I have a non-commercial small project built on top of Parse Server. I really like it and don't want it to die, but since it makes me no money I don't want to spend anything on it neither.
Free plan of Parse suits me tottally. 30req/s is ok for me (I don't even cross 5req/s I guess).
Is there a service which supports Parse migration that can allow me to stay on the same (or at least close) pricing policy?
Microsoft Azure announced support for Parse. Azure App Service does have free plans but there will probably be some minimal costs (probably pennies) for ancillary storage services and bandwidth. I would suggest starting a 1 month free Azure trial and seeing how it goes if you don't already have Azure credits through an MSDN subscription.
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I am not sure if I understand how this works and if I could accidentally be charged if I do this?
I want to play around with Azure just for myself, deploy a web app, learn how it works.
I have an old Visual Studio subscription that I got years ago from a company I used to work at.
This subscription is old and disabled now, expired. I have an option to convert it into pay-as-you-go subscription. When I try to do that, it is asking for my credit card. I don't want to use any paid services, I just want to play with a basic free service plan (I believe it is called F1).
If I provide my credit card and convert that subscription to "pay-as-you-go", it is not going to charge me right away for something? I am not very familiar how this works. Thank you.
I am using the pay as you go plan and it required a credit card to subscribe.
It is possible to use the Azure subscription without paying as long as you use the F1 (Free) service plan for any of the services you use.
Once you start using the Basic, Standard or Premium plans, then you will be billed monthly to those services, and almost all those paid plan costs accumulate hourly.
It is possible to use the non-free services as well and use almost nothing as long as you remove the resources soon after use. As with any service, please do check the pricing to ensure you don't use a service longer than is needed.
I have an Azure Cloud Service published at Microsoft and it's draining all my credit!
Payment
Pay as you go
Service resource
Minimal resource, 1 SMALL web role and 1 SMALL worker role.
I knew Azure wasn't cheap, but this is just too much. Currently my monthly cost is just under 80 USD. The only person that use this service is me, noone else, and I barely use it. So the cost is just for the upkeep.
Is this normal?
70 bucks a month!?
How much does it cost for YOU?
What Microsoft support told me
I am afraid the Cloud Services has a fixed price, and I am not aware
how it could be lowered. Maybe you want to check on how the service
itself could be tweaked to get it working as per your needs. You may
want to go through the Community Forum for that.
Community = Stackoverflow, so here I am!
If I look at my Azure subscription page I can see that it's the:
CALCULATING HOURS - Europe, Western
That is taking all my hard earned money. My service also uses SQL, storage and cache but, if I understand it correctly, these are not the cause for my expensive bill.
Before I leave you to it I just want to say that I can't use a simple web app because of my requirements. I know web apps are super cheap, but in this case I must use a cloud service..
Thank you
Update
I found out I was using A1 (small) and not A0 (extra small). The instance type for a cloudservice can be set in the servicedefinition file.
It's sad that not even Microsoft themselves could inform me about this.
Web and worker roles are like dedicated VMs if they are on, they will cost you money.
You can do one of two things
1) Stop the machines when no one is using them ( say in the off business hours). I am not sure if this is possible to do or not in your case. But if it is possible, you can run a small script to start/ stop the roles. You can even do so via apps on your phone. For example - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/azure-management/id826446897?mt=8
2) Move to Azure Web Apps and Azure Web Jobs - Both these services are "multi-tenant" and cost much less and in fact offer a free tier. If and when you need to scale, you can always scale as your need
Hope this helps
Windows Azure has a store.
The stuff you can by there are called Add-Ons, and they fall in two categories: Service and data.
I understand the point of some of the service offerings, but not all, and I don't yet understand the point of the data offerings at all.
With services, some offerings are database deployments such as ClearDB (MySQL) and MongoLab. That makes sense to me: You get those databases deployed and monitored with a few clicks, yet those databases run in the same data center as the applications that consume them, which is good for performance and security.
For most other services (there is a simple scheduler application, for example), it seems that the only advantage is the unified billing method. Is that a correct observation, or is there more to it?
