Creating a Batch account in theAzure portal

Azure Batch addresses the need for high computational performance, that is HPC. With aninfrastructure designed to withstand heavy workloads, Microsoft Azure makes use of thisfeature more efficiently by presenting the user with two forms of deployment, whether inIaaS or PaaS. In IaaS, you can use Azure batch to create a pool of nodes (virtual machines),then you must install the applications that you would want to run on the virtual machines.

Already in the model as PaaS, developers can use it as a service.The central idea of this functionality is to address any workloads that are intrinsicallyparallel and also that applications can run independently. It is worth mentioning that in theexecution of these applications, they may need to access some common data, however notto communicate with other instance of the application. Recommended scenarios for usingthis feature are:Risk Modeling,Image Rendering,Processing,Genetic Sequence AnalysisData ingestion,ETL processing,OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Let's contextualize this resource by addressing a specific scenario. A classic example ofparallel computing is the rendering of digital images and animations. Usually, small-scalework runs on a station that is compromised for hours, or even days, processing a scene. Orfor larger environments, Render Farms are assembled, composed of several dedicatedservers for this purpose. With Azure, you can have this on demand by paying only for the processing used. This is just an example, but through Powershell and .Net libraries inWindows and Python scripts in Linux, among other forms, Azure Batch can run manytypes of distributed workloads, from the simplest to the most complex.The charge is always made for CPU time, so you only pay for what you consume, plus thestorage that the process generates, being feasible for both seasonal loads and for regularprocesses. And by saving its output to a regular storage account, it is possible to makeoutput jobs directly to the virtual machines hosted as IaaS within a single tenant.

You caneven automate the creation process in Azure Batch using JSON templates. By using thistemplate, you can create a pool of virtual machines utilizing images from the AzureMarketplace.With a simple interface and a lot of flexibility, Azure Batch can be a powerful tool tostreamline repetitive processes and save computing resources, since through automation itis possible to upload a pool of servers of any size for the processing of your loads, available.

Implementing Azure Batch Service

To illustrate the implementation of Azure Batch, we will take as reference the implementation in the PaaS model. In the Azure portal, click Create a Resource and in the Azure marketplace search field type: Azure Batch.

Select your subscription and resource group appropriately and enter the name of the Azurebatch account that will be created. Another important point is the choice of location of theservice because we have to consider the latency as well as the cost of the feature. Fill in the fields shown.

There are two pool allocation modes:Batch ServiceUser Subscription.The difference is whether you must provide sets of computation nodes in a signaturemanaged by the Batch service, or if the subscription will create a new Batch account. If youchoose User Subscription you will be informed that this feature must be deployed to virtualmachines in a new resource group.