Further thoughts on Azure instance start times
My post from the other day about slow instance starts on Azure caused some commentary (mainly on reddit) that prompted me to think more about all this. In the end, there were a few more experiments I wanted to run to see if I could squeeze more performance out of Azure. First off, looking at the logs from my initial testing it looks like resource groups are slow. The original terraform creates a resource group as part of the test and then cleans it up at the end. What if instead we had a single permanent resource group and created instances within that? Here is a series of instance starts and deletes using the terraform from the last post: You'll notice that there's no delete value for the last instance. That's because terraform crashed and never deleted the instance. You can also see that instance starts are somewhat consistent, except for being slower in the second half of the test than the first, and occasionally spiking out to very very slow. Oh, and deletes are almost always really slow. What happens if we use a permanent resource group and network? This means that all the "instance start terraform" is doing…