In order to save expenses in Azure DevOps, I'm trying to scale the resources, which can scale depending on the requirement. Team leads will update the resource requirements in SharePoint, and the runbook needs to be executed with SharePoint datat. Team leads will update the resource requirements in SharePoint, and the runbook needs to be executed with SharePoint data. If such resources are not required on weekends but must be operational on weekdays, they should be stopped or reduced in size. I need to use automation to do it for all of the VMs and App Services at a subscription level every Friday. If there is a method to automate this procedure using PowerShell.
I'm glad to receive input. Thanks in advance.
I'm looking for feedback on Start/Stop VMs and Scaling Azure App Services. On weekends, the same may be said for other relevant resources. How can we accomplish this with Azure PowerShell?
The best way to do is by using 'Azure Automation Runbook' scheduled to run every specified day or date by time. To target the VM's, Azure Tags will be much helpful.
Your script must check:
A VM has a specific Tags (e.g., StopVM:Friday 11:00PM)
Maintenance Enabled in your monitoring solution
VM is stopped already or not.
Backup required?
Confirm the VM is Deallocated (not stopped)
Auto-Shutdown option is also available to do this activity.
Because sometime all you need is a quick and dirty way to save money :
And if you wan't to build something there's an API to shutdown and start VMs
Related
As an MSP, we manage multiple customer subscriptions through Azure Lighthouse.
Historically we've used a single Automation Account per subscription to contain solutions such as runbooks related to the Start/Stop v1 solution, Automation-based Update Management, Inventory, and Change Tracking. This Automation Account is also linked to a single Log Analytics workspace per subscription.
We've since deployed Start/Stop v2, which uses LogicApps and Azure Functions. We now have a requirement to, as part of stopping and starting some VMs, stop and start some services on the machines itself. I plan on doing this through (PowerShell) Azure Automation Runbooks, which would only stop a VM if the runbook has successfully stopped a service on it.
My question relates to whether a single monolithic Automation Account is the way to go, or whether there are any considerations to be taken if we were to implement multiple Automation Accounts.
(I've noticed Best practice to deploy Azure Automation Account Runbooks, but that's over a year ago. Things might have changed in the mean time)
The best practice related question which you have mentioned still holds good i.e., 2 major attributes to consider are pricing and logical resource allocation. One other attribute to keep in mind while deciding whether to go with single or multiple automation accounts is the limits i.e., if you go with single automation account then does the traffic in your environment or the activities that your automation account does reach the limits mentioned here? If yes, then go for multiple automation accounts approach.
I have 4 VMs in azure and I am trying to set up a schedule to lower the RAMs and CPU cores for after-hours and revert them back to their original size during business hours.
can someone guide me through the steps or share a how-to resource, please? I can't find any documents and I am sure my search key is not correct.
Thanks
As suggested by #harshavmb, you can make use of VMSS.
In Azure, Auto-Scaling is possible if you make use of Virtual Machine Scale-Sets.
Virtual Machine Scale-Sets allows you to automatically scale as resource demand changes.
Based on schedules, you can create auto scale rules.
These schedule-based rules allow you to automatically scale the number of VM resources at fixed times.
To create the Auto-Scale rule, you can make use of following tools:
Azure PowerShell
Azure CLI
Azure template
Otherwise, you can create an automation account in Azure and execute runbooks as mentioned in below link if helpful:
Automatically Resize an Azure VM - Automation account
Since the pricing does not offer much choice in terms of flexibility my developer MSDN account is quickly running out of credits using Azure Time Series Insights fro a Proof of Concept. Is it somehow possible to suspend the service so no costs are incurred? I would hate to have to delete the whole thing and set it up again when we start working again on the PoC.
Currently, Azure still do not provide a way to suspend TSI environment.
Maybe you can use scripted template deployment for creating/deleting TSI environment.
With this approach, however, you are going to constantly loose your data.
On the link below there are guidelines, provided by Microsoft, on how to implement template deployment:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/time-series-insights/time-series-insights-manage-resources-using-azure-resource-manager-template
The general steps provided by MSFT are:
Install PowerShell
Create the template and a parameter file.
In PowerShell, log in to your Azure account.
Create a new resource group if one does not exist.
Test the deployment.
Deploy the template.
I thought one of the advantages of Azure was that I could turn services on and off depending on when I want them to be available.
However I cant see how to pause my App Service Plan.
Is it possible?
I want to use the S1 tier so that I can play with what it offers. However I want to be able to pause the cost accumulation when I am not using it.
