I need to devise a pricing strategy for a SaaS product I plan to go live with, as tricky a task as that is.
Putting product 'value' and things like RoI aside (since they're off-topic here), I'm looking for some assurances against a situation whereby my competitively priced product incurs losses because of increasing blob storage/SQL costs in Azure.
In a nutshell, this web app will allow users to create tasks, to which they may attach any number of hi-res images, documents etc.
So, in order to keep this question specific and technical, what services does the Azure platform offer that helps mitigate against escalating costs of data/blob storage? Or which services lend itself to managing these losses/costs?
For example, I think a DTU option for my SQL Server will be a flat rate as opposed to a dynamically priced VCore alternative. So I could opt for DTU so I at least know where I stand.
Question/s
Does Azure offer flat rate services for storage? Would IaaS instead of PaaS give me this?
Does Azure ofer flat rate for SQL Server? (Is my understanding of DTU correct?)
Related
Recently we have upgraded our SSAS resources. Currently our SSAS is on Azure VM costing us based on this VM type 'Standard E32-8s_v3'.
I am looking for a way to save more cost by selecting a better option.
What can be a good option to save cost and at the same time have better efficiency.
what factors/ differences can be considered if we go to Azure analysis services instead of SSAS on Azure VM.
Our SQL server is also on Azure VM.
We have our reports on Power BI report server and SSRS.
Data is coming from different resources like SAP, external parties etc using SSIS.
Can you please Advice/ Suggest a better options for our data architecture.
Thank you.
Your VM is 8 cores and 256GB RAM.
One factor in pricing you haven’t mentioned is SQL licensing. You didn’t specify whether you are renting the SQL license with the VM or bringing your own license and what that costs. I’m going to assume you are renting it. With Azure Analysis Services the license is included in the price.
In Azure Analysis Services 100QPU is roughly equivalent to 5 cores. So 200QPU (an S2) would be an equivalent amount of CPU and a similar price but only has 50GB RAM.
To get the equivalent amount of RAM the S8 would get you close (200GB RAM) but for substantially more cost.
If you have one large model which (at least during peak usage or processing) uses most of the 256GB RAM then it may be tough to move to Azure Analysis Services for a similar price. If you have several models on that one server then you could split them across several smaller Azure Analysis Services servers and it may be a reasonable price for you. Or you could scale up for processing when RAM is needed most and scale down for the rest of the day to save cost.
maybe I should start that I am pretty new with Azure and I want to apologize in advance if my question is stupid. I am currently looking into the option to move my WordPress website to Azure. However, as I was looking through the pre-configured templates, I am quite confused and would be really thankful if someone can explain this for me. (Thank you in advance).
The template, which was created by WordPress for WordPress is using "App Service" model with a tier plan S1 (which comes with 100 total ACU & 1.75GB memory) and according to rough estimate it should be around 75 USD per month.
However, an alternative template created by Cloud Infrastructure Services is using a virtual machine model with a tier plan Standard_B1ms (which comes with 1 vcpu & 2 GiB memory) and according to rough estimate it should be around 36.83 USD per month.
I am quite struggling to understand the difference between the two options and more particular why one is using "App Service" and the other "Virtual Machine". In addition, what are the benefits and disadvantages to use one over the other. For example, when it comes to spikes in website traffic, the need to upgrade to higher tier, reliability, etc. Furthermore, I am not sure what 100 total ACU means. Is this supposed to be more powerful than the output that comes from a 1 core v-cpu? If yes, how much more? Last but not least, would like to hear your general opinion on hosting WordPress website on Azure, as well as, which of the two options would you go with and why? Thank you in advance!
ACU is a made-up measure for estimating the amount of computing power you receive. The ACU is a type of estimator since certain processors have turbo boost and some don't. DTUs for Azure SQL are similar, where DTU is a made-up statistic that combines IOPS, CPU, and RAM.
