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.
Related
As I understand there is no concept of update domain in App Services (and in other PaaS offerings). I am wondering how Azure is handling OS updates if I have only a single instance of an App Service app. Do I need to plan for two and more instances if I want to avoid such cases when an app goes down during the OS/other updates or this is handled without downtime? According to docs App Service has 99.95% SLA - is this time reserved here?
First of all, welcome to the community.
Your application will not become unavailable when App Services is patching the OS, you don't have to worry about that. Imagine if that would be the case, it would be a huge problem. Instead, the PaaS service will make sure your application is replicated to an updated worker node before that happens.
But you should have multiple instances, as a best practice listed in this article:
To avoid a single point-of-failure, run your app with at least 2-3 instances.
Running more than one instance ensures that your application is available when App Service moves or upgrades the underlying VM instances
Have a look at this detailed blog post:
https://azure.github.io/AppService/2018/01/18/Demystifying-the-magic-behind-App-Service-OS-updates.html
When the update reaches a specific region, we update available instances without apps on them, then move the apps to the updated instances, then update the offloaded instances.
The SLA is the same regardless the number of instances, even if you select "1 instance":
We guarantee that Apps running in a customer subscription will be available 99.95% of the time
Have a look at Hyper-V and VMWare, it will give you a rough idea on how App Services handle that.
If you're looking for zero-downtime deployments with App Services, what you are looking for are deployment slots.
Managing versions can be confusing, take a look at this issue I opened, it gives you a detailed how-to approach about managing different slot versions, which is not clearly described by Microsoft docs.
We have written a high scalable Cloudservice for MS Azure with two roles: "WebsiteRole" and "WebsiteWorkerRole". For better performance we deploy this Cloudservice in multiple regions (2x US, 2x EU, 1x JP). We have different configuration files for each region (EuWestProductive.azurePubxml, ServiceConfiguration.CloudEuWest.cscfg, Web.ReleaseEuWest.config).
Now the Problem: In each Region we have running the "WebsiteRole" and "WebsiteWorkerRole". But the "WebsiteWorkerRole" has only very small tasks, so that one extra small instance in one region is more than enough.
We tried to set the Role instance count to zero (ServiceConfiguration.CloudEuWest.cscfg). But this is not allowed:
Azure Feedback: Allow a Role instance count of 0
Is there an other way to remove a role when deploy the Cloudservice?
No, as you've discovered, a cloud service does not allow for scale to zero. You have to effectively remove the deployment. To have the minimum change to what you already have in place you could separate the two roles into two different deployments. Then have an Azure Automation Script, or set of scripts run elsewhere, that handles deploying the worker role when needed and decommissioning when it's not needed.
Depending on the type of workload that worker is doing you could also look at taking another route of using something like Azure Automation to perform the work. This is especially true if it's a small amount of processing that occurs only a few times a day. You're charged by the minute for the automation script, so just make sure it's going to run less than the actual current instance does.
It really boils down to what that worker is doing, how much processing it really needs to do, how much resources it needs and how often it needs to be running. There are a lot of options, such as Azure Automation, another thread on the web role, a separate cloud service deployment, etc. Each with their own pros and cons. One option might even to look at the new Azure Functions they just announced (in preview and charged by the execution).
The short answer is separate the worker from the WebSiteRole deployment, then decide the best hosting mechanism for that worker role making sure that the option includes the ability to only run when you need it to.
Thanks #MikeWo, your idea to separate the deployments was great!
I have verified this with an small example project and it works just fine. Now it is also possible to change the VM size and other configurations per region.
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It is possible to delete azure app hosting plan to stop being charged, but I am wondering if it's possible to disable it somehow. If you delete it, then you lose configuration, etc. But I did not find any options to kind of turn it off, and then put it back online (I suppose it's possible with virtual machines e.g.), or reduce the instance count to 0 somehow. Did someone find a way to do it?
P.S. Sometimes it's possible to switch to free plan, but e.g. it won't work when you have deployment slots, etc.
The only way to 'turn off' an Azure App Hosting Plan is to delete it! While it is up and running you will be charged.
The best solution you've got is to shrink it down to a single small server. The price for that is reasonably low.
The alternative is to automate the whole thing, If you keep the sites you host in Github etc you can create a hosting plan and deploy deployment slots etc from a script. You can host the scripts in Azure Automation, and it becomes a few minutes to redeploy your site. Although this does take a little time to create.
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)
I'm considering to join the Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special, but I'm a little bit afraid of losing money with it. I don't wanna develop any fancy large scale application, I want to join just to learn Azure and do my experiments, what should I be afraid of?
In the transference, it says: "Data Transfers (per region)", what does that mean?
Can I put limits to stop the app if it goes over this plan in order to avoid get charged?
Can it be "pre pay" instead "bill pay"?
Would it be enough for a blog?
Any experiencie so far?
Kind regards.
As ligget pointed out, Azure isn't cost affect as a host for an application that can be easily deployed to a traditional shared hosting provider. Azure's target market are those that want dedicated resources without the need to micro-manage the infrasture and the capability to easily scale up/down based on demand.
That said, here's the answers to the questions you posted:
Data Transfers are based on bandwidth in and out of the hosting data center. bandwidth for communication occuring within components (SQL Azure, Windows Azure, Azure Storage, etc...) in the same datacenter are not billable.
Your usage is not currently capped when the free quotas are used up. However, you will recieved warning emails when those items approach their usage threadsholds.
There is the option to pay your subscription using a PO, but the minimum threshold for most of these operations is $500/month. So as a hobbyist, its unlikely you're wanting that route.
The introductory special does not provide enough resources for hosting a 24x7 personal blog. That level includes only 25hrs of compute resources. Each hour a single instance of your application is deployed will count against this, even if the application received no traffic. Think of it like renting office space. You still pay rent on the office even if there are no customers there.
All this said, there's still much to be learned with the introductory special. The azure development tools allows you to work with Windows Azure and Azure storage locally and get a feel for how they work. The introductory special then lets you deploy those solutions so you can see what works and what doesn't (not everything that works locally works hosted).
I would recommend you host your blog somewhere else - it's a waste of resources running it on Azure and you'll find much cheaper options. A recently introduced extra small instance would be a better choice in this case, but AFAIK it is charged separately as of now, e.g. even when you have an MSDN subscription those extra small instance hours do not count towards free Azure hours that come with the subscription.
There is no pre-pay option I know of and it's not possible to stop the app automatically. It'll be running until the deployment is deleted (beware! even if suspended/stopped the deployment will continue to accrue charges). I believe you will be sent a notification shortly before reaching your free hours threshold.
Be aware that when launching more than 1 instance you are charged for every hour of every instance combined. This can happen for example when you have more than one role in your Azure project (1 web role + 1 worker role - a separate instance will be started for each role).
Data trasfer means your entire data trasfer: blobs/Table storage/queues (transfers between your hosted service and storage account inside the same data center are free) + whatever data is transfered in/out of your hosted application, e.g. when somebody visits your pages. When you create storage accounts and hosted services in Azure you will specify a region that will be hosting your account/app - hosting in Asia is slightly more expensive than in Europe/U.S.
Your best bet would be to contact Microsoft with these questions.