Box 1: 6 virtual machines - The Autoscale scale out rule increases the number of VMs by 2 if the CPU threshold is 80% or higher. The initial instance count is 4 and rises to 6 when the 2 extra instances of VMs are added. Box 2: 2 virtual machnes - The Autoscale scale in rule decreases the number of VMs by 4 if the CPU threshold is 30% or lower. The initial instance count is 4 and thus cannot be reduced to 0 as the minimum instances is set to 2. Instances are only added when the CPU threshold reaches 80%. Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/autoscale-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/autoscale-best-practices https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/autoscale-common-scale-patterns