I'm a little confused about Azure instance pricing.
Suppose I have one website running on Azure with standard mode. According to the price calculator:
Load balance unlimited websites per region in up to 10 auto-scaled dedicated instances. Includes support for custom domains and SSL, built-in FTP, Git, TFS and Web Deploy support.
If I choose 1 instance, the price is about $60.
Now if my website needs to use 3 instances, will I pay $60 or $180?
This is out of topic by anyways...If you scale to 3 instances, you'll be using 3 VMs so: hourly rate * number of instances, which in your example would be $180
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For example, I have one web app, which I can scale by CPU percentage up to 20 instances. But for me do 20 instances is not enough. Can I create autoscale rules to scale web apps to more instances than that? Is that possible?
The default instances limit is set to prevent people making costly mistakes. Contact Azure support to get a higher limit.
The maximum you can use in a single multi tenant App Service Plan is 20 instances, if you want more for your App Service Plan you may look into App Service Environments:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-service-app-service-environment-intro/
Other option is to clone your web app a number of times (across regions or within the same region), you can use the recently announced cloning feature:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-service-web-app-cloning/
How to autoscale virtual machines(IaaS approach) in azure instead of web/worker role autoscaling in azure?
You can now Autoscale Virtual machines in Azure directly in the Azure Management Portal. ScottGu has a post about it on his blog.
The important thing to autoscale VM's is you must proactively provision the Max # of VM's you think you'll need to handle your peak capacity, and add them to the same availability set.
For example, if on the busiest day of the week it takes 6 machines to handle all of your traffic, then you need to create 6 instances and install your application on it, configure it to handle traffic etc.... and then add it to an availability set with the other 5 machines.
Once you've done this, you can navigate to the Cloud Service that contains all of your virtual machines and click on the Scale tab. You should see a list of your availability sets, and it should tell you the # of machines you can scale over. Choose a metric (either CPU or Queue today), and then range of machines you want to scale between. You can scale between 1 and the total # of machines.
When load is low -- Azure will turn off machines (so you don't have to pay for them), and when load is high, Azure will turn those machines back on.
Auto-scaling on the IaaS level doesn't really make sense. Even if azure could detect high CPU usage and start a new VM based on it, what then? you still need to install your application on that VM automatically somehow.
What you are looking for is something that runs your app on azure, and installs new instances on new VM's if necessary. That "something" is called PaaS enabler. Basically it is another abstraction level between your app and the azure IaaS.
there are a couple of them out there :
Cloudify, CloudFoundary, Juju
as far as i know, only one that supports Azure is Cloudify. you can check out how to configure azure using Cloudify here : Configuring Azure
you can also check out the community - Cloudify Forum, or post questions here for assistance.
Disclaimer: I work for Gigaspaces, developing the Cloudify product line.
According to this it's possible to scale out IaaS with Availability sets by pre-provisioning the number of boxes: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kaevans/2015/02/20/autoscaling-azurevirtual-machines/
My shared instance website is costing about £20 GBP per month, and this is detailed as 'Compute Hours' in my bill.
According to Scott Gu's blog
"You pay for a shared mode web-site using the standard “pay as you go” model that we support with other features of Windows Azure (meaning no up-front costs, and you pay only for the hours that the feature is enabled). A web-site running in shared mode costs only 1.3 cents/hr during the preview (so on average $9.36/month)."
According to the azure pricing calculator a site on a shared instance should cost $9.36.
According to the Azure pricing details
"Shared Instance Model
The shared instance model provides support for custom domain names, 1
GB of storage, and unlimited outbound data transfer charged on the
terms of your Windows Azure subscription at the standard Pay-As-You-Go
rates. Up to three instances per Web site may be deployed at an
additional cost.
Under the shared instance model, you will receive the following
benefits:
The ability to assign your custom host or domain name Outbound traffic
charged at Pay-As-You-Go rates; unlimited inbound data transfer 1 GB
storage (shared by all sites) 20 MB of a third-party, MySQL database
Each Web site operated under the shared instance model will be charged
at $0.02 / hour (approx. $14.40 / month) per Web Site instance at
general availability. During preview, a 33% discount will be applied
for an effective monthly rate of $9.60 / month, per Web Site instance.
