title: How to do autoscaling with Azure VMs?
body: <p>It's pretty easy to do autoscaling with Azure web apps, and there's something called Virtual Machine Scale Sets (but that's still in beta and not working properly yet), so I'm wondering: how can we do autoscaling using normale Azure VMs?</p>
  
  <p>1) I was thinking we could create a load balancer, availability set and VMs, pre-provision them and turn some off. But aside from using the API to build a DIY scaler: how can I automatically turn on more machines if the current set exceeds a certain threshold? Does Azure offer anything for this? How do big companies that use Azure handle this?</p>
  
  <p>2) How can I make sure that the machines are all consistent and have the latest version of our software installed on it? Even if the machine has been offline for months?</p>