I'm new to azure and I have a trial account, but the credits are only available for 30 days. I think their previous offer with monthly credits was much better, it gives you more chance to get up and running efficiently and see what works best.
Anyway I have 4 websites, three of which require SQL Server dB. I'm trying to figure out if I can use Azure in a cheap and cost effective way.
All require custom domain and SSL, which means the B1 App Service plan is a minimum requirement, costing about £40-£50 per site. This is already completely unaffordable for me, for small, basic sites. I think it's ridiculous that a website with custom domain and SSL is so expensive on Azure. Maybe Azure is not for me.
I read about using Clouflare on the Shared App Service plan, but I'm not too keen on this solution. I've tried Clouflare in the past and had some issues with performance. Also the free version SSL only encrypts users to Cloudflare. So I'm looking for a solution without Clouflare.
I'm thinking to use an Azure VM but need some suggestions.
Which VM would be a good option for 4 websites ranging from a couple hundred to a couple thousand visits per month?
Can a B1S VM handle a website with dB?
Do I have SQL Server installed on the VM or do I connect to a managed SQL database?
Do I require a SSL certificate for each site or only one certificate for the VM?
Do I require any paid service link CI or anything to deploy my asp.net core sites to the VM?
Is it worth the effort managing the VM?
Any advice appreciated. Thanks
Firstly, you are charged with Azure App Service Plan, which is a platform for hosting your apps. You can deploy many web apps in one App Service Plan, for example: B1. But, be careful with the workloads. If your application is a big one, the B1 plan would be exhausted to host 4.
Secondly, you can try to use VM. Since the visit amount is small, I think the B series VM can handle the requests. And if there is not many db operations, you can install SQl server in the VM.
Thirdly, if all your website are under one domain. For example: web1.domain.com , web2.domain.com, web3.domain.com, web4.domain.com. Then you need to apply for a wildcard certificate *.domain.com. Or you can apply for 4 separate certificate.
Another solution for certificate is to deploy your web apps under a domain: www.domain.com/web1....Then you just need one certificate.
Finally, you can change the VM size if the performance is not good.
Related
I'm interested in using Azure as a PaaS solution to host a Node Js app that I'll be developing in the few coming months. I've done a fair bit of research on the pricing models and tiers so I sort of have a grasp on that, however, I'm not sure how to accurately spec my server requirements. When looking at pure CPU, Memory and Storage specifications between the Basic, Standard and Premium plans they all look similar, with the exception of storage I suppose.
The application I intend to build will primarily perform CRUD based actions. It will not host large images/videos and static files will be used in JS libraries or small images for theming (icons, logos etc I'm hoping there's a CDN). I anticipate no more than 1000 web page requests per day and the AppService is only intended to serve as a WebApi and Web Server, I intend to host the DB on Mlab.
I'm looking for an option that will give me reasonable page load and server response times (1-2secs). The app service also needs support for SSL, is that something I need to get from Microsoft or I can purchase and apply elsewhere.
Finally, I'd love to be able to test and dev on Azure, as from my experience it is better to do so on an architecture that matches your production. Is there any low cost Dev/Test server options that I can use instead of using the production service (which I anticipate will exceed my test performance requirements and would also cost more)?
While the CPU, memory, and storage options may look similar between the plans, the VM underneath and the additional features are not.
For plans:
Shared/Free are plans where you share a VM with other users. You have
quotas for how much of the VMs resources you are allowed to use, and
if you go over them the site will be shut down until the quota
resets. This is fine for dev/test environments, but can be risky for
production as a traffic spike can cause your site to be turned off
temporarily.
Basic plans give you a dedicated VM for your app, so there are no
quotas and thus removes the risk of having your site shut off it gets
too popular.
Standard adds autoscaling (the ability to increase and decrease resources based on usage metrics) and SSL.
Premium is similar to Standard, but the underlying VM is running on better hardware.
The Shared plan and higher (basically anything but free) offers load balancing and custom domains. You can purchase a domain within your Azure account or bring your own.
The default yourwebsite.azurewebsites.net is protected by the azurewebsites.net SSL cert. However, if you use a custom domain and need SSL support, then you need to be on a Standard plan or higher. As with domains, you can purchase one through Azure or bring your own.
You can put a CDN of your own choosing in front of your Azure App Service, or you can use Azure's CDN. It is not included in the App Service plan.
For production with a custom domain and SSL, you are looking at one of the Standard plans.
For dev/test there are a couple ways you could go. If your dev server doesn't use any of the extra features like custom domains, you can scale the plan up and down as you please. That means you can scale up to the matching plan for final testing of a release, but leave it in a lower tier the majority of the time.
The second option is to use deployment slots to create your dev site on the same VM as your prod site. You need to be on a Standard plan or higher to use this feature, and it comes with some added benefits. Particularly that you can swap which code is in production or funnel some of your traffic to a staging slot before swapping new code into production.
I have several (4) web apps running on Azure: 3 of them require very little processing power, thus, they had been running
on a Free plan; while the other one is meant for final users which means a higher load and a needs for a custom domain and SSL certificate.
SSL certificate was correctly configured (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-purchase-ssl-web-site/) and is working as expected.
However, we noticed all of the other sites are now importing this SSL certificate as opposed to the one offered by default by Azure (the one for *.azurewebsites.net sites);
this has caused all of our Free sites to move to the Basic tier automatically. We are the unable to set them to Free again, as an error message states Free does not support
our custom SSL certificate for our custom domain.
