first of all would like to say a big thank you to all who is reading my questions, I really appreciate your time and hope to be able contribute back, second, I did see part of my question already asked in another thread but it does not answer it plus my questions have a bit different angle, so here it goes:
Does not elasticity already include scalability? I see scalability and elasticity go as two separate features of the cloud in service promotions, is there a technical difference or is it just marketing play of terminology?
I have similar confusion about compute and networking, does not compute power already include networking, I saw it being briefly displayed as two separate advantages of cloud service
I will give it a try :) But it will largely be my understanding and less citing of provider documentation.
Elasticity vs. Scalability
I interprete elasticity as the capability to react to more or less daily variation in resource needs. Unlike reserved instances or your own server hardware "in the basement" the cloud provider offer both the resources and the managment tools to let you use varying amounts of compute, network , ... resources from hour to hour or day to day.
So elasticity (in my mind) solves the business need to react / adapt to changing demand that might follow a pattern like day / night or season / off-season but might be relatively stable from year to year or even week to week.
Scalability in my mind is more than everything the ability of these "hyper-scalers" to allow customers / you to grow your system continously and almost with no upper limit. So I would say the average (i.e.) weekly usage can go up every week for months after months and you wouldn't run out of upgrade options with the cloud providers to help you serve more and more requests.
Compute and Networking
The cloud uses "software defined networking" which abstracts all that hardware stuff like switches and routers from you as a user and offers connectivity options that would be hard to realize on your own / with traditional networking. So the networking capabilities of a major cloud provider are a feature set of their own, with lots of room for system improvements and capabilities. Therefor it is designed, serviced, billed... separately from other service classes like compute or storage.
A simple example or illustration of that might be a virtual machine (or multiple) that on their own as stand alone compute resources might have a network interface and a public ip attached to them. You can reach that machine, the machine can reach to internet (if you configure it that way) and you can install stuff on it. That's it - you have compute power.
But when you group virtual machines in i.e. application security groups and use these groups as objects in resources that allow, deny, redirect traffic internally or externally and maybe tunnel traffic to these compute resources to your on-premise resources (like in many cases Active Directory Domain Services) you start to use advanced networking capabilites. But obviously there's much more and networking can be one of the hardest parts of certification exams on cloud topics.
Related
From answers to other questions (such as this question), it sounds like different instance sizes offer different network throughput. My processing is I/O bound, and I'm trying to use web jobs to do it on a web site instance. Do web sites offer the same bandwidth as VMs with the same size/price point? Or if I need bandwidth higher than 100 Mb/sec, would I need to choose a solution other than web sites to do this processing?
Thanks,
David
Unfortunately, the bandwidth limits are not currently exposed.
At the end of the day, Azure App Service is using some Cloud Services machines and the bandwidth should be quite similar than in Web/Worker roles.
However, the requests go through different mechanisms (IIS ARR for example) but it might not add so much overhead.
That being said, the best way would be to try and scale out (using multiple instances) if you need more.
I hope this helps!
Adding to #dmatson answer a small detail - right now, expect SLA for high availability, which means that you can have different numbers sometimes. You will need to wait for the official release of SLA - or scale out by the size or amount. The very good FAQ i have found on that topic is here, many networking-related questions are covered.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/igorpag/2014/09/28/my-personal-azure-faq-on-azure-networking-slas-bandwidth-latency-performance-slb-dns-dmz-vnet-ipv6-and-much-more/
We are developing an engineering tool for analysis and simulation of wind turbines. An important use case is to run 1000s of (independent) simulations as fast as possible (called a batch). We want to do this on commercial cloud VMs (AWS, Azure, Google). We are wondering if it is realistic to start 1000 or more VMs in one go (and run them for 30-60 minutes)?
This is one of the exact solutions that cloud computing can solve because all of the large vendors have spare capacity in the regions of tens of thousands of cores.
They all have case studies showing this capacity, all with thousands of VMs running large, clustered applications.
The best approach is to come up with a 'small' simulation that you can deploy to test the environment, perhaps on a few hundred cores. Carefully spec it out - maybe engage with some of the HPC specialist consultancies. Then once you have a pitch for the number of processors you need, the amount of IO, the speed of network between clusters etc. Give each of their sales teams a call and start a discussion.
If you don't go through this route, you can simply raise a support call to have your VM limit raised (this applies to all vendors) at that point you would explain your requirements and they'll get back in touch and work out how to deliver your requirements.
I am looking for simple analogies to explain windows azure, app fabric, etc to students or layman person. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
Thanks
N
Well, first I would try and talk about how we used to build and maintain things. Buying our own hardware, building it, programming it, and connecting it to the internet. That's the old way. Then, I would pivot into what cloud service providers are. In a nutshell, they are just somebody else's servers. Usually Amazons, Microsoft's or Googles servers. AWS/Azure/GCP.
