The Challenge

As developers, we deal with lots of complexity, and this is a good thing. It forces us to be creative, and sometimes to go beyond our known universe to overcome challenges.

Microsoft Azure is designed to help us make the right choices. It imposes performance targets through a multitude of mechanisms like throttling and quotas. One of which, I’m sure you have come to know, is that we cannot scale a Cloud Service to zero instances. Let’s stop for a moment and think about this limitation for a second. How would you creatively overcome this challenge?

Scaling Azure Cloud Services

When we build applications on the cloud, we usually favor scaling-out over scaling-up. Consequently, scaling in and out is supported out of the box on Microsoft Azure. On rare occasions, there is a business need to scale-up during peak hours and to scale-down for the quiet hours. This blog post will show you how to achieve this with the help of Microsoft Azure Automation and with PowerShell.

Keep in mind, that scaling up and down requires us to be creative.