MS Azure Storage transactions - azure

I'm confused with Storage transactions in Azure Storage for page bolb, so what is mean Storage transactions in Azure Storage.
I want to use to upload all of my website image to their, so I do not know how many transaction i need.
so I i have 1000 photos in my website and every day 1000 gusts visit my website how many Storage transactions required to retrieve from Azure storage to client.
so what about Bandwidth? most of my big file will be in Azure storage only small amount of html and css will be in Azure Web App Storage so I do not know that I need to buy bandwidth or not required since most of load come to Storage transactions.

The first area we would want to cover for transactions is what equals 1 transaction to Windows Azure Storage. Each and every REST call to Windows Azure Blobs, Tables and Queues counts as 1 transaction (whether that transaction is counted towards billing is determined by the billing classification discussed later in this posting). The REST calls are detailed here:
Blobs
Table
Queues
Each one of the above REST calls counts as 1 transaction. This includes the following types of requests:
Query/List Requests and Continuation Tokens – A Table Query, and Listing Blob Containers, Tables and Queues can return continuation tokens. This means that the query/listing must be continued to complete it. As described above, each REST request to the storage service counts as 1 transaction. Therefore, each continuation of the query/list counts as an additional 1 transaction, since it is another REST request to the storage service.
For more information refer: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazurestorage/2010/07/08/understanding-windows-azure-storage-billing-bandwidth-transactions-and-capacity/

Related

Handling long-running tasks using Azure Functions and Azure Storage

I want to use Azure to handle long running tasks that can’t be handled solely by a web server as they exceed the 2 min HTTP limit (and would put unnecessary load on it regardless). In this case, it’s the generation of a PDF report that can take some time (between 2-5 mins). I’ve seen examples of solutions for this using other technologies (Celery, RabbitMQ, AWS Lamda, etc.) but not much using what's available on Azure (Functions and Storage in this case).
Details of my proposed solution are as follows (a diagram is here)
API (that has 3 endpoints):
Generate report – post a message to Azure Queue Storage
Get report generation status – query Azure Table Storage for status
Get report – retrieve PDF from Azure Blob Storage
Azure Queue Storage
Receives a message from the API containing parameters of the requested report
Azure Function
Triggered when a message is added to Azure Queue Storage
Creates report generation status record in Azure Table storage, set to ‘Generating’
Generate a report based on parameters contained in the message
Stores output PDF in Azure Blob Storage
Updates report generation status record in Azure Table storage to ‘Completed’
Azure Table Storage
Contains a table of report generation requests and associated status
Azure Blob Storage
Stores PDF reports
Other points
The app isn’t built yet – so there is no base case I’m comparing against (e.g. Celery/RabbitMQ)
The time it takes to run the report isn’t super important (i.e. I’m not concerned about Azure Function cold starts)
There’s no requirement for immediate notification of completion using something like Webhooks – the client will poll the API every so often using the get report generation endpoint.
There won't be much usage of the app, so having an always active server to handle tasks (vs Azure Function) seems to be a waste of money.
If I find that report generation takes longer than 10 mins, I can split it up into more than one Azure Function (to avoid consumption plan hard limit of 10 mins execution time per function)
My question is essential whether or not this is a good approach (to me it seems good, and relatively cost-effective, I’m just not sure if there’s something I’m missing).
This can be simplified using Durable Functions. Most of the job is already handled by the framework and you also can query an endpoint to check for the completion status.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable/durable-functions-overview?tabs=csharp

"Storage account management operations" and ClientThrottlingError

According to Storage account scale limits each storage account in Azure can handle 20.000 requests per second.
But there is also Storage resource provider scale limits that restricts Storage account management operations (read) to 800 request per 5 minutes.
We seem to have reached the latter limit, and we are wondering what kind of operations are counted as Storage account management operations. We got a few minutes with intermittent 503 responses in our production system this morning, having 2600 GetBlob operations in 5 minutes.
Which operations count as Storage account management operations?
Does it matter whether we use BlobClient from the blob storage SDK, or HttpClient from .NET?
How do we read blob properties and metadata, and download blobs to (possibly) achieve 20.000 requests per second?
Are there any other ideas on what can lead to throttling when the load isn't that high altogether?
UPDATE:
After communication with Microsoft support (the proper ones...), they could inform us of the following:
The type of throttling you experienced is a partition throttling error. This type of error occurs when the client does too many requests against the same partition server. When such happens and the partition server gets overloaded, it does internal load balancing operations as part of the normal azure storage healing process.
When the partition being accessed suffers a load balancing operation (reassigning partitions to less loaded servers), the storage service returns 500 or 503 errors.
The limits I previously mentioned (the 800 reads for 5 minutes) are indeed for management operations and not for data ones. In your case, the GetBlob ones are data operations and are not covered by these hard limits. After analyzing the ingress/egress limit and also the transactions per second of your storage account, I verified that you also seem to be far away from hitting the threshold.
Just for the record and improved searchability: In Metrics these errors showed up as ClientOtherError and ClientThrottlingError.
Which operations count as Storage account management operations?
All the operations listed here are considered as storage account management operations. Essentially the operations you perform on managing the storage account themselves (and not the data in them) are considered as management operations.
Does it matter whether we use BlobClient from the blob storage SDK, or
HttpClient from .NET?
No. These operations deal with the data and not considered as part of management operations. These operations have separate throughput limit.
How do we read blob properties and metadata, and download blobs to
(possibly) achieve 20.000 requests per second?
Please see answer to previous question.

