I have a couple unrelated websites that I host using the free subscription of Microsoft Azure. They are currently all under the same Resource Group and same App Service plan (though I don't understand those concepts well enough to know if they should or shouldn't be).
In the past, I've had a problem with individual apps eating up large amounts of some resource, like CPU Time or Data Out. The issue is that they all share one quota... so if Website A has a problem that consumes all the CPU Time for the day, then Website A, Website B, and Website C ALL go down until the quota resets, even though Website B and Website C aren't contributing to the problem.
In short, how do I prevent that so that each website has its own quota (not a shared quota)? Can I separate the websites into different Resource Groups? Different App Service plans? I tried to understand Microsoft's documentation on how these quotas work, but I was unable to find the answer to my question.
Thanks!
I have a couple unrelated websites that I host using the free subscription of Microsoft Azure. They are currently all under the same Resource Group and same App Service plan (though I don't understand those concepts well enough to know if they should or shouldn't be).
Resource groups define a way to group multiple related azure resources together. Typically all resources in the same resource group are deployed together, for example using ARM/Bicep templates.
An App Service plan defines a set of compute resources for web apps to run.The free tier provides 60 minutes of cpu time per day. You can host multiple web apps on the same plan, as you do. But in that case they all consume parts of that 60 minute cpu time quota.
In short, how do I prevent that so that each website has its own quota (not a shared quota)? Can I separate the websites into different Resource Groups? Different App Service plans? I tried to understand Microsoft's documentation on how these quotas work, but I was unable to find the answer to my question.
If you do not want to share the cpu time between the multiple web apps on the same app service plan you can create a free tier App Service Plan per web app, and deploy each web app to their own dedicated free tier App Service Plan.
Related
We had a legacy monolith website application that is hosted on Azure windows server and had 10 customers using it, now as the application data grows the bandwidth of the application is affecting each customer because they were hosted in single server as a single website. Now the client wants to split the database as per customer separately to reduce the database load, so we divided the databases as per customer.
Regarding the website, we still had a dilemma on how to proceed, so we already divide the databases so we are thinking as
it is better to host each customer website on separate servers?
create a different website on a single server for each and every customer?.
Because the clients want this to be scalable and 100%, that one client’s activities and usage will not affect another, as well as be able to easily distinguish cost.
The client also asked to differentiate how much cost occurring for each customer on the resource groups,
previously we had a shared resource group.
Could anyone suggest how to solve this problem?
If your requirement fits you could leverage Azure App Service WebApps (PAAS solution).
You can host apps in the same App Service Plan or isolate your app into new App Service plan (as per your requirement) by having tradeoff between level-of control and costs.
Or to have greater control on the underlying VMs you could leverage Azure VMs (IAAS solution).
To start with, kindly take a look at this approach - Common web application architectures – monolithic application design using Azure App Service.
You could create the web application as separate App Service apps. This design lets you run them in separate App Service plans so they can be scaled independently. If you don't need that level of scalability initially, you can deploy the apps into the same plan and move them into separate plans later if necessary.
The pricing tier of an App Service plan determines what App Service features you get and how much you pay for the plan.
Azure App Service plan overview
App Service plans pricing
Azure offers a number of ways to host your application code.
Kindly checkout this architecture guide on compute decision choice
Resource Group is a just a container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. The resource group can include all the resources for the solution, or only those resources that you want to manage as a group. It doesn't have direct cost implications, but the resources/services (in this case App Service) under it does.
You may wish to know:
Explore and analyze costs with cost analysis
Prevent unexpected charges with Azure billing and cost management
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.
Background
Our company designs and hosts websites for approx. 500 clients, each client has one website. Each website is built on ASP.net. Our current hosting infrastructure is built on hypervisors with virtual machines running Windows. We have 3 virtual machines all running the same spec (8 cores, 24 GB RAM). The 500 client sites are split over these three web servers, there is no load balancing or fault tolerance – the website exists in only one location.
Therefore, as we accumulate clients each web server’s site count increases. When we max out each server, we bring another one online and start again, then once that one is full we spin another VM up etc.
Goal
We would like to move (eventually) our sites over to Azure, however we do not want to replicate our current set up on Azure, instead we would like to move each website over to Azure Web app instead to take advantage of scaling.
We would also like more fine-grained control over our costs when bringing online additional sites. Currently, we bring online a VM and costs us X (for an empty server), it may take us 3 months to fill this. We would like to steadily add to our hosting hosts, not in big steps.
My question
I have investigated for many days on this and cannot find a tutorial or guide on what the ideal set up looks like on Azure Web apps when hosting 100’s of websites. Almost all tutorials assume you only ever going to have one website, so there is a 1:1 relationship between a site and the underlying resource. They never talk about how you should organise your apps into App Service Plans etc.
I understand the concept of adding a website, choosing the appropriate pricing tier and setting the scale settings, what I do not understand is why people online talk about scaling out Azure Apps – surely if an ASP.net websites consumes a certain amount of RAM on a system, by bringing online another VM all you are doing is immediately consuming that amount of RAM again on another system. So scaling out in this sense is to ONLY improve availability – is this correct?
