I have actually pay-as-you-go plan in my account right now and I am using free 20MB database to all my projects in this account. I've created mobile services for my mobile app and it's time to release this project. So I think the best for me right now is move from Free Mobile Services to Basic so I can have unlimited devices to use this. But I don't know how much database size and bandwidth I would need. I just want to set my plan to Basic and create new database and then pay how much bandwidth and database size I would need.
I found this calculator and I just want to buy that Basic services with 1 unit and I just don't want to fill any other things (not because I don't want them because I just don't know how many and that it would be great that with rising app using there would be rising too). Is it possible?
I hope I explained my problem well.
Btw: What unit means in "1.5M API calls per unit"?
Thanks
Yes, you can continue to use Free SQL DB with Basic tier of Windows Azure Mobile Services. SQL and Mobile Services are separate items on your subscription and each can be scaled independently of the other. In practice if you have a lot of load, you will likely need to scale both - for architectural reasons.
Egress bandwidth for Mobile Service responses to the client is included in Mobile Services pricing. If you don't use SQL in the same data center, you may incur separate bandwidth charges. Although for latency reasons, we strongly recommend using a database and Mobile Service in the same data center which also eliminates egress costs for Mobile Service - SQL interaction.
You can purchase 1-6 units of Basic tier of Mobile Services. Each unit provides 1.5M API calls per month. So if you buy 2 Basic units, you will get 3M API calls per month and so on.
Thanks.
Dinesh Kulkarni
(Program Manager, Windows Azure)
Related
I am developing a Xamarin mobile app that requires a central cloud data storage (so a database). I also need an app service to host an API to interface with the database. I have been leaning towards Azure for both of these needs to keep everything in the Microsoft/Azure space and I am also familiar with it, but I am not sure if that would be overkill for my needs.
The data I need to store is only a few hundred records across a couple of tables and does not contain sensitive information. The app service would be quite small. I used their cost calculator with the cheapest options and that came out to only about $7/month for a small database and they have a Free Tier for the app service, although I have read that it is very slow, not sure to what extent though for the simple use case I have for it. This is very reasonable unless I have to upgrade to the Basic Tier App Service which jumps up to $70/month, that becomes a bit more than what I am looking to spend for this.
Wondering if folks know if the Free Tier of the Azure App Service would be impractically slow to host an API. It is listed as using Shared Cores, 1 GB RAM, and 1GB of storage. Also open to suggestions for other options that play well with .NET. Thanks!
I run several web services between AWS and Azure. Depending on how you are planning to write your App Service you can go with Azure VM Standard B1s and they will fall under FREE tier usage. Else around $10 per month.
You can run an embedded DB like SQL Lite with ASP.net. I use Spring Boot and works well.
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
I am planning to use Azure Mobile Services for the mobile app I am planning to develop. Its a bit of social kind of app. (I am expecting a lot of data - relations and storage(pics etc. ). For the app, I wish to use Azure Mobile Services for easily adding oAuth authentication for my app, Mobile services also provide other useful features like granular control to data access, push notifications etc.
I plan to use Azure SQL for hierarchical data and Azure Storage for images etc. So for my data service API, writing custom API in Mobile service seem to be the natural way.
But I am bit apprehensive about developing my data service API in Mobile Services; when I think what if my data grows huge, somehow I have doubts will Mobile services API be able to handle huge data, thick and fast flying data requests.
(The size of data I am looking at is - on an average each user may add 'one' post of lets say 1000 words and 3 picture files on an average, not sure how many users, but users will be worldwide)
Does someone has any experience with performance/scalability- elasticity of Custom WepAPI? If you can kindly share your experiences/knowledge in this regard, I'll really appreciate
Azure Mobile Services does provide scaling... This means getting into the paid services, for example: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/mobile-services/
You can also scale out the SQL database used in your mobile services. For some detail: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj193178.aspx
If you think even that might be an issue, I'd recommend wrapping the use of the services so you can swap them out easily.
I have recently been looking at Azure as a hosting platform for a number of small asp.net websites with MSSql database back-ends. I currently use a non-microsoft host that charges a fixed amount each month.