Here is a quick youtube video explaining it in layman's terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ERdeg8Sfv4
Cloud service providers offer web portal, a website, where folks can click and build services like storage, backup, DNS, database, more websites, load balancing, and - maybe the most popular - virtual machine hosting.
What makes CSPs so successful is economies of scale. CSPs will build huge data centers and engineer them to provide the kind of services that most businesses need. COntrast that to if every business were to build their own from scratch. There are however lots of challenges to these CSPs, like needing a lot more spare capacity and having to build something that fits everyone as opposed to something that fits a particular user. So, for a small business, whether they save money depends on their use case. You might save more building from scratch, but then you'd have to train and pay folks to maintain your own servers.
One of the most revolutionary benefits that cloud service providers brought into the market is that purchasing additional capacity is much easier and faster. You might have taken weeks to buy hardware and install it at your location. Or if you are renting though traditional suppliers you might take a few hours to let them manually reconfigure things. However they now make everything automatic so you can get a new server within seconds. This have allowed businesses to build their applications to allow them to scale on demand. This means that they pay different amount of money for the services depending on how much they use. This have the ability to reduce costs but it again require more time to develop and maintain the more complex applications.
I've developed a simple system using ASP.NET MVC and WCF for customers to register software and get a license key. I was thinking about using Windows Azure instead of a traditional web hosting because it seems easy to use. I'd only need one SQL database and one small VM, but I'm confused about the billing.
Does the billing only charge as people actually use it, or would I pay the fee for each CPU every hour of everyday for the whole month because that was what was available to users? So for one single cpu VM at $0.12 an hour in a 30 day month I'd pay $86.4? Or would I pay less if no one used it? Then another $9.99 for an up to 1GB database, so for my needs I'd basically pay $96.39 a month?
That seems expensive for basic web hosting, but if it's easier for someone with little hosting experience to set up and maintain as well as making it easy to expand if I suddenly got a lot of traffic then it would certainly be worth it to me.
EDIT: I think I found the answer here: Getting started with Windows Azure
You're correct regarding the $0.12 / hour: you're billed based on resources consumed (meaning virtual machine instances), whether you're running at 0% cpu or 100% cpu.
While it might seem expensive compared to your average shared-hosting provider, consider that you're getting health monitoring, failover, SLA (if you have 2 or more instances) upgrade domains, etc.
I have two blog posts that go deeper into Compute Instance billing that you might find beneficial:
Part 1: The True Cost of Web and Worker Roles
Part 2: Staging and Compute-Hour Metering
I hope this helps...
The rule for billing is quite simple: if you look at the protal, there are the "gray" or "blue" boxes showing for a deployment.
If the box is gray, you are OK. If the box is blue, a bill is due.
This means that charges for every hour will be made whenever the box is blue, that is: once a deployment has been done, whether it's stopped or running.
Now you have a new feature in windows azure called WebSites. Deploying a website which have only a small amount of visits. It is simply 'free'. This is light weight website running in a shared environment.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ -> Check for websites.
I'd like to start a free budget/personal finance site and will need plenty of horsepower and storage. I'm definitely a nubee, so how does one get started in terms of hardware infrastructure? Do I need to get a dedicated IP from my ISP and obtain my own servers? Do I go with amazon or Sql Server Data Services/Azure or something like that? Is the latter services free or a discount offering available to non-profit/free services such as the budget/personal finance site I'm looking to start?
If you don't mind writing your web application in python, then I's suggest using Google App Engine. See: What Is Google App Engine?
What I like to do when I have new ideas for a site is to find an inexpensive hosting solution ($10 per month). This allows me to test the idea and see if the site is going to be successful. If it is a flop, I haven't wasted much money and if it is successful I can upgrade to better hosting (dedicated server).
There are many hosting options available and several of them have great tools such as an online SQL Server management studio. Your other option would be to host it yourself if you are prepared to deal with firewall issues, backups, storage, etc.
Whether it is feasible to DIY varies a lot by country...if you have a decent broadband connection with a fixed IP this can be the cheapest route to play around with first, especially if you need an awful lot of storage.
Note however that many fast broadband connections are only fast for downloads - when you're running a server, the speed your users will see is the upload speed, which is usually a lot less. Also, you'll need to do your own admin and backup etc.
Apart from this most hosting options have a price tag on top, varying from virtual hosts (sharing a real machine), to colocation (your machine in somebody's data center), to cloud services like amazon et al (which have a good scaling ability)- and you will need to shop around for the software stack and hardware features you really need.
There's really two ways to answer this question, what differentiates them is budget.
One is to properly design this solution, prototype it, benchmark the prototype, extrapolate anticipated user load, add overhead and scale accordingly. This takes time, costs but gives you a supportable solution that serves your customers well.
The other is to just give something, anything a go and fix the problems as they come along. This is quicker and cheaper but might be a headache for a while and might p*** off your customers.
Basically it comes down to budget.
Best of luck.