We are happy to announce the general availability of Ephemeral OS disk. This feature is suitable for stateless workloads and enable you to create thousands of VMs at scale with Shared Image Gallery.

One of the key value propositions of this feature is faster reimage of your VMs to its original state. The new writes to Ephemeral OS disk are only cached locally on the VM. Hence, Ephemeral OS disk works well for stateless workloads, where applications are tolerant of individual VM failures and only expects the writes to OS disk to persist only while the VM is running.

Ephemeral OS disk is also suitable to move applications, deployed using the Classic deployment model to the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) deployment model. With Ephemeral OS disk, you would observe lower read/write latency to the OS disk and faster VM reimage.

Ephemeral OS disk is free i.e., you incur no storage cost for the OS disk. You can still be charged for any data disks attached to the VM. You can use either the Marketplace or Custom or Gallery Images to deploy VM/VM Scale Set (VMSS) with Ephemeral OS Disk.

This functionality is available in all Azure regions, including Azure China and Gov regions. You can now use this functionality via. REST, CLI, PowerShell or Portal.

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