I am looking a way to run aks or k8s cluster in dev/test labs but I couldn't find an official way. I guess Azure has allow using production services in Dev/Test Lab however they haven't published yet a document to achieve this. I need rich memory VMs such as 128/256 gb though AKS doesn't support that vm on cluster. And AutoShutdown option will be cost saving for these VMs. So I have to build this in dev/test lab. Any suggestion would be helpful. Thanks!
AKS is a managed service and you can't run it on you own VMs or the ones from Dev/Test Labs. Why are you saying that you can't use 128/256GB RAM VMs? When selecting your VMs size in the portal, make sure to select the Memory Optimized family.
If I understand correctly, your goal is to save money running these high cost VMs. One possible way you can achieve this is create your cluster with a single instance of a smaller VM and create a a second node pool with the larger VMs. You can then create and destroy that second pool on demand.
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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
I have some workload which needs to be run a few times per week. It requires some heavy computational work and runs about one hour (with 16 cores and 32gb memory). It is possible to run it in a container.
Azure offers many different possibilities to run containers. (I have no knowledge of most of the Azure services, so my conclusions might be wrong.) Firstly, I thought Azure Container Instances is perfect for this scenario, but it only offers containers with up to 4 vCPU and 16gb memory. There is no need for orchestration with a single container, so Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Service Fabric come with too much overhead. Similarly, Azure Batch also offers computational clusters which are not needed for a single workload.
Which Azure service is the best fit for this use case?
While a "best fit" question is likely to be closed. Anyways, here's a suggestion.
Don't dismiss AKS. You can easily create a 1 node cluster using a VM that fits your required configuration. Using the standard SLA, you don't pay for the master node and you can stop your cluster after each run and stop being charged. No need to bother about orchestration, see this as a VM that has everything to run your container that you'll use like an ACI.
I was able to sign up for a free Azure for Students account, which has the same limits as with the Azure free tier. On the "Free Service" service, this is written:
As well as this:
While I understand that "you are only charged for the computer, storage, networking, etc. resources you use" (from Microsoft's website), what can we logically do with AKS and Service Fabric in the free tier? For example, with Virtual Machines, you can Linux and Windows B1S VMs for 1500 hours every month. This means I can provision B1S VMs, one Linux and one Windows, and leave them running for up to 1500 hours per month.
To summarize, can we provision any AKS cluster (with some amount of worker nodes), or a Service Fabric cluster without incurring any charges (a logical way to use these services) in a similar way to how I can create VMs and use them within these limits for free? And if not, is there any other alternative that is free?
Thank you in advance.
AKS cluster itself is free, but you cant use b1s nodes for the system node pool (they are too small):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/quotas-skus-regions#restricted-vm-sizes
so the answer would be no.
EDIT: sorry, forgot about the Service Fabric part of the question. I dont see why that wouldn't work apart from the fact that it would be next to impossible to actually deploy anything useful on top of b1s vm that's running all of the SF binaries.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-cluster-capacity
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.
How to autoscale virtual machines(IaaS approach) in azure instead of web/worker role autoscaling in azure?
You can now Autoscale Virtual machines in Azure directly in the Azure Management Portal. ScottGu has a post about it on his blog.
The important thing to autoscale VM's is you must proactively provision the Max # of VM's you think you'll need to handle your peak capacity, and add them to the same availability set.
For example, if on the busiest day of the week it takes 6 machines to handle all of your traffic, then you need to create 6 instances and install your application on it, configure it to handle traffic etc.... and then add it to an availability set with the other 5 machines.
Once you've done this, you can navigate to the Cloud Service that contains all of your virtual machines and click on the Scale tab. You should see a list of your availability sets, and it should tell you the # of machines you can scale over. Choose a metric (either CPU or Queue today), and then range of machines you want to scale between. You can scale between 1 and the total # of machines.
When load is low -- Azure will turn off machines (so you don't have to pay for them), and when load is high, Azure will turn those machines back on.
Auto-scaling on the IaaS level doesn't really make sense. Even if azure could detect high CPU usage and start a new VM based on it, what then? you still need to install your application on that VM automatically somehow.
What you are looking for is something that runs your app on azure, and installs new instances on new VM's if necessary. That "something" is called PaaS enabler. Basically it is another abstraction level between your app and the azure IaaS.
there are a couple of them out there :
Cloudify, CloudFoundary, Juju
as far as i know, only one that supports Azure is Cloudify. you can check out how to configure azure using Cloudify here : Configuring Azure
you can also check out the community - Cloudify Forum, or post questions here for assistance.
Disclaimer: I work for Gigaspaces, developing the Cloudify product line.
According to this it's possible to scale out IaaS with Availability sets by pre-provisioning the number of boxes: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kaevans/2015/02/20/autoscaling-azurevirtual-machines/