Azure BLOB storage phantom requests

I see strange requests when uploading blobs to storage. The only methods I use is PutBlob and SetBlobTier. But metrics shows large amount of GetBlobProperties requests with time interval about 1 hour. It seems like Azure makes some extra requests for statistic purposes. It happens only when uploading process is running. At attached diagram you can see 4 peaks of GetBlobProperties requests.
Does anybody know what is it? Another question is, will I be billed for this requests?
Any API call is considered to be a transaction:
Transactions – Each individual Blob, Table and Queue REST request to the storage service is considered as a potential transaction for billing. Applications can then control their transaction costs by controlling how often and how many requests they send to the storage service. We analyze each request received and then classify it as billable or not billable based upon our ability to process the request and the request’s outcome.
For that specific transaction, my guess is you're using Blob Archive(correct me if i'm wrong), the prices are as below:
It will be considered as All other Operations(per 10,000) pricing.
What could be causing it?
Due to a bug in our system, some internal transactions are miscategorized as customer requests when blobs transition between cold and archive storage tiers. These unexpected transactions will also be visible in both Azure Monitor as well as Storage Analytics logging. We are working on a fix for this and will deploy it as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and confusion this may have caused.

Storage Transaction Profiler for Windows Azure Web Deploy Accelerator

I've recently begun using the Web Deployment Accelerator for my Windows Azure account. It is providing an immediate return in time saved and is an excellent offering.
However since "everything" is now stored to Azure Storage rather to the regular E:Drive I am immediately seeing a cost consequence for using the tool.
In one day I have racked up a mighty 4 cent NZD charge. In order to do that I had to burn through about 80,000 storage transactions and frankly i cant figure where they all went.
I uploaded 6 sites that are very small wouldn't have more than 300 files each. So I'm wondering:
a. is there is a profiling tool for the Web Deployment Accelerator that will allow me to see where and how 80,000 storage transactions were used for such a small offering. Is it storage transaction intensive tool? Has any cost analysis been carried out in terms of how this tool operates? Has it been optimised with cost in mind?
b. If I'm using this tool do i pay for 2 storage transactions per http request to a site? As since the tool now writes the web server logs to table storage, that would be one storage request to pull the http request resource (img, script, etc) and a storage request to write the log entry as well would it not?
I'm not concerned about current charges I 'm concerned about the future if i start rolling all my hosted business into the cloud. I mean Im now being charged even just to "look" at my data right? If i list the contents of a storage folder using a tool like Azure Storage Explorer that's x number of storage transactions where x = number of files in the folder?
Not sure of a 3rd-party profiler tool, but Windows Azure Storage logging and metrics will give you very detailed info regarding both individual accesses and hourly rollups. It's pretty straightforward to enable, and the November 2011 SDK includes support for the API calls required for enabling. See here for an overview of what's offered for metrics and logging.
My team worked with Fullscale180 to build a storage library, Azure Store XRay, to demonstrate how to enable and query storage metrics and logging. Note: This was published before the SDK had logging and metrics support, so it uses the REST API calls instead. But that won't impact you if you try to use the library.
You can also look at another code demo, Cloud Ninja, which calls the XRay library for its metrics display (see here for running demo).
Regarding querying storage for objects in blob containers: that's not a 1:1 transaction:file scenario. You can specify the maximum number of blobs to return when listing items in a container. It's possible that all blobs are returned in one transaction. Of course, if you then grab each blob, each of these will be at least one transaction (depending on blob size). See here for details about listing blobs.

Azure BLOB storage - Pricing and speed "Within the data center"

I am quite sure I know the answer, just want to make sure I got this right.
From Azure In Action :
If I use the CloudBlobClient from a WCF service that sits in my WebRole, to access blobs (read/write/update) , so :
1) Does read/write/update charge as transaction or are they free ?
2) Does the speed of accessing those blobs is fast as mentioned in the note ?
If I use the CloudBlobClient from a WCF service that sits in my
WebRole, to access blobs (read/write/update) , so :
1) Does read/write/update charge as transaction or are they free ?
Transaction metering is independent of where the requests are made from. Storage read/write/update is done via REST API calls (or through an SDK call that wraps the REST API calls). Each successful REST API call will effectively count as a transaction. Specific details of what constitutes a transaction (as well as what's NOT counted as a transaction) may be found here.
By accessing blob storage from your Worker / Web role, you'll avoid Internet-based speed issues, and you won't pay for any data egress. (Note: Data ingress to the data center is free).
2) Does the speed of accessing those blobs is fast as mentioned in the note ?
Speed between your role instance and storage is governed by two things:
Network bandwidth. The DS and GS series have documented network bandwidth. The other sizes only advertise IOPS rates for attached disks.
Transaction rate. On a given storage account, there are very specific documented performance targets. This article breaks down the numbers in detail for a storage account itself, as well as targets for blobs, tables and queues.

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