We have few cloud services with both VMs and web worker roles in it. Is there a way to "freeze" or stop them to not be billed but if we want to start them again?
I saw some answers but most of them are outdated.
Thank you in advance!
Is there a way to "freeze" or stop them to not be billed but if we
want to start them again?
Unfortunately no. You must delete the cloud service deployment to stop the billing. Stopped cloud service will continue to incur charges.
One detail not covered in #gaurav's answer: with Cloud Services, you can scale your number of web or worker instances down to 1, minimizing cost. If you won't be using them for an extended period of time, you can also choose to scale down to a smaller instance size.
Virtual Machines may be stopped (where they're no longer billed, aside from the storage costs related to OS + data disks).
Related
I find Azure Container Instances (ACI) very confusing. In Azure Container Apps, if there are no requests, the service scales down to zero and stops billing. However, does ACI also have such a feature?
For example, if I deploy a container that is called once a month, and each call takes 5 seconds to complete, will I be charged for the 5 seconds or for every second in the month for which it was deployed/available?
How can I stop/pause ACI to only bill for the 5 seconds used?
I know that is not a strictly programming question, so I appreciate that this may not be the best forum to ask, but I am unsure where else to post this.
Thank you in advance!
You can use Azure Automation or logic app to stop/start containers in ACI but that's extra work on your part to implement that. In your scenario if you want to only pay for what you use and then the best options are
Azure Function (Basic App Service plan required, so there will be a minimum charge and won't quite scale to zero)
Azure Container Apps (scale rule to 0 when no traffic)
Your best bet (apart from going to the full-blown AKS, for which you still need to pay for the minimum 1 node required) here is to run this workload in Azure Container Apps and scale to 0 when there is no traffic and pay for only when you have traffic.
Currently Azure Container Apps supports HTTP, but TCP is coming very soon https://github.com/microsoft/azure-container-apps/issues/375
I realized that ACI is not the solution that should be used for such a workload. ACI is meant to run tasks like compiling apps, not for servers that wait for a client to request something.
I have a .NET Core application currently running as an Azure App Service, and I need it to do a lot of 'work' only about a few times a day. In order to save on the hourly billing, this is the solution I developed:
Using a runbook (Azure Automation): scale the App Service Plan to the 'Free' tier at 7:00 PM
Using a runbook (Azure Automation): scale the App Service Plan back up to the premium tier at 8:00 AM
Hard-code my .NET Core application to ensure it only does the heavy 'work' between 8:00 AM and 7:00 PM
This is fine as it saves me a significant portion of cost, as I'm only paying for the hours in which the App Service Plan is scaled up to the premium tier. However it is definitely not ideal.
My question is - what design pattern should I implement in order to accomplish what I'm trying to do? I need a lot of compute resources but only for a few hours out of the day. I know AWS has 'spot' instances that you can configure - is there a similar mechanism in Azure?
Ideally I could implement a solution that involves me only paying for those heavy compute resources when I actually need it (e.g.: a few times a day, while the sun is up)
Thank you for any insight and help!
EDIT in regards to the type of computation, my summary is essentially a few ML.NET trainers running in parallel with some moderate Elasticsearch document writing
It is pretty tough to answer this with the whole description of your workload being a "lot" of "heavy compute".
If you can put your "compute" into Azure Functions, going serverless with a consumption plan will probably be the nicest solution. However, individual function executions have a given timeout, so you need to see if your app fits the bill.
As an alternative, you can put your application into an Azure Container Instance, and spin that up on demand.
If you have REALLY high workload, you can use Azure Batch. If your current workload can be done on an AppService plan, this may be "overkill".
The equivalent to AWS spot instances is called Azure Spot Virtual Machines. You can also use them with Azure Batch.
Yes, you can switch to Serverless. Host front end on Storage Accounts and back end move to Azure Functions (Consumption Plan).
PS: If it's a long running processing, it may not be the best solution unless you use Durable Functions.
