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.
Related
Background
Our company designs and hosts websites for approx. 500 clients, each client has one website. Each website is built on ASP.net. Our current hosting infrastructure is built on hypervisors with virtual machines running Windows. We have 3 virtual machines all running the same spec (8 cores, 24 GB RAM). The 500 client sites are split over these three web servers, there is no load balancing or fault tolerance – the website exists in only one location.
Therefore, as we accumulate clients each web server’s site count increases. When we max out each server, we bring another one online and start again, then once that one is full we spin another VM up etc.
Goal
We would like to move (eventually) our sites over to Azure, however we do not want to replicate our current set up on Azure, instead we would like to move each website over to Azure Web app instead to take advantage of scaling.
We would also like more fine-grained control over our costs when bringing online additional sites. Currently, we bring online a VM and costs us X (for an empty server), it may take us 3 months to fill this. We would like to steadily add to our hosting hosts, not in big steps.
My question
I have investigated for many days on this and cannot find a tutorial or guide on what the ideal set up looks like on Azure Web apps when hosting 100’s of websites. Almost all tutorials assume you only ever going to have one website, so there is a 1:1 relationship between a site and the underlying resource. They never talk about how you should organise your apps into App Service Plans etc.
I understand the concept of adding a website, choosing the appropriate pricing tier and setting the scale settings, what I do not understand is why people online talk about scaling out Azure Apps – surely if an ASP.net websites consumes a certain amount of RAM on a system, by bringing online another VM all you are doing is immediately consuming that amount of RAM again on another system. So scaling out in this sense is to ONLY improve availability – is this correct?
If someone is able to provide some of their own experiences when dealing with a lot of websites on Azure (even better if they own a web design company who hosts on Azure) it would be very much appreciated.
Think of AppService plan as a VM or pool of VMs (in case you run multiple instances) that runs the same applications simultaneously and share the same data disc. If you scale out, you add a new VM to the pool, if you scale up, you change the size of VMs (actually they aren't VMs, but from the user's point of view it is simmilar).
So basically in case like yours, where you run many applications (potentially) smaller applications, scaling up/down establishes the baseline - how many websites you can run, how many applications you can fit in the memory. And then scaling out gives your better reliability and more CPU power that helps you to cope with high traffic.
Our company is much smaller than yours, we host dozens of websites not hundreds. But there are some points that our experience have taught us:
Use at least S2 instances that have 2 cores, with S1 instances a single app can easily degrade performance of other apps in the same AppService plan
Use TrafficManager. If a need arises (e.g. an outage of the service in your region), you can easily move to another region
Split webistes between more smaller AppService plans and collocate applications with the similar usage patterns to the AppService plans. That way you can run one instance, when the traffic is low and spin up new instances when the traffic spikes up.
You are correct that in all pricing tiers (except free and shared) web apps are scaled to all machines in an app service plan. This is an availability feature from the perspective of a web app. Scaling an app service plan from 1 to 2 machines(or auto-scaling) essentially provisions the same web app on all the machines. This of course is no good for your situation, but all is not lost. Generally, the unit of scaling is the app service plan. You could break down web apps into buckets of app service plans. Say first 100+ web apps in AppServicePlan1, then roll over to the next 100+ in AppServicePlan2. The downside is that you will have to manage tracking what app service plan to place the next web app in.
Looking into it I came to find out that a 1 role of 1 small compute Cloud Service is almost 60% more expensive as the same 1 small "vitual machine"...
So why should i choose to use cloud service over virtual machine?
Searching the web I came across a lot articles about this including this article but none were clear enough for me... the comparison in the last one is plain useless in my opnion...
Is there a "perk" that i don't know about or is not being considered? something to justify the "extra-charge" for cloud service... Does a code running on cloud service perform better than running on a virtual machine (maybe because there's less overhead)? anything?
I think virtual machine would be used when we need to migrate our application to the cloud and make it 'just work'. We don't need many additional effort to move our legacy code to azure if using virtual machine. But it doesn't provide the rich PaaS features comparing with cloud service such as automatically deployment, automatically update, load balance, etc.
So if we have a legacy system and we wanted to quick move to azure, then we can choose virtual machine. But if we need to manage bunch of machines, cloud service would helps us a lot and make us focus on the business logic.
