I am planning to migrate my Azure resources from EA type of subscription to C-S-P subscription. I found a tool called as Migrate Azure(sorry cannot write the short form as this does not allow me to post). I am aware of its working, however i am just worried about one that.
Can the migration cause a downtime into any working of any resources like Azure Virtual machine, storage...etc. Point is i will be directly working on the production resources to migrate to the C-S-P subscription.
Can anyone give me an idea ?
As indicated by #HariHaran, you should follow the documentation mentioned in here
The subscription switching should not affect your workloads, since it's a subscription migration and not workload related(Assuming that all of your resources already reside in Azure). The safe approach to follow during your migration process is to do it incrementally. Then if all functions as normal, increase the migration rate. Do it all at once may not be the best. Redeployment issues can occur at times.
Related
I have managed to get the C# and db setup using ListMappings. However, when I try to deploy the split/merge tool to Azure cloud classic the service it states 'The requested VM tier is currently not available in East US for this subscription. Please try another tier or deploy to a different location.' We tried a few other regions with the same result. Do you know if there is a workaround or updated version? Is the split / merge service even still relevant? Has anyone got this service to run on Azure lately?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/elastic-scale-overview-split-and-merge
The answer to the question on whether it is still relevant, in my opinion is ...no. Split\merge is no longer relevant with the maturation of elastic pools. Elastic pools with one data base per tenant seem the sustainable way to implement multi tenancy with legacy code. The initial plan was to add keys to each of our tables to have multiple tenants per database. Elastic pools give us the same flexibility without having to make breaking changes our existing code.
Late post here, but we are implementing ElasticScale for a client to split ~50 clients into a database-per-tenant model. I don't think the SplitMerge tool will be used over the long term, just for the initial data migration from one db to many shards, but it has been handy for that purpose. We are using the ElasticScale SDK to allow a single API to route queries to the appropriate shard(s) based on sharding key. Happy to compare notes with you if you are still working on this.
Since the pricing does not offer much choice in terms of flexibility my developer MSDN account is quickly running out of credits using Azure Time Series Insights fro a Proof of Concept. Is it somehow possible to suspend the service so no costs are incurred? I would hate to have to delete the whole thing and set it up again when we start working again on the PoC.
Currently, Azure still do not provide a way to suspend TSI environment.
Maybe you can use scripted template deployment for creating/deleting TSI environment.
With this approach, however, you are going to constantly loose your data.
On the link below there are guidelines, provided by Microsoft, on how to implement template deployment:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/time-series-insights/time-series-insights-manage-resources-using-azure-resource-manager-template
The general steps provided by MSFT are:
Install PowerShell
Create the template and a parameter file.
In PowerShell, log in to your Azure account.
Create a new resource group if one does not exist.
Test the deployment.
Deploy the template.
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.
We currently have a window service which send some notification emails to users after doing some processing on database(SQL database). Runs once in day.
We want to move this on azure cloud. One alternate is to put it on Azure VM as is. but I am finding some other best possible solution for that.
I study about recurring and on demand Web jobs but I am not sure is this is best solution.
Also is there any possibility to update configuration of service code in App.config without re-deploy the code of service on cloud. I means we can manage configuration from Azure portal.
Thanks in advance.
Update 11/4/2016
Since this was written, there are 2 additional features available in Azure that are both excellent choices depending on what functionality you need:
Azure Functions (which was based on the WebJobs described below): Serverless code that can be trigger/invoked in various ways, and has scaling support.
Azure Service Fabric: Microservice platform, with support for actor model, stateful and stateless services.
You've got 3 basic options:
Windows service running on VM
WebJob
Cloud service
There's a lot of information out there on the tradeoffs between these choices, but here's a brief summary.
VM - Advantages: you can move your service basically as it is without having to change much or any of your code. They also have the easiest connectivity with other resources in Azure (blob storage, virtual networks, etc). The disadvantage is you're giving up all the of PaaS advantages and are still stuck managing your own VM infrastructure
WebJob - Advantages: Multiple invocation options (queues, blobs, manually, queue receive loops, continuous while-loop style, etc), scheduled (would cover your case). Easy to deploy (can go with website, as a console app, automatically through Kudu), has some built in logging in Azure portal - and yes, to answer your question, you can alter the configuration in the portal itself for connection strings and app settings.
Disadvantages - you'll need to update code, you don't have access to underlying resources (if you need that), and more of something to keep in mind than a disadvantage - it uses the same resources as the webapp it's deployed with.
Web Jobs are the newest of the options, but at the same time appear to have active development going on to increase the functionality and usefulness.
Cloud Service - like a managed VM, has some deployment options, access to underlying VM if needed. Would require some code changes from your existing service.
There's nothing you've mentioned in your use case that makes me think a Web Job shouldn't be first thing you try.
(Edit: Troy Hunt has a great and relatively recent blog post illustrating most of the points I've mentioned about Web Jobs above: http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/01/azure-webjobs-are-awesome-and-you.html)
We have got an application running fine on On premises and plan to move it to IaaS on Ms Azure, do we need to make any changes to it or will it work as is?
I agree with the above post. You have not detailed if you are using Virtual Machines (Sql server or going to use Azure SQL). You will have to make choices about fail-over and geo redundancy, cloud services, etc. There are IP restrictions that may affect you (I don't know since I am not sure what you are moving). More than anything, I always warn people about the cost, it is difficult to understand. Here is an article series I wrote on Azure & SharePoint, you can skip the SharePoint stuff but the cost/limitation/VMs and such would still apply.
http://www.matthewjbailey.com/sharepoint-azure-guide/
We've managed a lift-and-shift of an on-premise Windows app into Azure, but I wouldn't say it's been without its pain. The above comments definitely ring true; you need to provide a bit more of an overview of what the current application does so that people can help answer your question.
In my experience, the only stumbling blocks to moving on-premise into Azure are:
Hardware requirements; i.e. if your application requires some specific hardware
Cost: It's not always cheaper to move large systems into Azure
Licensing: Make sure that your existing licensing is compatible with a cloud system which you don't control