SQL Server 2017: Read-Scale Availability Group

Till SQL Server 2016, it was required to create Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to set up Availability groups irrespective need of project i.e. whether it is required for High Availability or resource conservation on primary server (i.e. to use secondary for read requests).
With SQL Server 2017, we can create availability group without Windows Server Failover Cluster. Of course, it will not act as high availability or disaster recovery set up but it can be used for balancing the read-only load between many servers.
So overhead of maintaining Windows Failover cluster can be avoided if the requirement is just to reduce the read-only load on the primary.

How to enable this?

1. Windows Server Failover Clustering is not needed
   The Availability Group manager does not have or need a cluster context
2. A new cluster_type option is present

To use this, we want the cluster_type of "NONE"

We can set up read-only routing same as SQL Server 2016 (refer to the links in references for more details).

References: 

1. Link 1
2. Link 2
3. Link 3