Notice that our custom domain is in no way associated with any of the (3) Free sites but just the one that needs it.
Also, when going to SSL cert options in our Free sites, we cannot remove the custom SSL cert, as it states the site requires at least one of them, and custom one is the only one.
When creating a new site, this custom SSL will be automatically imported as well.
What should we do so the Free sites make use of the default *.azurewebsites.net SSL cert instead of the custom one, so we can then get back these sites to the Free plan?
Thank you for your help.
1.Root cause: It maybe that use the same hosting plan for all your websites.
As free app service plan doesn’t support custom SSL, if you want to use your user custom SSL then need to scale up to app service plan from to basic or higher.
After scaling up the App service plan, it will apply to all your websites in your app service plan.
2. How to resolve it
Please have a try to create another free app service plan for the 3 websites. Detail please refer to how to create-a-new-app-service-plan and Move an app to a different App Service plan.
Note: Only valid plans (in the same resource group and geographical location) are shown.
With Azure websites you are basically renting an IIS instance. In order to use SSL on your website you need to switch your plan to "Basic" or higher, as you've seen. Right now I think all of your websites are in the same "webhosting" plan. This means that they are automatically scaled to the "Basic", as you are basically scaling the IIS instance, not the indiviudual website.
See it as buying a hosting plan that can host multiple web applications. If you move to basic, you end up paying for 1 basic plan that hosts all 4 sites (so not 4 billable plans, just 1).
In this case you won't end up with a higher bill (you need a basic instance for the SSL-site anyway) - the other sites are including in this same hosting plan for 'free' - sharing the resources of the basic instance).
If you want to keep the basic site and the 3 free sites separated, you should create a new webhosting plan (App service plan) on the new Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com) and move those 3 websites there.
I would recommend letting those 3 sites use the basic plan - it won't cost you any extra.
I have a wordpress site hosted on Azure. Call it, mysite.com. I'd also like to develop a separate .net app and host it at subsite.mysite.com. How can I do this without having to pay for 2 separate Azure sites?
There are ways to achieve what you require. However, key point here is to understand the Azure App Service. Because, in Azure app service, you never pay (your concern is having to pay, not having to maintain) for a single site!
If you take a closer look at the App Service Pricing model, you will see that even with the free (like in Free lunch) tier, you get to host 10 applications in your hosting plan. But you need custom domain, then you go to Shared plan, you already can host 100 web sites within it, all with your custom domain/s.
Next you will have to learn a bit about what is Top Level Domain, what is Domain, what is Sub Domain, what is A DNS Record and what is C-Name DNS record, because these are all thing you need to understand in order to properly configure your sites.
And finally read the article on how to configure custom domain for Azure App Service.
Remember. With Azure App Service, you are paying for a hosting environment (or service plan), not for a single web site!
I have my website (abc.azurewebsites.net) hosted to Azure Web Apps using Visual Studio.
Now after 1 month I am facing problems with traffic management. My CPU is always 90 - 95% as the number of requests is too high.
Does anyone know how to add Traffic Management in this web app without changing the domain abc.azurewebsites.net? Is it hard coded in my application?
I thought of changing the web app to a Virtual Machine but now as it's already deployed I am scared of domain loss.
When you Scale your Web App you add instances of your current pricing tier and Azure deploys your Web App package to each of them.
There's a Load Balancer over all your instances, so, traffic is automatically load balanced between them. You shouldn't need a Virtual Machine for this and you don't need to configure any extra Traffic Manager.
I can vouch that my company is using Azure Web Apps to manage more than 1000 concurrent users making thousands of requests with just 2-3 instances. It all depends on what your application does and what other resources does it access too, if you implemented or not a caching strategy and what kind of data storage you are using.
High CPU does not always mean high traffic, it's a mix of CPU and Http Queue Length that gives you an idea of how well your instances are handling traffic.
Your solution might implementing a group of things:
Performance tweak your application
Add caching strategies (distributed cache like Azure Redis is a good option)
Increase Web App instances by configuring Auto-Scaling based on HTTP Queue Length / CPU.
You should not have to change your domain to autoscale a Web App, but you may have to change your pricing tier. Scaling to multiple instance is available at Basic pricing tier, and autoscaling starts at Standard tier. Custom domains are allowed at these levels but you don't have to change your domain if you don't want to.
Here is the overview of scaling a web app https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-scale/
Adding a Virtual Machine (VM) is very costly as compared to adding instance. On top of it, Redundancy (recommended) for the VMs, adding NIC etc will blow up the cost. Maintenance is another challenge. PAAS (webApp etc) is always a better option than IAAS.
Serverless offerings like Azure Functions can also be thought of. They support http trigger and scale up really well.
We are looking to host a website (some css,js, one html file but not aspx, one generic handler).
We deployed in as:
1) Azure Web Site
2) Azure Cloud Service
Both solutions work. There is a question though: which way of hosting it is better and why? Second thing: as there might be a lot of traffic - which solution would be cheaper?
Thanks in advance,
Krzysztofuncjusz
You may want to review this article that explains the primary differences. Web Sites are best for running web applications that are relatively isolated (that do not require elevated security, remote desktop, network isolation...). Cloud services are more advanced because they give you more control over web sites while still remaining flexible. And VMs are for full control over applications that need to be installed and configured (like running SQL Server for example).
I think that main difference in abilities to modify VM and possibility to configure scalability. Web sites is something like classic hosting, without ability to login by rdp. Cloud Services allows you to configure VM and if necessary setup scalability and availability.