Azure GPU VMs Alternatives for Fine-Tuning
Adapting an existing base model to your own data, typically LoRA or a full fine-tune over hours.
What fine-tuning actually needs
Why people look past Azure GPU VMs for this
Base weights are re-downloadable but slow; the adapter checkpoints and the dataset you spent time cleaning are not something you want to re-derive. That is exactly the gap Azure GPU VMs does not close: Azure's NC and ND series make sense when your organisation is already on Azure and the GPU needs to sit inside that boundary. Priced and operated as enterprise cloud; the environment is an Azure managed disk and does not leave Azure.
To be fair, Azure GPU VMs's real strength is real: Enterprise integration: Entra ID, Azure networking, compliance certifications, and existing enterprise agreements.
Live rates for the GPUs fine-tuning wants
Live per-GPU rates from Aquanode's marketplace. Refreshes hourly.
How you run it here today
Run it today with the seeded lora-finetune job recipe — a real, publicly-imaged container Aquanode can queue directly, not a template we're promising to build later.
Restoring an environment requires a snapshot that already exists. Stopping a deployment yourself captures it on the way out, so you can bring it back later on any provider. A provider-side termination is different: it is only recoverable if you had already switched automated snapshots on for that deployment, and it costs you the work since the last one. Automated snapshots are opt-in, nothing runs until you start it, and with none running there is nothing to restore.
More alternatives pages
Other workloads on Azure GPU VMs
Fine-Tuning alternatives to other clouds
