We have TONS of websites hosted on Azure. Our VMs appear to be running now, but many of our Azure Websites are not. In an effort to bring our sites back up sooner than later, we have tried scaling UP, OUT, and changing our hosting plan, to no avail. Is there a way to force an Azure Website VM to move to another (working) datacenter? We don't want to destroy the site and bring it back up, as we will be forced to update DNS, which will cause an even longer delay in service to our customers.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Sorry to everyone else experiencing a long night right along with me.
Your best bet is to run two instances of the site in two Regions and use something like Traffic Manager (or AWS Route 53 if you want something external to Azure) to perform failover routing for you.
Depending on the type of sites you could run a static holding site in a non-Azure environment and failover to that. How you choose to solve this will depend on what your budget is (or opportunity cost in the event your sites are offline).
Note that a 99.9% yearly SLA equates to almost 9 hours of downtime in a year.
If you want to understand how you could solve this intra-Azure here's a good guide: http://blog.kloud.com.au/2014/11/03/deploy-an-ultra-high-availablity-mvc-web-app-on-microsoft-azure-part-1/
Related
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.
I am a newbie to web development
I would like to host my site in azure.
There are so many subscriptions plans.
So which subscription is reasonably good and give me price details of that?
Thanks in advance
Windows Azure has few types of hosting. For a website you might want to look at the following -
Web Sites - You can host right away without modification of your existing project.
Cloud Services - I used this, but it requires changes such as Caching.
Here is the calculator based on your need.
FYI: Rule of thumb is you need a least two instances in Production to minimize the downtime.
If you are a newbie , I would strongly suggest using azure websites for now, and you can always move to a custom solution using webroles/caching Etc later if you feel it doesn't cater all your needs..
Azure websites pricing can be obtained from here :
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites/
Again on what parameters would you choose the right package, you are the best judge for that since you know what traffic are you expecting and how much memory etc you need
I'm deploying an eCommerce site for my customer in spain. So, my first idea was to deploy it to the Azure Nortwest region.
The problem is that, even with the SLA of 99.99%, there could happen that the whole Azure datacenter would broke-down. (The same as the Amazon S3 services that went down for severeal hours some months ago).
My question is: How to protect against this eventual problem? I know that I can change my DNS C-Name to change the endpoint website, but it takes a lot of time to propagate DNS changes, and I must have a very-current backup of the database to be able to restore it into another server.
I know I can use traffic manager too, but I still have the problem with the database....
Which is the best aproach to solve this problem?
Also, I have some doubts about if this is reasonable to take this into consideration for a medium sized company.
Is anyone doing this, and is happy with the solution? 8ยท)
thanks in advance for your help,
luis
SQL Data Sync is a great way to synchronize the data between Azure SQL Databases. It works across Data Centers as well as regions. Using SQL Data Sync you could create a second database in another data center and synchronize the data between the two databases. There will likely be a period of time that you are exposed to loss however as the time between automatic syncs currently can't be lower that five minutes.
I am using a normal IIS web host to host my website and web services.. It is just a hobby and I get very little traffic. I would let to be using Azure instead since I would like an excuse to learn azure.
Is anyone out there using Azure in this way and can tell me about what is thier monthly cost? I long ago subscribed to azure and forgot about it and a month later had a $90 bill so that really scares me.
Right now my web host + sql is about $25 a month.
Is there a way to have azure shut the service off if it gets over a certain monthly cost?
Well, even a very small instance costs $0.05/hour, and the SLA is only guaranteed if you run two or more instances. That in itself adds up to approximately $75/month.
SQL Azure is at least $9.99/month. Add to this charges for traffic, etc.
There are reasons why the SQL Azure pricing model is like this. You do get your very own virtual machine instances with dedicated RAM, which you typically don't get in a web hotel, so taking that into account, the Azure price may be reasonable, but isn't very competitive for very small hobby sites.
The official price list is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/
Unfortunately, Azure is not designed to host hobbyist sites. You won't be able to beat $25 a month, but then you don't need things like SLA's and HA databass. But, as I commented earlier, it is nice to be able to work with it to train up on the platform.
There are ways of getting onto Azure cheaply.
Firstly There is the free introductory offer. Very much a "toe in the water" just to play/learn the platform. There aren't enough compute hours to host a site.
Secondly, if you're prepared to put in a little effort you can join either the partner or Bizspark programs which will give you access to enough resources to host a site for free, but there is an expectation that you're trying to build "something".
Oh, and for a hobbyist site you don't need the SLA so a single instance is fine.
We are experiencing a very serious unscheduled downtime of our Azure application today for what is now coming up to 9 hours. We reported to Azure support and the ops team is actively trying to fix the problem and I do not doubt that. We managed to get our application running on another "test" hosted service that we have and redirected our CNAME to point at the instance so our customers are happy, but the "main" hosted service is still unavailable.
