I have a very unique question. In azure when you look at the pricing calculator and your deciding which size of VM to deploy for your cloud service the pricing calculator at the following URL
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=cloud
shows storage along with the the size of the VM. For example the extra small instance says
"Extra small VM (1GHz CPU, 768MB RAM, 20GB Storage)" while the large instance shows "Large VM (4 x 1.6GHz CPU, 7GB RAM, 1,000GB Storage)".
My question is this. If I link a storage account to this cloud service do I get the listed storage in my storage account included with my payment for the cloud service. EG. I have a Large instance with a linked storage account and in the storage account I have 500GB of data stored. Do I pay 251.06 for the cloud service and an additional $36.91 for the 500 gb or is the storage free because it is under the 1000 gb limit listed as included storage for the cloud service?
Your question not unique, but rather common. The answer is - you pay for VM once and for Cloud Storage - second time. The point is that if you do Cloud Service (Web and Worker Roles) the storage that comes with the VM is NOT persistent storage. This means that the VM storage (the one that is from 20GB to 2TB depending ot VM size) can go away at any point of time. While the Cloud Storage (the cloud storage account - BLob / Tables / Queues) is absolutely durable, secure, persistent and optionally even geo-replicated.
Related
I have two webapps on separate plans each has multiple instances of large size (P3) and it says I get 250GB of storage on P3.
I also have azure storage to store photos.
I want to know, how is Azure storage related to the webapp plans... meaning, what if I reduce the webapp to S3 where it's only 50GB, how will that affect storage?
Also, do I get 50GB for each instances or for the entire plan?
Thank you
Azure App Service plans represent the collection of physical resources used to host your apps.
App Service plans define:
Region (West US, East US, etc.)
Scale count (one, two, three instances, etc.)
Instance size (Small, Medium, Large) SKU (Free, Shared, Basic, Standard, Premium)
If you scale down your App Service plan to S3, yes you will get 50GB storage.
This storage includes/stores all of the resources and deployment files, logs etc.
You can only store data/files up to the available Storage according to the pricing tier that you choose. To increase the storage you can scale up your pricing tier.
Also, note that increase/decreasing instances is nothing but increase/decrease the number of VM instances that run your app. You get only one Storage account for all the instances not individual Storage.
Before scaling based on instance count, you should consider that scaling is affected by Pricing tier in addition to instance count. Different pricing tiers can have different numbers cores and memory, and so they will have better performance for the same number of instances (which is Scale up or Scale down).
For more details, you may refer the Azure App Service plans in-depth overview and App Service pricing.
Hope this answers your questions.
App Service storage is completely different than Azure Storage (blobs/tables/queues).
App Service Storage
For a given tier size (e.g. S1), you get a specific amount of durable storage, shared across all instances of your web app. So, if you get 50GB for a given tier, and you have 5 instances, all 5 instances share that 50GB storage (and all see and use the same directories/files).
All files in your Web App's allocated storage are manipulated via standard file I/O operations.
App Service Storage is durable (meaning there's no single disk to fail, and you won't lose any info stored), until you delete your web app. Then all resources (including the allocated storage, in this example 50GB) are removed.
Azure Storage
Azure Storage, such as blobs, is managed completely independently of web apps. You must access each item in storage (a table, a queue, a blob / container) via REST or a language-specific SDK. A single blob can be as large as 4.75TB, far larger than the largest App Service plan's storage limit.
Unlike App Service / Web App storage, you cannot work with a blob with normal file I/O operations. As I mentioned already, you need to work via API/SDK. If, say, you needed to perform an operation on a blob (e.g. opening/manipulating a zip file), you would typically copy that blob down to working storage in your Web App instance (or VM, etc.), manipulate the file there, then upload the updated file back to blob storage.
Azure Storage is durable (triple-replicated within a region), but has additional options for replication to secondary regions, and even further, allowing for read-only access to the secondary region. Azure Storage also supports additional features such as snapshots, public access to private blobs (through Shared Access Policies & Signatures), and global caching via CDN. Azure Storage will remain in place even if you delete your Web App.
Note: There is also Azure File Storage (backed by Azure Storage), which provides a 5TB file share, and acts similarly to the file share provided by Web Apps. However: You cannot mount an Azure File Storage share with a Web App (though you can access it via API/SDK).
I have created a SQL server 2016 virtual machine.
I have added 6 disks of 1 TB SSD each to my machine.
Is the pricing for each 1 TB disk the same as the premium storage disk (e.g. 148$ per month) or is there another pricing for the disks ?
Is the pricing for each 1 TB disk the same as the premium storage disk
(e.g. 148$ per month)
Yes, it is right. Only premium storage account supports SSD disk. Please refer to this link.
Billing for a premium storage disk or blob depends on the provisioned
size of the disk or blob. Azure maps the provisioned size (rounded up)
to the nearest premium storage disk option.
You select 4 1TB data disk, you need pay for 4 P30 cost(even you don't use them).
How can I change the disk type in an Azure storage account disk from Premium to Standard (SSD to HDD)?
For example, in my windows server VM the disk is configured to be a Premium. I no longer need it to be an SSD for the type of usage so I would like to change it to Standard. But it is greyed out. The VM is not currently running.
The disk type is configured at the time of creating the Azure Storage Account. The disk type is used to determine the physical hardware that hosts your Azure Storage Account within the Azure data center.
Currently, you are NOT able to change the disk type of a storage account after creation, and it's tied to that particular disk type. Unfortunately, if you need to change disk types, then you will need to copy your VM .vhd disk images to a new storage account that uses HDD disk type, then create the Azure VM to use the .vhd disk image from the new storage account.
I want to use the premium storage for better performance.
I am using it for BLOBS and i need the fastest blob access for reading.
I am using the reading and writing of the blobs only internally within the data center
I create a premium storage and checked it vs the standard storage by reading a blob of 10 MB 100 times in different location using seek method (reading 50 kb each time).
I read it using a VM machine with windows server 2012
the result are the same - around 200 ms.
Do i need to do something else ? like attach the storage ? if so how do i attach the storage.
both the vm and the storage are at the same region
You can use Premium Storage blobs directly via the REST API. Performance will be better that Standard Storage blobs. Perf difference may not be obvious in some cases if there is local caching on the application or when the blob is too small. Here 10MB blob size is tiny compared to the performance limits. Can you retry with a larger blob? Like, 10 GB? Also note that Premium Storage model is not optimized for tiny blobs.
Well, in Virtual machine cases it always rely on your main Physical HDD, unless you will used that premium storage it's plus but i think internet connection matters as well.
By default, there is a temporary storage(SSD) provided with each VM. This temporary storage drive is present on the physical machine which is hosting your VM and hence can have higher IOPS and lower latency when compared to the persistent storage like data disk.
For test, we can create a VM with HDD disk, and attach a SSD to this VM. After it complete, we can install some tools to measure disk performance, in this way, we can find the difference between HDD and SSD.
like attach the storage ? if so how do i attach the storage.
We can via Azure new portal to attach a SSD to this VM.
More information about attach disk to VM, please refer to this link.
As we are stopping azure service, we have stopped and deleted the VM's and attached disks last month, which now displays no instances in cloud services, which in turn have deleted the blobs inside the storage. Do we get billed for subscription this month.Any idea?
For Azure storage account, your total cost depends on how much you store, the volume and type of storage transactions and outbound data transfers, and which data redundancy option you choose.
If you delete all your blobs in your storage account, you don't pay for storage account.
More information about Azure Storage Pricing please refer to this link.