The Azure demos and webinars that I have seen are very seductive.
The problem I have is that I need some predictability on costs so that I can charge my clients appropriately. I've run thru a number of pricing calculators but have gotten a wide mix of results. In the real world what could I expect?
The sites would be low traffic (<100 unique visits a day).
My biggest fear is that I would open the management dashboard some day and see a bill that is far bigger then what I quoted a client.
Anyone have experience with Azure, and could give me some insight into their experiences?
As an example: I currently have 6 small sites that I have under my reseller account at a hosting service. I pay ~$35.00/month for all the space I need, including SQL, and bandwidth.
Let me share my thoughts on this.
Before looking at costs, I think what you need to evaluate if a cloud platform is a right platform for your applications. The picture below summarizes some of the common application patterns:
2 biggest benefits (at least to me) that you get out of any cloud platform is elasticity and pay-per-use pricing model. Generally speaking for low volume sites, cloud is generally costlier than other hosting providers. The questions you may want to ask yourself are:
Do my applications need elasticity as far as resource consumption is concerned? Or in other words, will there be a scenario where you would need 1 server for a week and then 10 servers for next week and then 1 server again week after that and things like that.
Am I willing to pay some extra even if my resources are under utilized? Or in other words, will you be happy to host a site in a single VM even if with a hosting company you can host 10 sites in a similar sized VM?
Will there be any scenarios where I have to handle predictable/unpredictable bursting in traffic?
If the answer is No to any of these questions, then IMHO Windows Azure may not be a right platform for you to host your applications.
There may be some components of Windows Azure which you can use - Storage for example where you don't have to worry about running out of disk space ever or Mobile Services so that you don't have to worry about building a backend for any mobile applications you may develop.
We have our own application that stores contacts in an SQL database. What all is involved in getting up and running in the cloud so that each user of the application can have his own, private list of contacts, which will be synced with both his computer and his phone?
I am trying to get a feeling for what Azure might cost in this regard, but I am finding more abstract talk than I am concrete scenarios.
Let's say there are 1,000 users, and each user has 1,000 contacts that he keeps in his contacts book. No user can see the contacts set up by any other user. Syncing should occur any time the user changes his contact information.
Thanks.
While the Windows Azure Cloud Platform is not intended to compete directly with consumer-oriented services such as Dropbox, it is certainly intended as a platform for building applications that do that. So your particular use case is a good one for Windows Azure: creating a service for keeping contacts in sync, scalable across many users, scalable in the amount of data it holds, and so forth.
Making your solution is multi-tenant friendly (per comment from #BrentDaCodeMonkey) is key to cost-efficiency. Your data needs are for 1K users x 1K contacts/user = 1M contacts. If each contact is approx 1KB then we are talking about approx 1GB of storage.
Checking out the pricing calculator, the at-rest storage cost is $9.99/month for a Windows Azure SQL Database instance for 1GB (then $13.99 if you go up to 2GB, etc. - refer to calculator for add'l projections and current pricing).
Then you have data transmission (Bandwidth) charges. Though since the pricing calculator says "The first 5 GB of outbound data transfers per billing month are also free" you probably won't have any costs with current users, assuming moderate smarts in the sync.
This does not include the costs of your application. What is your application, how does it run, etc? Assuming there is a client-side component, (typically) this component cannot be trusted to have the database connection. This would therefore require a server-side component running that could serve as a gatekeeper for the database. (You also, usually, don't expose the database to all IP addresses - another motivation for channeling data through a server-side component.) This component will also cost money to operate. The costs are also in the pricing calculator - but if you chose to use a Windows Azure Web Site that could be free. An excellent approach might be the nifty ASP.NET Web API stack that has recently been released. Using the Web API, you can implement a nice REST API that your client application can access securely. Windows Azure Web Sites can host Web API endpoints. Check out the "reserved instance" capability too.
I would start out with Windows Azure Web Sites, but as my service grew in complexity/sophistication, check out the Windows Azure Cloud Service (as a more advance approach to building server-side components).