I see from the app service pricing help that an app will still be billed for even though it is in the stopped state.
Yet the link also clearly states that I only pay for what I use. So how does that work?
If you put your hosting plan onto the free tier, you will stop being charged for it. However if you have things like deployment slots and certificates these will be deleted.
The ability to turn services on and off, is more to do with being able to scale services, so if you need 50 servers for an hour you can easily do that.
What you can do to make your solution temporary is to create a deployment script, using Powershell or Resource manager Templates then you can deploy your solution for exactly as long as you need it and then delete it again when you don't. In this sense you can turn your services on and off at a whim.
Azure provides building blocks for you to create the solution you need, it is up to you to figure out how to best use those building blocks to create the solution you seek.
Edited to answer extended question.
If you want to use the S1 pricing plan, and not have it charge when you are not using it, the only way of achieving that is by using automation. Fortunately, this is reasonably trivial to achieve.
If you look at this template it is pretty much all configured to deploy a website from Github to Azure on demand. If you edit that to configure it to your needs you can have a new Azure website online with 2 minutes of running the script.
Then you would have another script that deleted it once you had finished.
Doing it this way you would loose no functionality, and probably learn quite a bit about what is possible with Azure along the way.
App Service Plan
An app service plan is the hardware that a web app runs on. In the free and shared tier your web apps share an instance with other web apps. In the other tiers you have a dedicated virtual machine. It is this virtual machine that you pay for. In that case it is irrelevant whether or not you have web apps running on your app service or not, you still have a virtual machine running and you will be charged for that.
To change the App Service Plan via PowerShell, you can run the following command
Set-AzureRmAppServicePlan -ResourceGroupName $rg -Name $AppServicePlan -Tier Free
I was able to accomplish this using the dashboard by selecting the App Service Plan, clicking Scale up (App Service Plan), and then from there if you click Dev/Test you can select the Free tier.
As others have mentioned, you need to script this. Fortunately, I created a repository with one-click deployment to your Azure resources.
https://github.com/jraps20/jrap-AzureVerticalScaling
The steps are intended to be as simple and generic as possible:
Execute the one-click deployment from the repo readme
Select the subscription, resource group etc.
Deploy resource to Azure
Set up your schedule to scale up and scale down as-needed
The scripting relies on runbooks and variables to maintain the previous state of each App Service Plan and App Services within those plans. Some App Services cannot be scaled due to specific settings being used (AlwaysOn, Use32BitWOrkerProcess, ClientCertEnabled, etc.). In those cases, the previous values are stored as variables prior to down scaling and then the original values are reapplied when the services are scaled up.
For more clarity, I have written a blog post that goes into detail. The post is pertaining to Sitecore, but applies to any App Service setup- Drastically Reduce Azure PaaS Hosting Costs in Non-Prod Environments With Scheduled Vertical Scaling. It also includes a brief video tutorial to show its use case.
Myself and others have been using this repository/approach for well over a year and it works great. I mostly use it for POC's to reduce costs when I'm not actively working on something. However, its main intention was for targeting non-prod environments to save costs during non-work hours.
Azure App Service Plan is just an logical concept of a set of features and capacity that you can share across multiple apps. I don`t think you can "pause" a plan, instead you can pause your service. and depends on billing model of each service, you might or might not get charged.
Pausing = Delete or lower tier.
Scripting is the key.
Design Diagram
Use scripts to create (also consider shared resources)
Delete using scripts
Use scripts to recreate.
eg: If we use resource group properly per environment then
Export-AzureRmResourceGroup will create a template for us (everything in the resource group will be pulled out as script). So we can delete it and recreate it anytime.
To pause a VM and stop billing you need to shut is down and deallocate it. Just shutting down still has the capacity reserved as if its running.
Storage can't be shutdown - it can be moved to lower cost tiers.
This is essentially a question about saving money - we have build machines in azure - but they are only active for about 8 hours a day. Is there any easy way to create a schedule, so they are taken off line for the rest of the time, so we only pay for 1/3 the amount of compute time?
Darren
Yes , its possible. There are two options available
Via Powershell
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Start-Windows-Azure-b6c179b6
Using Azure VM As scheduler.
http://clemmblog.azurewebsites.net/start-stop-windows-azure-vms-according-time-schedule/
The thing that you can do is using a Powershell script to start/stop the VMs at certain times.
You can find a draft at the Azure Management Portal, under Automation ==> Runbooks.
There you can also find runbooks to scale your machines over the night, to cut costs ever more.
I hope this helps :)