to:

• Azure Autoscale
• Azure Virtual Machine Extensions
• Marketplace and Custom Images
• Attached Data Disks
• Azure Application Gateway
• Azure Load Balancer Standard

Please note that during preview, some of these capabilities might not be fully zone redundant.

With scale sets, it’s easy to build big compute, big data, and containerized workloads. With zones it’s easy to manage VM uptime, especially with the 99.99% uptime SLA at GA mentioned in the previous blog post. Together, they provide the backbone for building mission-critical, scalable services on Azure.

Please refer to this article about creating a virtual machine scale set using Availability zones to get started.