Then the data offerings: The fact that I can buy bing query transactions cannot really have anything to do with the rest of my azure account, right? Technically, it's just bing (or whatever other data offering you look at) and presumably I'm going against the same bing api that I would have used previously (I'm assuming that was possible). There is nothing really deployed in any Azure data center the moment I buy it, is there? So in what sense is that an Add-On?
In a nutshell, am I missing something or are most Add-Ons just a method of buying external services and having the billed on my Azure account?
If you can answer the question for other 'app stores', you can answer it for Windows Azure. We know about THE App Store (as per the court battles over the name) which is the only way to get applications onto the closed (iOS) device. There is also a Mac App Store which would seem unnecessary because of the ability to install apps by yourself (which makes it more similar to the Azure store). In this case the reason for the store is discoverability, association with the store brand (where the buyer assumes a degree of vetting), a single point for updates, and simplified billing.
The Windows Azure Store (and data marketplace) exist for similar reasons. It is less about the technical benefits than the association with the Azure brand. Since SO is technical, let me highlight some (largely) technical aspects:
Don't assume that the service will run in the same data centre. In most cases it probably won't.
There is an advantage of having everything in one place from an operational point of view. Granting of operator access to the subscription means that you don't have to administer accounts on the service. I have had problems with this though - where the service made it difficult to do other things (such as get support) because the Azure identity wasn't handled very well. (I had this with New Relic).
The combined billing works on credit card payments only. Last time I checked (Summer 2013) there was no way to get an add-on with a pay-by-invoice subscription, so a second subscription (with credit card) was needed anyway.
Add-ons seems to still be in 'preview', which may indicate low adoption. Microsoft probably hasn't seen it grow the way they expected and may not be developing it much in future. This is opinion only, and shouldn't affect the service (after all the store is just a gateway, and has no (little) technical impact on the service provided)
Don't completely ignore the store however. The biggest benefit seems to be the free tier of the servers and reduced pricing, where Microsoft has managed to get service providers to make the store attractive. For example, the SendGrid free option provides 25,000 emails per month, and there doesn't seem to be a free option on SendGrid.com. New Relic pricing was (and maybe still is) significantly less.
Pay attention mainly to the pricing benefits, rather than perceived technical benefits.
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.
Azure itself is imo PaaS and not IaaS. Do you agree?
MS gurantees an availability of 99% and a strong consistency. You can find MS SLAs here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sla
(three SLAs Uptime: http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/4889/unbenanntqt.png ) I can't find anyhing about how they are going to archive that. Do they do backups? If Yes: How do they manage consistency? According to the Cap theorem (http://camelcase.blogspot.com/2007/08/cap-theorem.html
) their claims are not realistic.
2.1 Do you know detailed technical stuff about the how they are going to realize the claims about consistency and availability?
On the MS page you'll find three SLAs .docs, one for SQL Azure, the second for Azure AppFabric/.Net Services and the third for Azure Compute&Storage.(Screenshot in 1.) How can one track whether SLAs are violated? Do they offer some sort of monitor, so I don't have to measure the uptime by myself?
1) Azure is a classical "Platform as a Service". I agree
2) 99% is not a very high availability. It means that Azure is allowed to be 3 full days down per year. The blog article you referenced is IMHO quite suboptimal. There is another one that explains the CAP theorem in more detail.
In answer to your first point, MS itself calls Azure the "Windows Azure Platform", so its status as PaaS seems self-evident.
In response to your question about backups in the second point, one of the main promises of cloud computing is to allow you to ignore the administration of the resources. They promise safe data, it's up to you as to whether you trust them, but if you want to know exactly how they implement it, you're missing the point of the cloud abstraction.
The third point is more interesting, but I would assume it's up to you to pay attention (write monitoring software?) to whether they live up to their SLAs.
"Will Microsoft add VM functionality to Windows Azure to expand the set of existing applications that can be run on it?
Yes, Microsoft will add Virtual Machine functionality to Windows Azure to expand the set of existing applications that can be run on it. This Virtual Machine deployment functionality will enable developers to run a wide range of Windows applications in Windows Azure, while taking full advantage of the built in automated service management." ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/faq/ )
thus MS is planning Azure to become IaaS.