Reducing the cost of a Stream Analytics Cluster - azure

Basically I have a Stream Analytics Cluster 36RU/S and I am being billed for the total computer per hour even if I dont use any or all of it.
I was wondering can I reduce my cost by stopping specific jobs or do you have any other suggestions for reducing the cost of a cluster.
I need the Stream Analytics Cluster and not a Stream Analytics Job because it must be in a VNET.
Thanks

When you create a ASA cluster, there are dedicated VMs that get provisioned and managed for you behind the scenes. There is no way as of today to 'pause' unused SUs to prevent you from getting billed. If you need your ASA jobs to connect to resources that are in a VNET, you will need to use ASA cluster with private endpoints or consider using managed identity with 'allow trusted services' option.

Related

what is container inventory in azure kubernetes service

I am analyzing azure kubernetes service data ingestion to the log analytics and cost optimization.
When i analyze the logs using queries i found that container inventory produces large data ingestion to log analytics which costs more.
When I analyzed about container inventory for AKS, kubernetes i couldn't find proper answer.
Can anyone explain what is container inventory? and how it generates so much of data ingestion in aks?how can i optimize container inventory data ingestion?
I analyzed more about this concept but i couldn't get proper explanation about it as i fresh to azure AKS and kubernetes. can anyone guide me on this?
Thank you!
The ContainerIventory is an inventory of all the containers running in the cluster and their properties) such as state, ports, environment variables etc).
The inventory is collected periodically (once every minute). This means that all this data is collected every minute for every container.
To reduce data ingestion and cost, there are a few things you can do, which are described in the docs, for example disable the environment variable collection, which can be done by either disabling log collection globally in the oms agent config map:
[log_collection_settings.env_var]
enabled = false
Or by disabling it per container by setting the environment variable AZMON_COLLECT_ENV to false

Is it possible to see when my Azure Resources are idling?

I want to see when my resources are idling (e.g. certain resources might only be used during business hours and not used for any other background process). I'd like to do that preferably through an API call.
It would all depends on the type of resource and what you are wanting to do. You could use the Azure Monitor API or Azure Data Explorer API with Kusto to query out specific metrics for your different services. Depending on the type of data, this would require you to have more analytics enabled.
Here are some examples based on types of services.
Azure App Service - You could query for CPU, Memory, HTTP Requests, etc. This would give you an idea of activity. These same metrics tie into the auto-scaling.
Azure VMs - CPU, Memory, Disk IO, etc. You could determine your baseline then you would know when it is idle or not.
Azure Storage - Transactions, Ingress, Egress, Requests, etc. You could use that to determine if there is activity in your storage account.
As you can see it all depends on what you want to define as idling. If the goal is to reduce costs, then that will be difficult with many of these services. You could scale up and down your App Services with some scripts or scale in/out based on metrics. Same can be done with your Azure VMs, or using stopping and starting. Storage will not be able to be adjusted, but you are only charged for storage and egress so that is dictated by activity.
Hope this helps.
no, this is not possible. how do you define "idling"? how would azure know if your service does anything or not? besides, most of the PaaS resources cannot be stopped, so whats the use of that.
You can use Azure Advisor to get cost optimization advice, or Azure Monitor directly to gather performance data and then analyze it, but its not going to be trivial.

How to design Azure HDInsights Cluster

I have a query on AZURE HDInsights. How do I need to design AZURE HDInsights Cluster according to my on-premises infrastructure ?
What are the major parameters which I need to consider before designing the cluster ?
(For Example) If I have 100 servers running on-premises, how many nodes I need to select in my Cloud Cluster like that. ?!! In AWS we have EMR sizing calculator and Cluster Planner/Advisor. Do we have anything similar planning mechanism in AZURE apart from Pricing Calculator ? Please clarify and provide your inputs. With Any example will be really great. Thanks.
Before deploying an HDInsight cluster, plan for the desired cluster capacity by determining the needed performance and scale. This planning helps optimize both usability and costs. Some cluster capacity decisions cannot be changed after deployment. If the performance parameters change, a cluster can be dismantled and re-created without losing stored data.
The key questions to ask for capacity planning are:
In which geographic region should you deploy your cluster?
How much storage do you need?
What cluster type should you deploy?
What size and type of virtual machine (VM) should your cluster nodes use?
How many worker nodes should your cluster have?
Each and every question is addressed here: "Capacity planning for HDInsight Clusters".