I am totally new to cloud services, and using Windows Azure, I need a web server and a database server, each with 16gb of RAM. However, the extra large windows virtual machines only have 14gb of RAM. How would I go about adding 2gb of RAM to each of these servers, or do I need to do something else, such as incorporate a SQL database? I don't need to know the specifics of installation, all I need to know right now is what needs to be paid for, as I am just trying to figure out the price for everything. Thank you.
The Extra Large (XL) VM size provides 14GB available RAM. This applies to both Virtual Machines (IaaS) and web/worker roles (PaaS). There are no other VM sizes that provide more RAM than that. There's nothing you can do to add 2 extra GB.
UPDATE April 16, 2013: There are now two new sizes: 28GB/4-core and 56GB-8-core, available to Virtual Machines (not for Cloud Services e.g. web & worker roles). Announcement here. There's also a new SharePoint template in the Virtual Machine image gallery (since you mentioned using SharePoint) as well as a SQL Server template.
UPDATE APRIL 30, 2013: The new 28GB/56GB sizes are now available with Cloud Services, coincident with the release of Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET. Details here.
Just to add a bit, regarding web servers: Unlike on-premises servers where it's typically economical to buy the largest machine possible, it's better in Windows Azure to go with smaller VMs and have more of them. So, for a web server, go with the smallest VM size that would still run your software. Then, to handle additional traffic, scale to more web instances. As traffic ebbs, reduce the instance count. Load will be distributed amongst all of of the web servers (which are stateless - no user affinity to a specific instance).
I run my own uk based hosting and web design company.
We have about 10 physical servers in a DC in the UK and host about 300 or so web sites, email servers and web applications. They are all on a windows server platform with a few linux VM's.
I now have a Windows Azure account, I have set up a medium windows 2008 server within my azure account and want to start using it to maybe host and migrate some of my web sites and services onto my azure account and new server. With the view that maybe I could move ALL my services over and get rid of the need for any of my physical servers in the DC.
My question that I am still really struggling with how much this will really cost me on an ongoing basis.
The billing area, doesnt really tell me much as it simply shows my bill as £0.00. It shows my usage but I am really struggling to compare the resources I am currently using compared to how its billed in azure? It doesnt even show me what it would have cost me if I werent ona trial.
I dont want to move web hosted sites over if its going to cost me more than hosting in my current DC.
I was thinking of moving many sites onto the new server i have set up as its a better spec than a few of my current servers, so would see a big benefit, I even considered setting up a much larger Server in my Azure account but again unsure as to the real cost of that box its hard to compare.
Do I simply need to look at the calculator and select the number of servers i wil deploy, select how much storage I need and bandwidth? Or do I need to look at the items in the billing area as well - such as:
Compute units,Storage Transactions,Data Transfer Out,Data Transfer In
When I set up the server it didnt ask me for how much storage I wanted it just set it up with about 150GB avaialble in the actual server.
Any advice as I really see this as something i want to use over the next 12 months, but not if once i have finally migrated stuff its going to cost me more than my normal hosting and i have to move stuff all back at the end of the 12 months.
Cheers
Because you're using Windows Azure Virtual Machines, you should first use the virtual machine pricing calculator. This calculator only displays the costs that are relevant for your scenario except for the storage transaction cost. Here is a breakdown of the costs you'll have to consider:
Virtual Machines
The Virtual Machine cost appears on the bill as compute units. Throughout the Windows Azure Virtual Machine preview, the cost per core per hour is $0.08. Once VMs reach general availability, the cost will be $0.115 per core per hour for Windows VMs and $0.085 for Linux VMs. Using the calculator, you can see that a medium instance uses two cores and will therefore be billed at $0.16 per hour during the preview period. You will have to use your best judgement to determine how many virtual machines you'll need and how large they should be.
Storage
You will have to pay for the data actually used within your VHDs. Let's assume you have one virtual machine with one VHD attached. If the size of the VHD 200GB, but only 100GB is used, you will have to pay for 100GB per month.
Bandwidth
Microsoft now only charges for egress data transfers (data going out of the data center). With this pricing change, the Data Transfer In section of the billing area will always be 0.00. Hopefully, you already have a good idea about your current outbound data usage. If so, you can calculate your bandwidth cost by simply moving the bandwidth slider to the correct spot.
Storage Transactions
If you scroll down to the Transactions section of this blog post, you'll see how storage transactions are counted. Basically, you count one transaction per write operation and possibly one transaction per read operation depending if the data is cached or not. The cost of storage transactions are negligible because you only have to pay one cent per 100,000 transactions. That's why storage transactions are left out of the calculator.
