Spot the Savings 🎯 Run Non-Critical Workloads on Azure Spot VMs and Save Up to 90%

Your CI runners, batch jobs, and dev environments don't need guaranteed availability. Azure Spot VMs use unused capacity at up to 90% discount. Here's how to deploy them safely with Terraform, handle evictions gracefully, and build a hybrid Spot + on-demand architecture. A team runs 10 D4s_v5 VMs for CI/CD build agents at $0.192/hr each. All pay-as-you-go, all running 24/7. Monthly cost: $1,401. Switch to Spot VMs at ~$0.037/hr? Monthly cost: $270. That's $1,131/month saved, or $13,572/year. For build agents that can just retry a failed job if evicted. 🎯 Azure Spot VMs use unused datacenter capacity at massive discounts: Standard_D4s_v5 (4 vCPU, 16 GB, Linux, East US): Pay-as-you-go: $0.192/hr ($140/month) Spot price: ~$0.037/hr (~$27/month) Savings: ~81% Standard_D2s_v5 (2 vCPU, 8 GB, Linux, East US): Pay-as-you-go: $0.096/hr ($70/month) Spot price: ~$0.019/hr (~$14/month) Savings: ~80% The trade-off is simple: Azure can evict your Spot VM with 30 seconds notice when it needs the capa