Azure Batch updates for May 2017

New and important Azure Batch capabilities are now available: * Low-priority VMs to enable compute at a fraction of the price (preview): * Low-priority VMs are allocated from surplus compute capacity and are available for up to an 80% discount, enabling certain types of workloads to run for a significantly reduced cost or allowing you to do much more for the same cost. * For more information, see the [announcement](https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/announcing-public-preview-of-azure-batch-low-priority-vms/), [Batch documentation](https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/batch/batch-low-pri-vms), and [pricing details](https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/batch/). * Metered-based licensing for graphics and rendering software with Azure Batch Rendering (private preview): * Seamlessly submit rendering jobs by using Autodesk’s suite of products with the agility, flexibility, and scalability of Azure compute. * For more information, see the [announcement](https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/massive-scale-cloud-rendering-with-autodesk-on-azure/) and the [product page](https://rendering.azure.com/). * Support for built-in output file upload from pool nodes to Azure Blob storage: * ​Batch has always provided the built-in ability to download files by copying them from Azure Blob storage to the pool nodes via task resource files. Now there is built-in support to persist task output files to Blob storage. You can specify output files on a task. * Output file support is available only for pools that you create by using virtual machine configuration (not cloud service configuration). * For more information, see the [Add a task to a job](https://docs.microsoft.com/rest/api/batchservice/add-a-task-to-a-job#outputFile) article. * Improved support for creating Linux VM users: * When you're specifying the user accounts to be created on each node in pool configuration, you can specify a UID and GID for Linux users. * For more information, see the [Add a pool to an account](https://docs.microsoft.com/rest/api/batchservice/add-a-pool-to-an-account#userAccount) article. * Improved task status reporting: * The execution info for a task now has a result property that indicates if the task succeeded or failed. * For more information, see the [Get information about a task](https://docs.microsoft.com/rest/api/batchservice/get-information-about-a-task#executionInfo) article. * Batch * Features * [ Batch](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/batch/)