Azure Batch Account quota - azure

I want to increase the quota of creating a batch account in same region.
For eg. I have the limit of creating 3 batch accounts in Central US region. However I want to create 2 more batch accounts in same region.
Is there any extra cost associated for increasing the quota?

Based on the Azure Subscription Limits, you can have a maximum of 50 batch accounts. For increasing the quota, you will need to contact Azure Support.
Regarding any extra cost, I don't think so. Based on the pricing page, you are not charged for the account per se. Rather you're charged for the compute and other resources you deploy in these accounts to run your batch jobs.
There is no charge for Batch itself, only the underlying compute and
other resources consumed to run your batch jobs. For compute, Cloud
Services, Linux Virtual Machines or Windows Virtual Machines can be
utilised by Batch.

Related

HDInsight Cores Quota increase

I have two different HDInsight deployments that I need to deploy. One of the HDInsight deployments uses the D12_v2 VM type and the second HDInishgt deployment uses the DS3_v2 VM type.
Although both the VM types use the same number of cores, would the deployments work if I just request a quota increase of the Dv2-series type? Do note that, at a time, only a single deployment will exist.
Although both the VM types use the same number of cores, would the
deployments work if I just request a quota increase of the Dv2-series
type?
No, it won't work that way as both are of different VM series i.e. Dv2 and DSv2. So , even if they are using same cores , deployment will fail in that region if you don't have sufficient quota to allocate in your subscription for both of the VM series as it depends on your total Vcpu's available for that region.
You can refer this Microsoft Document for the VM series specifications.
So , as per your requirement ,You have to create the quota request for both the series in the particular region .
Reference for Quota limits of VM:
Request an increase in vCPU quota limits per Azure VM series - Azure supportability | Microsoft Docs
Reference for Quota limits of HDInsights:
CPU Core quota increase request - Azure HDInsight | Microsoft Docs
You should include both VMs in your request.
Please refer to the following document which provides info about requesting a quota increase for HDInsight. You need to be sure to ask for HDInsight quota, and not regular Compute-VM quota. In the text box entry, you state which VMs you need and they will process the request accordingly.
Requesting quota increases for Azure HDInsight

