SO I have been using the azure 3 month trial, to test out whether I want to use Microsoft Azure to host a project I am working on, however I have been very confused as I have run out of "Geo Redundant Storage" in the first month and I don't really understand why.
I have read this: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/ and the only thing I can make of it, is that it takes an average of how much storage you are using across a month, eg as long as I am using less then 35gb (for a 35gb limit) on average of storage space I am in the clear.
So under my Azure Subscriptsions 'STORAGE (GB/MONTH) - GEO REDUNDANT' it says '101.027% of 35 GB/month' (so I have reached my cap).
But I don't understand why this would be happening, all I have is a simple server with a nodejs web application and a redis database (pretty much an empty at the moment), all running on an ubuntu VM, and as I can't login and check storage now because it is disabled, but I am pretty sure it is nowhere even near 35gb total storage and never has been?
I am hoping someone can explain how the azure storage is charged or if I have missed something silly?
Edit: It just hit me that it could be redis, doing crazy things with IO? not sure if this is possible, but if it is, would I be better to use locally redundant storage and pay for locally redundant storage transactions?
Edit 2: On my graph it says I had been using 1.96gb / day. So that means its not the total harddrive space per month, is it harddrive space / day? (using 2gbs of data probably sounds about right with the OS included, if this is the case, that means they give you less then 2gb space on the trial, seems minute??)
This caused due to the limitation on the geo redundant storage I have faced the same issue to fix this just disable geo redundant storage from the Windows Azure preview portal.
Open the Windows Azure preview portal.
Select Storage left.
The select your storage.
Click Configure on the top.
Turn off geo-replication.
I hope this will help.
This is probably caused by the image of your Ubuntum VM. If you read the pricing details (the link in your question) you'll see this:
Compute hours do not include any Windows Azure Storage costs
associated with the image running in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. These costs are billed separately.
How large was the VM you created?
Related
I am new to Azure and started a new free trial account. As one of the first things to try, I decided to create a VM. As I followed steps in Azure portal, I was stuck when it came to 'Select Size', because all of them are greyed out; and per my understanding, the field is required.
I was using the default region (USEast), and I selected no AZ and 'Ubuntu 18.04 LTS' as the image the VM is based upon.
I googled this issue on the internet. And I have done the following to rectify the issue but no luck:
switched to use different PC with different IP (as some suggested)
"clear All filter' in Select Size window and specified VM size
selected different VM images
ensured there is a credit attached to my subscription (as some suggested)
ensured there is no resources created to avoid hit the quotas (as some suggested)
This is something very basic, and it should've worked out-of-the-box. I am disappointed with the experience. But I want to give it the benefit of doubt and will continue to try out Azure if this issue is resolved. Maybe something very simple that I might've missed on my side.
Thank you so much for the help in advance.
Due to COVID-19 most of the enterprise user working from home and the usage of Azure and Microsoft service has increased a lot. Microsoft says that there has been a colossal 775 percent increase in usage of its cloud services.
All that Azure usage appears to have led to users in many regions "observing deployments for some compute resource types in these regions drop below our typical 99.99 per cent success rates". Which goes a long way towards explaining the inability to create resources as The Register revealed last week.
Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements.
Try to change your deployment region.
Most of the VM's we are unable to create. This is due to heavy toll on the resources.
You can read more here : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/our-commitment-to-customers-and-microsoft-cloud-services-continuity/
For time being seems like we have to opt for some other size.
I am new to Azure and started a new free trial account. As one of the first things to try, I decided to create a VM. As I followed steps in Azure portal, I was stuck when it came to 'Select Size', because all of them are greyed out; and per my understanding, the field is required.
I was using the default region (USEast), and I selected no AZ and 'Ubuntu 18.04 LTS' as the image the VM is based upon.
I googled this issue on the internet. And I have done the following to rectify the issue but no luck:
switched to use different PC with different IP (as some suggested)
"clear All filter' in Select Size window and specified VM size
selected different VM images
ensured there is a credit attached to my subscription (as some suggested)
ensured there is no resources created to avoid hit the quotas (as some suggested)
This is something very basic, and it should've worked out-of-the-box. I am disappointed with the experience. But I want to give it the benefit of doubt and will continue to try out Azure if this issue is resolved. Maybe something very simple that I might've missed on my side.
Thank you so much for the help in advance.
Due to COVID-19 most of the enterprise user working from home and the usage of Azure and Microsoft service has increased a lot. Microsoft says that there has been a colossal 775 percent increase in usage of its cloud services.
All that Azure usage appears to have led to users in many regions "observing deployments for some compute resource types in these regions drop below our typical 99.99 per cent success rates". Which goes a long way towards explaining the inability to create resources as The Register revealed last week.
Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements.
Try to change your deployment region.
Most of the VM's we are unable to create. This is due to heavy toll on the resources.
You can read more here : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/our-commitment-to-customers-and-microsoft-cloud-services-continuity/
For time being seems like we have to opt for some other size.
I have been doing some test and realized that when I stop a VM, I get a red warning saying that it still generates charges.
But on which basis ?
Furthermore, on some VM I created, the system without any reason starts fooling and reach a 98% CPU during several hours with no way to stop it or to connect with RDP. VM was totally dead and it's only after several hours that the stop command from the control panel succeeded.
Hope I will not been charged for this ? Who is able to decide if my VM is OK or fooling like a crazy horse ?
Moreover, is there any software allowing to transfer my VMs from Azure to my local system, and delete them on Azure to stop any charge ? for a simple backup with possibility to restore/restart them later ? Or to run them in my own hyper-V ?
Best regards
CS
Even if your VM is stopped, you still have resources that have been reserved for your VM (think of storage space, memory, CPU, ...) and these can't be 'sold' to anyone else. Deleting the VM will free these resoures and you'll no longer be charged.
Remember that Virtual Machines are still in preview, meaning things can go bad sometimes. And yes you'll be charged for this, but during the preview you get a 33% discount (more info here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/).
The persistent disks of your VMs are stored in a storage account as page blobs. Using tools like Azure Storage Explorer, CloudXplorer, CloudBerry, ... you can download these VHD files and simply mount them in Hyper-V (You'll need to remember that you'll need a license if you want to run the machine on-premises).
Note that, if you simply delete the VM the disks won't be deleted (they will stay in your storage account). In that case you only pay for storage (which is very cheap).
The price of VM depends on their size and nature (prenium or not).
Also you have to pay for the storage, but a 120GB disks is not billed fully, only effectively used space is.
You can use IaaS Managament Studio to easily calculate how much your blob disk cost, and see links to pricing pages of azure.
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.