HTH
To answer such question in an input box has limitation to express in details. The cost calculator is there to give you an estimate of upper limit about what the cost will be if your usage are under selected limit. Based on my personal experiences if you choose higher limits of usage and keep the usages within your forecast limits, there will be no hidden charges. But the reality could be far different because you may not estimate the usages correctly at first and this could change the cost later.
For moving a traditional web hosting solution to Windows Azure, latest release of Windows Azure Virtual Machine is best fit as this requires minimum migration complexity. So the VM size you will choose will have fixed resources (compute, local storage, network bandwidth, disk I/O etc) and the cost will be fixed as long as you are under limit so there will not be unseen charges.
Windows Azure Storage is pay as you go (ranges ~$0.012/GB depend on usage limit) and there is no limit. When moving from traditions web hosting to Cloud environment, due to application architecture design, I have seen less Cloud storage usage and more VM storage so it may not cost a lot.
The place you will see cost variation is data egress/ingress and it is difficult to forecast as it is all depend on application usage, so this is something you will have to account as variable cost.
You can also contact Windows Azure Virtual Machine Forum where dedicated Windows Azure Virtual Machine resources are available to answer your such questions.
Finally One thing I would also add that Windows Azure Virtual Machines are still in preview mode so it would be best to bring some of your business to Windows Azure VM as trial and testing purpose because now matter what you think you may encounter problems (because it is preview release) and this could case service disruption.
I'm considering to join the Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special, but I'm a little bit afraid of losing money with it. I don't wanna develop any fancy large scale application, I want to join just to learn Azure and do my experiments, what should I be afraid of?
In the transference, it says: "Data Transfers (per region)", what does that mean?
Can I put limits to stop the app if it goes over this plan in order to avoid get charged?
Can it be "pre pay" instead "bill pay"?
Would it be enough for a blog?
Any experiencie so far?
Kind regards.
As ligget pointed out, Azure isn't cost affect as a host for an application that can be easily deployed to a traditional shared hosting provider. Azure's target market are those that want dedicated resources without the need to micro-manage the infrasture and the capability to easily scale up/down based on demand.
That said, here's the answers to the questions you posted:
Data Transfers are based on bandwidth in and out of the hosting data center. bandwidth for communication occuring within components (SQL Azure, Windows Azure, Azure Storage, etc...) in the same datacenter are not billable.
Your usage is not currently capped when the free quotas are used up. However, you will recieved warning emails when those items approach their usage threadsholds.
There is the option to pay your subscription using a PO, but the minimum threshold for most of these operations is $500/month. So as a hobbyist, its unlikely you're wanting that route.
The introductory special does not provide enough resources for hosting a 24x7 personal blog. That level includes only 25hrs of compute resources. Each hour a single instance of your application is deployed will count against this, even if the application received no traffic. Think of it like renting office space. You still pay rent on the office even if there are no customers there.
All this said, there's still much to be learned with the introductory special. The azure development tools allows you to work with Windows Azure and Azure storage locally and get a feel for how they work. The introductory special then lets you deploy those solutions so you can see what works and what doesn't (not everything that works locally works hosted).
I would recommend you host your blog somewhere else - it's a waste of resources running it on Azure and you'll find much cheaper options. A recently introduced extra small instance would be a better choice in this case, but AFAIK it is charged separately as of now, e.g. even when you have an MSDN subscription those extra small instance hours do not count towards free Azure hours that come with the subscription.
There is no pre-pay option I know of and it's not possible to stop the app automatically. It'll be running until the deployment is deleted (beware! even if suspended/stopped the deployment will continue to accrue charges). I believe you will be sent a notification shortly before reaching your free hours threshold.
Be aware that when launching more than 1 instance you are charged for every hour of every instance combined. This can happen for example when you have more than one role in your Azure project (1 web role + 1 worker role - a separate instance will be started for each role).
Data trasfer means your entire data trasfer: blobs/Table storage/queues (transfers between your hosted service and storage account inside the same data center are free) + whatever data is transfered in/out of your hosted application, e.g. when somebody visits your pages. When you create storage accounts and hosted services in Azure you will specify a region that will be hosting your account/app - hosting in Asia is slightly more expensive than in Europe/U.S.
Your best bet would be to contact Microsoft with these questions.