Azure Databricks pricing: B2B subscription vs official page pricing

From one company I know that 50,000 DBUs for B2B Non-Production subscription may cost about 44,000$. In turn, at Databricks official pricing page, the most premium layer costs 0.55$/DBU (27,500$ per 50k DBUs).
Could you please explain the difference between B2B subscription DBUs and official page Data Analytics Pemium SKU DBUs?
Why the pricing differs so dramatically? Is there anything else (as part of B2B) besides support/fastrack?
Hope you won't need to publish private informationto to answer my question. But I need to understand the main reasons, to be able to plan costs for future projects.
UPD
Databricks B2B subscription does not provide you with a choice of different usage layers (Light/Engineering/Analytics). Instead you have a single option (price) for each bundle (DBU volume). That option is significantly more expensive than the most expensive Analytics layer.
Think of it as getting a discount on $50,000 worth of tokens. The way you run your process will pull from that bucket as if you had $50,000 to spend even though you are paying $46,000. You have a year or 3 years to spend them, if you don't spend them in that timeframe you lose the remaining. If you go through them all you will pay the pay-as-you-go price or you can pre-buy another year or 3 year bucket of units. Also how you run your jobs and what tier you run under (Standard or Premium) will determine how fast you burn through the bucket of units and does still matter as the previous answer stated.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/databricks/
Databricks Unit pre-purchase plan
You can get up to 37% savings over pay-as-you-go DBU prices when you
pre-purchase Azure Databricks Units (DBU) as Databricks Commit Units
(DBCU) for either 1 or 3 years. A Databricks Commit Unit (DBCU)
normalizes usage from Azure Databricks workloads and tiers into to a
single purchase. Your DBU usage across those workloads and tiers will
draw down from the Databricks Commit Units (DBCU) until they are
exhausted, or the purchase term expires. The draw down rate will be
equivalent to the price of the DBU, as per the table above.
The purchase tiers and discounts for DBCU purchases are shown below:
1-year pre-purchase plan
DATABRICKS COMMIT UNIT (DBCU) PRICE (WITH DISCOUNT) DISCOUNT
25,000 $23,500 6%
50,000 $46,000 8%
100,000 $89,000 11%
200,000 $172,000 14%
350,000 $287,000 18%
500,000 $400,000 20%
750,000 $578,000 22%
1,000,000 $730,000 27%
1,500,000 $1,050,000 30%
2,000,000 $1,340,000 33%
Also Analytics/Engineering/Light are not options that you choose from. They are defined by how you run your jobs. Executing a job through the notebook interface is defined as an Analytics job where as if you schedule the notebook to run that is considered an engineering job and if you use a coded library submit job you are running under the light tier.
UPDATE - not enough room in comment section to answer OP reply
great thanks for your answer! I think I got my mistake, but please approve once again. So DBCU is about US dollars, so 50k DCBUs may be equal to let say ~100k DBUs, right?
DBUs and DBCUs are exactly the same and are charged the same as far as usage. The only difference is that you get an up front discount of 8% with your example of pre buying 50,000. If you were to run everything exactly the same in two different workspaces and you spent exactly 50,000 DBU Hours in one and 50,000 DBCU Hours in the other, you would owe $50,000 over the course of the year or you would pay $46,000 up front. Neither of these include the actual VM base costs that you would owe to Azure. The DBU structure is Databricks cut of the cost, so you would have to factor that in to your overall cost.
This took me a while to figure out when I started with databricks as well. When they say you are charged $0.55 for the Analytical job that is per DBU hour that is processed not .55 per job. So if I run an Analytical job for 1 hour I would burn .55 * (# of VM's * VM DBU cost per hour). If I ran that same job for only 1/2 an hour I would be charged (.55*.5) * (# of VM's * (VM DBU cost*.5)). It's easier to think of the DBU and DBCU units as 1 unit = $1 and you are burning the dollar value per second of compute not the unit count. The pricing grid that shows $0.55/DBU should be labeled $0.55/DBU-hour in my opinion. Took me a long time, a couple calls and a poc, to figure out.
As to your second question
And scheduling jobs through REST API is more beneficial then scheduling through ADF => Notebook, right?
Again the question is more complicated that it seems like it should be. I initially said yes it is better, I didn't catch the ADF portion of the question. You can run engineering jobs through ADF by making use of the job cluster option to run your notebooks. If you attach your notebooks through ADF to a premade analytics cluster you will pay the analytics cost. Using the API's you could schedule your notebooks in the built in jobscheduler that databricks provides. My understanding is that is charged at the engineer level of a Notebook and light level if a job library.
Another thing to ask for when prebuying if you go that route is to be able to attach the bucket of units to both your dev/test environment and prod environment. We keep them completely separate networks so we have two workspaces. can both pull from the same pool of units. Depends on your azure setup. We went through Databricks sales when we set ours up but Microsoft should be able to do the same.
Depending on the type of workload your cluster runs, you will either be charged for Data Engineering or Data Analytics workload.
For example, if the cluster runs workloads triggered by the Databricks jobs scheduler, you will be charged for the Data Engineering workload. If your cluster runs interactive features such as ad-hoc commands, you will be billed for Data Analytics workload.
Here is an example on how billing works?
If you run Premium tier cluster for 100 hours in East US 2 with 10 DS13v2 instances, the billing would be the following for Data Analytics workload:
VM cost for 10 DS13v2 instances —100 hours x 10 instances x $0.598/hour = $598
DBU cost for Data Analytics workload for 10 DS13v2 instances —100 hours x 10 instances x 2 DBU per node x $0.55/DBU = $1,100
The total cost would therefore be $598 (VM Cost) + $1,100 (DBU Cost) = $1,698.
In addition to VM and DBU charges, you may also be charged for managed disks, public IP address or any other resource such as Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB depending on your application.
Still you have confusion on understanding the Azure Databricks pricing?
I would suggest you to a create a billing support ticket to get more clarity on the "Azure Databricks pricing: B2B subscription vs official page pricing" which you are looking for.
Step1: Go to “Help+Support”
Step2: Under support =>Select + New support request
Step3: Fill Basic details: Issue type*: Billing
Step4: Review + Create
Note: Azure provides unlimited support for subscription management, which includes billing, quota adjustments, and account transfers.
Reference: How to create an Azure support request

How to monitor IOPS for an Azure Storage Account

Having used Azure for some time now, I'm well aware of the default 20,000 IOPS limit of an Azure Storage Account. What I've yet to find however is up to date documentation on how to monitor an account's IOPS in order to determine whether or not it's being throttled. This is important when debugging performance issues for applications, VMs, and ASR replication - to name but three possible uses.
If anyone knows the correct way to keep track of an account's total IOPS and/or whether it's being throttled at any point in time, I'd appreciate it - if there's a simple solution for monitoring this over time, all the better, otherwise if all that exists is an API/PowerShell cmdlet, I guess I'll have to write something to save the data periodically over time.
You can monitor your storage account for throttling using Azure Monitor | Metrics. There are 3 metrics relevant to your question, which are
AnonymousThrottlingError
SASThrottlingError
ThrottlingError
These metrics exist for each of the 4 storage account abstractions (blob, file, table, queue). If you're unsure how your storage account is being used then monitor these metrics for all 4 services. Things like ASR, Backup and VM's are going to be using the blob service.
To configure this, go to the Azure Monitor | Metrics blade in the portal and select the storage account(s) you want to monitor. Then check off the metrics you're interested in. The image blow shows the chart with these 3 metrics configured for the blob service.
You can also configure an alert based on these metrics to alert you when any of these throttling events occur.
As for measuring the IOPS for the storage account, you could monitor the Transactions metric for the storage account. This is not really measuring the IOPS, but it does give you some visibility into the number of transactions (which sort of relates to IOPS) across the storage account. You can configure this from the storage account blade and clicking Metrics in the Monitoring section as shown below.

