I believe that there's no easy way, but it doesn't hurt ask for you guys.
Is there a way to move services (websites, cloudaps, etc) between datacenters without re-create and re-deploy them?
For example: I have a website in West US and I want to move to Europe.
(by the way I suggest this to azure team and I hope you can vote for it http://feedback.windowsazure.com/forums/34192-general-feedback-/suggestions/5071811-move-services-from-datacenters)
As Gaurav suggested, you can try to put in a support ticket with Microsoft. I'm assuming you'll need a support plan though in order to get that through, since this isn't really a billing related issue.
Other than going that route, there is nothing today that will move services (websites, cloud services, etc.) from one datacenter to another.
Related
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/
We have got an application running fine on On premises and plan to move it to IaaS on Ms Azure, do we need to make any changes to it or will it work as is?
I agree with the above post. You have not detailed if you are using Virtual Machines (Sql server or going to use Azure SQL). You will have to make choices about fail-over and geo redundancy, cloud services, etc. There are IP restrictions that may affect you (I don't know since I am not sure what you are moving). More than anything, I always warn people about the cost, it is difficult to understand. Here is an article series I wrote on Azure & SharePoint, you can skip the SharePoint stuff but the cost/limitation/VMs and such would still apply.
http://www.matthewjbailey.com/sharepoint-azure-guide/
We've managed a lift-and-shift of an on-premise Windows app into Azure, but I wouldn't say it's been without its pain. The above comments definitely ring true; you need to provide a bit more of an overview of what the current application does so that people can help answer your question.
In my experience, the only stumbling blocks to moving on-premise into Azure are:
Hardware requirements; i.e. if your application requires some specific hardware
Cost: It's not always cheaper to move large systems into Azure
Licensing: Make sure that your existing licensing is compatible with a cloud system which you don't control
Is it possible to change a Cloud Service region (i.e: move from East US to West US)?
I don't see an option from the management console to do it or maybe I did not dig deep enough.
I would like to do it since I have my database in one region different to my application's and I guess it could decrease performance.
Thanks,
No, there is no way to change Cloud Service region. You have to create new Cloud Service in desired region and redeploy there. It becomes more complicated when you also have Storage accounts with data which you have to move. For this you could probably use Red Gate's Cloud Services or other mature product.
And you are right about Database and performance. It is not only performance, but also costs savings. When your Database is in different geographic region all data that comes out of your database is basically Outbound (Egress) traffic, which is being charged per GB!
You can make your own script using Powershell that is a powerful tool and can help you a lot, including copying the data between regions directly (not passing by your computer). I am going to do that know.
I have got two database (SQL azure) in North America, I'm getting error that the applications can't Access to the server.
I didn't update the application or database, so I supose that there are a problem with sql azure service. How can I notify Microsoft of this problem?
To 'notify' Microsoft, you have very limited options.
They have their own support forums.
They have their own support ticketing system, that costs a pretty penny but is the fastest way to get their attention.
They have their dashboard, which in my own experience is terrible. It is not a true representation, ever. The updates are very very late.
You also have StackOverflow - but there will be little that we can advise on if there is a problem on the Azure infrastructure side of life.
To help aid in your Azure support woes, I would suggest you get an account with Pingdom and get MetricHubs for your subscription. These will help in showing what goes down, when, how often, and for how long. It can help show if the problem really is in your application or not.
I would also ensure you have diagnostics set up, and log everything you can.
Many many people forget or don't know about the transient error problems. Microsoft have a huge article on it, but it does trip people up a lot.
The Azure Management Portal should also be able to give you a quick summary of if your roles & instances are actually up, healthy and stable.
I'm just learning about Azure so forgive me for my naivety. I work for a federal government that would be very hesitant to have their applications and data hosted in another country. Could a local company offer "Azure" services? i.e. could software developers in a government department build their applications and deploy them to the Azure cloud, ensuring that their data stays within the country? Or would they have to look at a non-Microsoft cloud provider?
Data and Compute will reside in the datacenter you specify. Blobs, Tables and Queues are also backed up automatically to a paired data center:
San Antonio <--> Chicago
Dublin <--> Amsterdam
Hong Kong <--> Singapore
You can opt-out of cross-datacenter data backup if data sovereignty becomes an issue. Once opted-out, data would only be in the specified data center, and you'd need to handle DR on your own (by possibly backing up data to on-premises storage).
Aside from those 6 datacenters, Fujitsu runs a Windows Azure data center in Japan. See this press release for more info.
Yes, when you create your Azure service you can specify what region (of the country) it runs in.
I'm not sure if you know this, but the Federal CIO (Vivek Kundra) is really pushing hard for Agencies to move to the cloud. You might want to check out Info.Apps.Gov for guidelines on the Federal Cloud initiative and resources for what you can and can't do.
To answer your immediate question: No. Only MS hosts Azure to my knowledge. I do know that Amazon is bending over backwards however to accommodate Government clients and you can control which datacenters are used on that service. MS appears to have a similar capability per the other answer to this question.
As far as I can tell, these are the only locations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Services_Platform#Datacenters
If they're that concerned about data security though, they should deal directly with Microsoft, not buy Azure services that same way a client usually would. Microsoft may be able to arrange something depending on budget (but probably not).
Edit: What I'm basically saying is, Microsoft is not going to arbitrarily do special licensing. Meaning you either need a large enough budget to convince MS to build a data center in your country, or you need some other way of convincing MS to allow Azure services hosted in your country. Also, I hate to sound paranoid, but if you're worried about America seeing your data, you likely should avoid Ameican companies.
If there isn't a Windows Azure Data Centre in the relevant country, but you still want to use Azure, you'll need to look at a hybrid cloud model where data remains resident in a private cloud. However, in-flight data can still present complications for some organisations and Azure may not be the right answer in all cases.
If you like, I can talk about it some more using Chat. The company I work for specialises in just these cases and has the only production Windows Azure data centre that isn't owned by Microsoft (and isn't in the US). Probably best not go into further specifics here, though, for fear of my answer looking like pure spam!