Azure App Service as "Build, deploy, and scale web apps on a fully managed platform". It's a Platform as a service and hence would be managed in the containers or any operating system can be used. Use the fully managed platform for your operating and monitoring activities to meet stringent, enterprise-grade performance, security, and compliance requirements.
Azure Virtual Machine It provides on-demand, high-scale, secure, virtualized infrastructure. It provides the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions, including development and testing, application execution, and datacenter expansion. It's the flexibility of open-source software set to your specifications.
Hence, Azure App service has lots of advantages as it has got tools with which it can be integrated. Scaling up is an ability using both the services and if you have an fix budget then you can opt Azure Virtual Machines then resize it anytime.
Here, is the Pricing Calculator which might help you to calculate the exact expenditure according the resources you choose.
I would definitely suggest to go for Azure App Service as it has a wide range of advantages.
I would like to use Azure Spatial Anchors and understand that it is free during the preview period.
Are there other Azure services like storage, bandwidth, etc. involved which I would need to take into consideration regarding pricing when working with Azure Spatial Anchors?
Does anyone have a rough estimate how much it costs to work with a "typical" Azure Spatial Anchors project? I know this is a broad question but if someone could give me a rough estimate from their experience I'd be more than happy!
While in preview, Azure Spatial Anchors is free (pricing page).
Depending on your project, you may need to use other cloud services, which may or may not also be free. For example, you may use Cosmos DB to store Azure Spatial Anchor IDs, as outlined in the ASA sharing sample. But Cosmos DB has a free tier, so, depending on the scale of your project, that may be free as well.
I have moved a classic ASP site with a SQL Database to Azure.
We moved from a shared hosting.
The sites runs really fast and we are happy with Azure.
Our only situation is the cost. We pass from a Us $8 monthly cost to a Us$ 90.
And we have only 8000 visits per month.
Actually the 90% of the cost of processor hours and 10% is BD units.
Is there some best practices we can use in Azure Websites so we can reduce this cost without changing the web (which is a very old one)?
Thanks
I don't think Azure is a real good alternative to replace $8/mo shared hosting. Azure provides a more... sophisticated and scalable environment. You're getting very impressive suite of middleware (cache, storage, nosql, relational, acs, vpn, etc) and managed environment, but the implication is that your either middleware, management or scalability needs are a little more demanding than $8/mo shared hosting can provide.
So in a nutshell, if you were happy with $8/mo - you should have probably stayed there.
i have an idea of putting my blog on to Azure instead of a regular webhosting company.
The only thing i cannot figure out is if that will be cheaper or not. The good part is the getting-knowledge of Azure but on the other hand it is my personal blog and i really don't wanna spend to much money on it.
So do you have any idea of how the pricing works? I saw some calculator but didn't manage to understand the numbers.
Thanks in advance
You'd have to have a significantly-active blog to justify the costs of Azure. Aside from keeping a web role up and running (and just one instance chews up almost $90 monthly, as ZippyV stated), you'll also have to pay for data.
You do NOT need to invest in SQL Azure though. There's Azure table storage which is much better suited for your blog. It has a table structure, you can define entities (e.g. classes, maybe a BlogEntryClass) that are stored, and the storage costs will run you significantly less than SQL Azure (only $0.15 per GB per month, so your storage costs will likely remain well under a dollar a month for a blog, a small fraction of the cost of SQL Azure).
You'll also pay for bandwidth ($0.15 outbound per GB).
If this is a learning exercise, it's a great investment, but if you have an MSDN Premium account, you can host your blog there - you get 750 compute-hours monthly (enough to run a single role instance 24x7), 10GB table storage, and 14GB monthly outbound data.
Classic webhosting will be a lot cheaper for you. In Azure you need to pay for at least 1 instance (webserver) to run per hour. At then end of the month you will have to pay about 89$ if I remember correctly and that's without SQL Server.
If you want to learn more on how to develop for Azure you can download the SDK and run your project locally. You don't need to pay for it.
EDIT: you can find the pricing here. If you want to add SQL server you pay a minimum of 100$ a month.