If someone is able to provide some of their own experiences when dealing with a lot of websites on Azure (even better if they own a web design company who hosts on Azure) it would be very much appreciated.
Think of AppService plan as a VM or pool of VMs (in case you run multiple instances) that runs the same applications simultaneously and share the same data disc. If you scale out, you add a new VM to the pool, if you scale up, you change the size of VMs (actually they aren't VMs, but from the user's point of view it is simmilar).
So basically in case like yours, where you run many applications (potentially) smaller applications, scaling up/down establishes the baseline - how many websites you can run, how many applications you can fit in the memory. And then scaling out gives your better reliability and more CPU power that helps you to cope with high traffic.
Our company is much smaller than yours, we host dozens of websites not hundreds. But there are some points that our experience have taught us:
Use at least S2 instances that have 2 cores, with S1 instances a single app can easily degrade performance of other apps in the same AppService plan
Use TrafficManager. If a need arises (e.g. an outage of the service in your region), you can easily move to another region
Split webistes between more smaller AppService plans and collocate applications with the similar usage patterns to the AppService plans. That way you can run one instance, when the traffic is low and spin up new instances when the traffic spikes up.
You are correct that in all pricing tiers (except free and shared) web apps are scaled to all machines in an app service plan. This is an availability feature from the perspective of a web app. Scaling an app service plan from 1 to 2 machines(or auto-scaling) essentially provisions the same web app on all the machines. This of course is no good for your situation, but all is not lost. Generally, the unit of scaling is the app service plan. You could break down web apps into buckets of app service plans. Say first 100+ web apps in AppServicePlan1, then roll over to the next 100+ in AppServicePlan2. The downside is that you will have to manage tracking what app service plan to place the next web app in.
I am trying to understand the azure service plan and how it effect our project's budget.
To give some background, we have two web applications running under Azure Cloud services in single instance auth.foo.com and api.foo.com. This was a good and convenient way to save some money as you still have to pay for one cloud service. We were doing this using hostheaders to deploy two apps on a same IIS instance.
With new WebApp model I understand we can not do the same thing.
Enter the app service plan. I understand its a grouping mechanism to group your apps so that they can be under one roof. The thing I am not clear about is how its billed? So If I have both apps under a same app service plan does it mean I get billed for two apps or just for one?
Think of an App Service Plan as a mapping from sites to servers. So you can have a large amount of small apps running on a couple of servers, or a small amount of large apps running on the same couple of servers. Provided that your App Service Plan is the same SKU and there are the same amount of instances in each, these will be the same cost.
That's why the billing page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/plans/ has unlimited for the number of web apps. So to answer your question specifically, you will get billed for one App Service Plan regardless of the number of apps you have in it, since regardless of the number of apps, you'll be using the same amount of servers.
I'm trying to understand the correct way when hosting a web service using Windows Azure.
After reading some of the documentation available, I have reached these lines:
Windows Azure takes the following actions if a subscription's resource usage quotas are exceeded in a quota interval (24 hours):
Data Out - when this quota is exceeded, Windows Azure stops all web sites for a subscription which are configured to run in Shared mode for the remainder of the current quota interval. Windows Azure will start the web sites at the beginning of the next quota interval.
CPU Time - when this quota is exceeded, Windows Azure stops all web sites for a subscription which are configured to run in Shared mode for the remainder of the current quota interval. Windows Azure will start the web sites at the beginning of the next quota interval.
I was always under the impression that using cloud solution will prevent such events, as I really don't know a head of time what needs my web service will have, and that the cloud will provide the resources as needed (and off-course I will be charged for them) -
is that assumption is wrong?
EDIT
I found this great post that really explains Azure perfectly
Scott Hanselman - my own Q&A about Azure Websites and Pricing
If you are hosting the Windows Azure Website in the Shared mode, although you are paying, there are certain quotas that are in place because in the background you are basically sharing the resources with other websites which are hosted on the same Virtual Machine.
If you are hosting using the Standard mode, then you no longer have quotas and you will not experience this issue. As an added bonus, you can now setup Autoscale to automatically scale out your website under load.
Azure provides you different scalability levels according to the method of hosting you pick. For example if you host your web service on an azure web site you can't scale to thousands of servers. If you host your web services in a cloud service you can scale much further.
In Azure the scalability does not always happen transparently. In the case of a web service your choices are "azure web sites", "azure mobile services" and "azure cloud services". None of these will provide transparent scalability. You will need to define how you want scalability to be processed by azure. Most of the time you can do it in your azure management portal and define "Auto-Scaling" based on your pre-defined metrics as in "total amount of memory used" or "compute power used". Azure helps you gather metrics from a distributed environment, define scaling rules and scale without worrying about the underlying infrastructure but you will need to glue these pieces together as it defines how much you will get billed as well.
Hope this makes sense.