During preview, all paid shared instance hours will be billed using
the current Cloud Services small compute meter, except we will emit
1/9th of the Cloud Services small compute hours to deliver the
discounted pricing of $9.60 / month per Web Site instance. The monthly
calculation per paid shared Web Site instance is as follows: 720 hours
* 1/9 * $0.12 =$9.60."
So what I am misunderstanding? A shared website at the this moment in time (Jan 2013) should cost less than $10 per month.
EDIT MORE INFO
The price I am paying is exactly 3 times £9.60
I have a BizSpark account but I'm struggling to work out what I'm actually entitled to as part of my free Azure package. The package details are listed here:
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/details?locale=en-us&offer=ms-azr-0012p&no-rewrite=true
I need to run:
One virtual machine (running Linux) to power the website
One hosted service to provide the client software (Windows Phone and Windows 8) with database access
One hosted service to provide the virtual machine with database access
Two storage accounts (one for images and one for the virtual machine)
One SQL database
Do the hosted services count as VMs and can anybody shed some light on the best configuration (VM sizes etc) to fit all of the above into my subscription please? Multiple instances would be nice but I think I might be getting greedy now!
Thank you.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that you 1500 hours of small compute instances (this includes both Cloud Services and Virtual Machines). 1500 hours per month means you can run 2 small instances full time or choose for an equivalent ratio. So you could go for 4 extra small instances and still have room for 2 extra small instances and 1 small instance to use for something else. To keep the SLA (on the hosted service at least) I would suggest the following:
2 extra small instances of a Linux Virtual Machine
2 extra small instances of a hosted service with a web role. The web role would have 2 tasks:
Provide the client software with database access
Provide the Virtual Machine with database access
This might not be the best solution in terms of performance, but you'll be able to run everything high available without having to pay anything extra.
The 2 storage accounts and the SQL Azure database (you must use the web edition) are also covered by the BizSpark subscription.
Update: 1 small = 4 extra small equivalent ratio isn't right. The ratio is 1 small = 6 extra small.
How many worker roles and web roles can you have per Azure subscription?
a. 1 worker role and 1 web role
b. 10 in total
c. 11 in total
d. Unlimited
Is Windows Azure only work for .NET?
EDIT: I updated this to reflect the changes from September, 2011, increasing role count from 5 to 25.
A subscription is not capped by role-count. Each hosted service may have up to 25 roles (see this MSDN article for clarification), with a mix of Web, Worker, and VM Roles. By default, a subscription is limited to six hosted services, and a total of 20 Small instances (e.g. 20 cores) across the entire subscription. You can mix and match VM sizes but you'll initially be capped at 20 cores. You can contact customer support to get both the hosted service count and the instance count lifted (I work with ISVs who go well beyond 20 instances).
Windows Azure is not limited to .net apps. The VMs themselves are based on Windows Server 2008 SP2 and 2008 R2. You can easily run Java, PHP, and python apps, for example. Launch Jetty or Tomcat, run servers such as MongoDB, etc. Take a look at the Windows Azure Interop page for more info.
Azure you get X number of instances.
An instance can be a web role or a worker role.
You can have one role per instance.
You can have as many instances you can afford per subscription.
So the answer to the question in your comment is yes.
But it is probably not a good idea since it would increase your cost. You would have 5000 instances and it would cost 600 USD per hour (last time I checked it was 0.12 USD per hour)
Better to install all services on one web role and one worker role instance, and then increase the number as needed.
in each subscription you have 6 hosted accounts and 5 storage accounts.
by defualt each hosting account can use up to 20 instances (any size).
each instance can serve a worker or web role
in the calculation note that the same role must served in at least 2 instances to have active
sla for the service and you can use up to 20 instances for a role (only the available per hosting account).
A single web role can serve many web applications.
The same about worker role.
So the instance count is for performance (web servers in your farm) not .net application count you create.
What client has 5000 servers?(instance is server 2008 R2 VM not .net application)
Hope that helps