Context: I am designing the auto-scaling (scale out) configuration for my .NET Framework 4.7 web app hosted on a Microsoft Azure App Service. I am using the P3V2 pricing tier. The application is CPU-bound. The app's 30 day CPU average is 30% usage while running on 2 instances, according to the stats indicated in the App Service plan. We occasionally have traffic spikes which will overwhelm the 2 instances: I want to implement auto-scaling.
I want to take into account the App Service Provisioning + App Startup Time when designing the metrics thresholds that decide when my app service scales out. I need to make my thresholds low enough to give Azure time to spin up a new app service instance but not so low that I am paying unnecessarily for processing power that's not needed. Budget is a significant factor.
Question: How long does it take for an Azure App Service instance to be available after a scale out? In other words, how long does it take for an Azure App Service to scale out?
P.S. I recognize that there is a lot more to scaling in/out that I am not addressing here. I'm trying my best to be succinct. :)
Generally, not long at all. By that I mean typically under one minute, but the time will vary depending on several factors, such as application size, time of day, region of deployment.
You could scale out manually and inspect the run history logs on the scale out tab.
FYI you can also use Azure Monitor to create auto-scale policies, in case this is of any use to you.
I have one big task to do every day, with no need to scale, that takes about 30 minutes and is DB, processor and memory intensive.
This means actual 16h/month of computation time.
WebJobs require constantly running WebSite 744h/month
WebRole is also constantly running 744h/month
Azure Batch - suited for scaled storage input - storage output
processing (or that is how I understand it)
Stopped cloud service still cost you. Setting instance count to 0 is not available. And paying for 728h/month unused computation time looks like madness. Only thing I can imagine is automatic deployment of cloud service every day and automatic deletion of deployment once task is finished, but this also looks like madness.
Are there any options for this scenario in Azure?
Cloud service will be charged continuously until the deployment is deleted. Yes you can delete it every day and redeploy...
Azure VMs in Stopped (Deallocated) status, does not incur any charge. You can shut them down in portal or by script when you don't need them.
I think there is a large difference in billing if you only use it 62h/month. Would you consider switch this deployment to VM? WorkerRole and VMs can be placed on the same subnet, they can still connect to each other.
We are working on architecture of new web application to be hosted on Azure. This application would run only in day time (Say 9AM to 5PM). What I read so far about Azure is we would continue be billed even when we stop the deployment.
However in case of Azure VM (IAAS) billing stops when we stop the VM.
Client is keenly interested in running the IT cost to the minimum. We are planning to use WASABi/Auto-scaling block to auto shutdown & auto-start the app to run only during (9AM-5PM)
Deploying application every morning & deleting every evening even programmatically doesn't sound like a good architecture.
Should we target the app for VM rather than Azure web role?
While hourly billing cost is definitely a consideration and it is true that if you stop a VM in IaaS, billing stops, there are other considerations as well. Some of them are:
With Cloud Services, you have to architect the application in a certain way to take advantage of statelessness there. So there may be a bit of a learning curve there. With Virtual Machines, in theory you can build an application the way you are used to and deploy that in the cloud.
With Cloud Services, the major advantage is that you don't have to maintain the VM. This is something Microsoft does that for you. So there's little or no IT-admin overhead. With VMs, maintaining the VM is your responsibility so that's an additional cost which is recurring as well (assuming you (or your client) have an IT Admin kind of guy on the payroll).
Generally speaking, if the application is a stand-alone application with quite simple deployment topology and is brand new application it is recommended that you write them as Cloud Service but do take the costs (development / IT admin) into consideration as well.
When you stop the virtual machine through a standard shutdown (through the machine itself for example), it does continue to incur charges. The portal will eventually show it as shutdown, but the VM still has resources allocated.
However, if you stop the machine through the portal, API, or PowerShell, it will stop and DEALLOCATE the machine. This means the VM will use storage space, but will not incur compute charges.
Simply schedule the deallocation of the machines during off-hours, and you will only page for the usage during the day.