Cut-price VMs that can be evicted, intended for work that tolerates interruption. Dedicated hosts cannot use them, and since 31 March 2026 Azure Machine Learning clusters asking for low-priority nodes receive Spot VMs.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Spot VMs in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Virtual machines
Infrastructure-as-a-service compute giving complete control of the operating system, making it a fit for lift-and-shift moves and for software relying on OS-level pieces like COM.
- Dedicated
Running Azure Functions on an App Service plan, which removes the execution time limit and offers VNet integration on Basic and higher tiers.
- Azure Machine Learning
Azure platform where you train, deploy, monitor and retrain models of your own, practising MLOps through tools such as pipelines, online endpoints, model monitoring and prompt flow.
Related terms
- Low-priority VM
Discounted, preemptible VM tier that Azure Machine Learning compute clusters used to offer. It has been retired, and clusters still asking for low priority now get Spot VMs billed at the Spot rate.