Azure: Why is it advised to use multiple storage accounts for a virtual machine scale set?

In the documentation for Virtual Machine Scale Sets it says
Spread out the first letters of storage account names as much as possible
I have two questions to this:
Why should you use multiple Storage Accounts at all?
Why is Azure creating 5 Storage Accounts if I create a new Virtual Machine Scale Set through portal?
Why should I spread the first letters as much as possible?
The answer to this lies in the limits of Azure. If you look at the storage limits specifically, you will find that the storage account is capped at 20k IOPS.
Total Request Rate (assuming 1KB object size) per storage account
Up to 20,000 IOPS, entities per second, or messages per second
So that means that your Scale Set would effectively be capped at 20k IOPS, no matter how many VM's you put in it.
As for the storage Account naming, I have no clue, but looking at the templates they are linking to, they are not doing it:
"uniqueStringArray": [
"[concat(uniqueString(concat(resourceGroup().id, variables('newStorageAccountSuffix'), '0')))]",
"[concat(uniqueString(concat(resourceGroup().id, variables('newStorageAccountSuffix'), '1')))]",
"[concat(uniqueString(concat(resourceGroup().id, variables('newStorageAccountSuffix'), '2')))]",
"[concat(uniqueString(concat(resourceGroup().id, variables('newStorageAccountSuffix'), '3')))]",
"[concat(uniqueString(concat(resourceGroup().id, variables('newStorageAccountSuffix'), '4')))]"
],
I suspect, this may be somehow linked to how the storage accounts are distributed among nodes hosting them (so say accounts starting with 'A' are all hosted on the same cluster or near by clusters).
It's about avoiding throttling
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/storage-scalability-targets
For standard storage accounts: A standard storage account has a
maximum total request rate of 20,000 IOPS. The total IOPS across all
of your virtual machine disks in a standard storage account should not
exceed this limit.
You can roughly calculate the number of highly utilized disks
supported by a single standard storage account based on the request
rate limit. For example, for a Basic Tier VM, the maximum number of
highly utilized disks is about 66 (20,000/300 IOPS per disk), and for
a Standard Tier VM, it is about 40 (20,000/500 IOPS per disk), as
shown in the table below.
There's is no price difference between 5 or 1 storage accounts, so why not 5?
If you create 5 SA in different Storage Rack/Stomp (Datacenter infrastructure) you have less chance to be throttled, and they have better chance to distribute traffic load. So I think those are the reasons

Azure Cloud Role included storage = extra costs?

I'm currently working out the cost-analysis for my upcoming Azure project. I am tempted to use a Azure Cloud Role, because it has a certain amount of storage included in the offer. However, I have the feeling that it is too good to be true.
Therefore, I was wondering. Do you have to pay transaction-costs/ storage costs on this "included" storage? I can't find any information about this on the Azure website, and I want to be as accurate as possible (even if the cost of transactions is almost nothing).
EDIT:
To clarify, I specifically want to know about the transaction costs on the storage. Do you have to pay a small cost per transaction on the storage (like with Blob/Table storage), or is this included in the offer as well?
EDIT 2:
I am talking about the storage included with the Cloud Services (web/worker) and not a separate Table/blob storage.
Can you clarify which offer you're referring to?
With Cloud Services (web/worker roles), each VM instance has some local storage associated with it, which is free of charge and, because it's a local disk, there are no transactions or related fees associated with this storage. As Rik pointed out in his answer, that data is not durable: it's on a single disk and will be gone forever if, say, the disk crashes.
If you're storing data in Blobs, Tables, or Queues (Windows Azure Storage), then you pay per GB ($0.095 cents per GB per month for geo-redundant storage, or $0.07 per GB per month for locally-redundant storage), and a penny per 100,000 transactions. And as long as your storage account is in the same data center as your Cloud Service, there's no data egress fees.
Now we come back to the question of which offer you're referring to. The free 90-day trial, for instance, comes with 70GB of Windows Azure Storage, and 50M transactions monthly included. MSDN subscriptions come with included storage and transactions as well. If you're just working with a pay-as-you-go subscription, you'll pay for storage plus transactions.
The storage is included, but not guaranteed to be persistent. Your role could be shut down and started on a different physical location, which has no impact on the availability of your role, but you'll lose your whatever you have in storage, I.E. the included storage is very much temporary.
As for transaction costs, you only pay for outgoing data, not incoming data or data within Azure (one role to another).
You pay per GB, and $0,01 per 100.000 transactions

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