I have a scenario where our Azure App Service needs to run a job every night. The job cannot scale to multiple machines -- it involves downloading a large data file, and does special processing on it (only takes a couple minutes). Special software will be required to be installed as well. A lot of memory will be needed on the machine for the computation, therefore I was thinking one of the Ev-series machines. For these reasons, I cannot run the job as a web job on the Azure App Service, and I need to delegate it elsewhere.
Anyway, I have experience with Azure Batch so at first I was thinking of Azure Batch. But I am not sure this makes sense for my scenario because the work cannot scale to multiple machines. Does it make sense to have a pool with a single node and single vm on the node? When I need to do the work, an Azure web job enqueues the job, and the pool automatically sizes from 0 to 1?
Are there better options out there? I was look to see if there are any .NET libraries to spin up a single VM and start executing work on it, then disable the VM when done, but I couldn't find anything.
Thanks!
For Azure Batch, the scenario of a single VM in a single pool is valid. Azure Container Instances or Azure Functions would appear to be a better fit, however, if you can provision the appropriate VM sizes for your workload.
As you suggested, you can combine Azure Functions/Web Jobs to enqueue the work to an Azure Batch Job. If you have autoscaling or an autopool set on the Azure Batch Pool or Job, respectively, then the work will be processed and the compute resources will be deallocated after (assuming you have the correct settings in-place).