Turning off ServiceFabric clusters overnight

We are working on an application that processes excel files and spits off output. Availability is not a big requirement.
Can we turn the VM sets off during night and turn them on again in the morning? Will this kind of setup work with service fabric? If so, is there a way to schedule it?
Thank you all for replying. I've got a chance to talk to a Microsoft Azure rep and documented the conversation in here for community sake.
Response for initial question
A Service Fabric cluster must maintain a minimum number of Primary node types in order for the system services to maintain a quorum and ensure health of the cluster. You can see more about the reliability level and instance count at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/service-fabric-cluster-capacity/. As such, stopping all of the VMs will cause the Service Fabric cluster to go into quorum loss. Frequently it is possible to bring the nodes back up and Service Fabric will automatically recover from this quorum loss, however this is not guaranteed and the cluster may never be able to recover.
However, if you do not need to save state in your cluster then it may be easier to just delete and recreate the entire cluster (the entire Azure resource group) every day. Creating a new cluster from scratch by deploying a new resource group generally takes less than a half hour, and this can be automated by using Powershell to deploy an ARM template. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-cluster-creation-via-arm/ shows how to setup the ARM template and deploy using Powershell. You can additionally use a fixed domain name or static IP address so that clients don’t have to be reconfigured to connect to the cluster. If you have need to maintain other resources such as the storage account then you could also configure the ARM template to only delete the VM Scale Set and the SF Cluster resource while keeping the network, load balancer, storage accounts, etc.
Q)Is there a better way to stop/start the VMs rather than directly from the scale set?
If you want to stop the VMs in order to save cost, then starting/stopping the VMs directly from the scale set is the only option.
Q) Can we do a primary set with cheapest VMs we can find and add a secondary set with powerful VMs that we can turn on and off?
Yes, it is definitely possible to create two node types – a Primary that is small/cheap, and a ‘Worker’ that is a larger size – and set placement constraints on your application to only deploy to those larger size VMs. However, if your Service Fabric service is storing state then you will still run into a similar problem that once you lose quorum (below 3 replicas/nodes) of your worker VM then there is no guarantee that your SF service itself will come back with all of the state maintained. In this case your cluster itself would still be fine since the Primary nodes are running, but your service’s state may be in an unknown replication state.
I think you have a few options:
Instead of storing state within Service Fabric’s reliable collections, instead store your state externally into something like Azure Storage or SQL Azure. You can optionally use something like Redis cache or Service Fabric’s reliable collections in order to maintain a faster read-cache, just make sure all writes are persisted to an external store. This way you can freely delete and recreate your cluster at any time you want.
Use the Service Fabric backup/restore in order to maintain your state, and delete the entire resource group or cluster overnight and then recreate it and restore state in the morning. The backup/restore duration will depend entirely on how much data you are storing and where you export the backup.
Utilize something such as Azure Batch. Service Fabric is not really designed to be a temporary high capacity compute platform that can be started and stopped regularly, so if this is your goal you may want to look at an HPC platform such as Azure Batch which offers native capabilities to quickly burst up compute capacity.
No. You would have to delete the cluster and recreate the cluster and deploy the application in the morning.
Turning off the cluster is, as Todd said, not an option. However you can scale down the number of VM's in the cluster.
During the day you would run the number of VM's required. At night you can scale down to the minimum of 5. Check this page on how to scale VM sets: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-cluster-scale-up-down/
For development purposes, you can create a Dev/Test Lab Service Fabric cluster which you can start and stop at will.
I have also been able to start and stop SF clusters on Azure by starting and stopping the VM scale sets associated with these clusters. But upon restart all your applications (and with them their state) are gone and must be redeployed.

Azure VMs high-availability setup for data disk or storage

I'm currently looking into a high-availability approach for a file server within Azure in which I will need to be deploying VMs for. The data on the file server will be constantly changing. From what I read so far, I will need at least 2 VMs and grouping them together into a shared availability set along with creating a cloud service. Although this will address the application and server aspect, what about the storage and the data on them?
I understand that I can't attach a single disk to multiple VMs so I'm a bit lost on how to proceed with this. Any thoughts or ideas on how to move forward with this?
In short, I have a VM with direct data disk attached to it that I'm looking to provide high-availability in the event that the VM goes offline; either through an outage, host patching, hardware maintenance, etc...
Have a look into Azure Blob Storage - don't worry about disks etc, just let the Azure fabric handle the data redundancy and scalability for you!
Here's an "all you need" introduction to WIndows Azure Storage:

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