What guarantee does Microsoft give to providing long term support for Azure? If Microsoft was to shutdown Azure how long would they keep the Azure cloud up and running? Has anyone regretted using a SQL Azure feature as it harmed their ability to move off of SQL Azure?
OK. A few questions there. Some can really only be answered officially by Microsoft but I'll take a stab at providing at least some detail for you.
1. What guarantee does Microsoft give to providing long term support for Azure?
Microsoft commit to providing at least 12 months notice for any disruptive change. This is set out in their Online Services Support Lifecycle document. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/OSSLpolicy
2. If Microsoft was to shutdown Azure how long would they keep the Azure cloud up and running?
Per the above. I would consider that a disruptive change and expect them to provide a minimum of 12 months notice.
3. Has anyone regretted using a SQL Azure feature as it harmed their ability to move off of SQL Azure?
There are very few features that are only available in SQL Azure. IN terms of shipping features I can only think of Federations off the top of my head. It's a unique feature in that it's only somewhat interesting for on-premise deployments as you don't typically have elastic capacity on tap on premise and you can probably take other approaches such as a monolithic DB server + storage partitioning to solve your problems. In short I haven't had such regrets.
Related
There has been a previous question on this and the accepted answer was Azure Elastic Job agent. The problem I have is that the feature is in preview and it still lacks a lot of functionality like diagnostics and alerting. I also find it to be very unreliable as job get randomly cancelled because of service restarts.
Azure Automation Accounts also works, but it only has a execution/running time of 3 hours. So if your maintenance takes more than 3 hours, this is not an option.
I have previously developed my own application for doing this, but the maintenance and management of this can become a headache.
Another alternative could be to just leverage Azure Data Factory perhaps, but this is a route I have not yet followed.
So what are people actually using to do long running maintenance against Azure SQL Databases that has enough diagnostic information in case something goes wrong and has at least some level of alerting?
PS: The database I need to do maintenance on is not small.
I found that with VS2017 it is available 50$/per month Azure credit. I have never worked with Azure before, but have a little experience with CloudFoundry. It seems a good chance for me to try Azure now. So, my question is what I can obtain with 50$/month? Is it enough for small ASP .NET Core web-site, database, some services into docker containers, just to play with these?
Thanks
Yes. You can play around these services.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/credit-for-visual-studio-subscribers/
Credit for use on a wide range of Azure services. Virtual Machines, Storage, SQL Databases, Containers, Cognitive Services, Functions, Data Lake, and much more.
Azure dev/test pricing helps your credit last longer.
Exclusive access to Windows 10 virtual machine images.
Easy sign-up. No credit card required.
No surprises. A spending limit protects you from overage charges. You can remove the spending limit when you’re ready.
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
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.
Azure itself is imo PaaS and not IaaS. Do you agree?
MS gurantees an availability of 99% and a strong consistency. You can find MS SLAs here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sla
(three SLAs Uptime: http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/4889/unbenanntqt.png ) I can't find anyhing about how they are going to archive that. Do they do backups? If Yes: How do they manage consistency? According to the Cap theorem (http://camelcase.blogspot.com/2007/08/cap-theorem.html
) their claims are not realistic.
2.1 Do you know detailed technical stuff about the how they are going to realize the claims about consistency and availability?
On the MS page you'll find three SLAs .docs, one for SQL Azure, the second for Azure AppFabric/.Net Services and the third for Azure Compute&Storage.(Screenshot in 1.) How can one track whether SLAs are violated? Do they offer some sort of monitor, so I don't have to measure the uptime by myself?
1) Azure is a classical "Platform as a Service". I agree
2) 99% is not a very high availability. It means that Azure is allowed to be 3 full days down per year. The blog article you referenced is IMHO quite suboptimal. There is another one that explains the CAP theorem in more detail.
In answer to your first point, MS itself calls Azure the "Windows Azure Platform", so its status as PaaS seems self-evident.
In response to your question about backups in the second point, one of the main promises of cloud computing is to allow you to ignore the administration of the resources. They promise safe data, it's up to you as to whether you trust them, but if you want to know exactly how they implement it, you're missing the point of the cloud abstraction.
The third point is more interesting, but I would assume it's up to you to pay attention (write monitoring software?) to whether they live up to their SLAs.
"Will Microsoft add VM functionality to Windows Azure to expand the set of existing applications that can be run on it?
Yes, Microsoft will add Virtual Machine functionality to Windows Azure to expand the set of existing applications that can be run on it. This Virtual Machine deployment functionality will enable developers to run a wide range of Windows applications in Windows Azure, while taking full advantage of the built in automated service management." ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/faq/ )
thus MS is planning Azure to become IaaS.