My own "finger in the air" instinct is that the issue is network related within our data center (west europe), and indeed, later on in the day the service dash board has gone red for that region with a message to that effect. (Our application is showing as "Healthy" in the portal, but is unreachable via our cloudapp.net URL. Additionally threads within our application are logging sql connection exceptions into our storage account as it cannot contact the DB)
What is very strange, though, is that the "test" instance I referred to above is also in the same data centre and has no issues contacting the DB and it's external endpoint is fully available.
I would like to ask the community if there is anything that I could have done better to avoid this downtime? I obeyed the guidance with respect to having at least 2 roles instances per role, yet I still got burned. Should I move to a more reliable data centre? Should I deploy my application to multiple data centres? How would I manage the fact that my SQL-Azure DB is in the same datacentre?
Any constructive guidance would be appreciated - being a techie, I've never had a more frustrating day being able to do nothing to help fix the issue.
There was an outage in the European data center today with respect to SQL Azure. Some of our clients got hit and had to move to another data center.
If you are running mission critical applications that cannot be down, I would deploy the application into multiple regions. DNS resolution is obviously a weak link right now in Azure, but can be worked around (if you only run a website it can be done very simply using Response.Redirects or similar)
Now, there is a data synchronization service from Microsoft that will sync up multiple SQL Azure databases. Check here. This way, you can have mirror sites up in different regions and have them be in sync with SQL Azure perspective
Also, be a good idea to employ a 3rd party monitoring service that would detect problems with your deployed instances externally. AzureWatch can notify or even deploy new nodes if you choose to, when some of the instances turn "Unresponsive"
Hope this helps
I can offer some guidance based on our experience:
Host your application in multiple data centers, complete with Sql Azure databases. You can connect each application to its data center specific Sql Server. You can also cache any external assets (images/JS/CSS) on the data center specific Windows Azure machine or leverage Azure Blog Storage. Note: Extra costs will be incurred.
Setup one-way SQL replication between your primary Sql Azure DB and the instance in the other data center. If you want to do bi-rectional replication, take a look at the MSDN site for guidance.
Leverage Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic to the data center closest to the user. It has geo-detection capabilities which will also improve the latency of your application. So you can redirect map http://myapp.com to the internal url of your data center and a user in Europe should automatically get redirected to the European data center and vice versa for USA. Note: At the time of writing this post, there is not a way to automatically detect and failover to a data center. Manual steps will be involved, once a failover is detected and failover is a complete set (i.e. you will failover both the Windows Azure AND Sql Azure instances). If you want micro-level failover, then I suggest putting all your config the in the service config file and encrypt the values so you can edit the connection string to connect instance X to DB Y.
You are all set now. I would create or install a local application to detect the availability of the site. A better solution would be to create a page to check for the availability of application specific components by writing a diagnostic page or web service and then poll it from a local computer.
HTH
As you're deploying to Azure you don't have much control about how SQL server is setup. MS have already set it up so that it is highly available.
Having said that, it seems that MS has been having some issues with SQL Azure over the last few days. We've been told that it only affected "a small number of users". At one point the service dashboard had 5 data centres affected by a problem. I had 3 databases in one of those data centres down twice for about an hour each time, but one database in another affected data centre that had no interruption.
If having a database connection is critical to your app, then the only way in the Azure environment to ensure against problems that MS haven't prepared against (this latest technical problem, earthquakes, meteor strikes) would be to co-locate your sql data in another data centre. At the moment the most practical way to do this is to use the synch framework. There is an ability to copy SQL Azure databases, but this only works within a data centre. With your data located elsewhere you could then point your app at the new database if the main one becomes unavailable.
While this looks good on paper though, this may not have helped you with the latest problem as it did affect multiple data centres. If you'd just been making database copies on a regular basis, that might have been enough to get you through. Or not.
(I would have posted this answer on server fault, but I couldn't find the question)
This is just about a programming/architecture issue, but you amy also want to ask the question on webmasters.stackexchange.com
You need to find out the root cause before drawing any conclusions.
However. my guess one of two things was the problem
The ISP connectivity differs for the test system and your production system. Either they use different ISPs, or different lines from the same ISP. When I worked in a hosting company we made sure that ou IP connectivity went through at least two different ISPS who did not share fibre to our premises (and where we could, they had different physical routes to the building - the homing ability of backhoes when there's a critical piece of fibre to dig up is well proven
Your datacentre had an issue with some shared production infrastructure. These might be edge routers, firewalls, load balancers, intrusion detection systems, traffic shapers etc. These typically are also often only installed on production systems. Defences here involve understanding the architecture and making sure the provider has a (tested!) DR plan for restoring SOME service when things go pair shaped. Neatest hack I saw here was persuading an IPS (intrusion prevention system) that its own management servers were malicious. And so you couldn't reconfigure it at all.
Just a thought - your DC doesn't host any of the Wikileaks mirrors, or Paypal/Mastercard/Amazon (who are getting DDOS'd by wikileaks supporters at the moment)?