Our company has until bought a lot VS Pro/Premium and Ultimate Licenses, and each includes a free Azure Account.
At the Azure Info day we have been told the best way would be to bundle them into one big account
(there is just too much overhead if every developer here would register that account on his own).
Do you know how to do this ?
Is there a special account manager we should contact ?
Thanks in advance,
Mathias Held
Each MSDN subscription has its own Windows Azure subscription with a given number of resources allocated per month. Those resources cannot be combined. For example, if you have 10 developers with MSDN Ultimate subscriptions, each with 1,500 Compute hours per month, you can NOT combine them into a single account with 15,000 Compute hours.
Regarding too much overhead: The task of enabling Windows Azure resources is incredibly simple. In fact, if you go to the new Windows Azure portal and sign in with the Live ID associated with your MSDN account, the portal will recognize that there's an associated Windows Azure subscription.
If your concern is that an individual dev won't have enough Windows Azure Compute resources monthly, this is more of an educational issue. At 1,500 monthly Compute hours (and Extra Small instances running at 1/3 Compute Hour), you have enough resources to run 2 Small instances 24x7 (or 6 Extra Small). The prudent advice is to delete all deployments when not in use (e.g. after work hours or between test deployments). This will give you much more breathing room and let you run much larger VM sizes without risk of going over allotted resources.
Related
I just activated my Visual Studio Professional with MSDN and it is telling me now that I have $200 to spend,
my question is:
is this will take $200 from my credit card after the month is over, or this is an offer, and can I use and rely on windows azure using these $200 monthly or this is a limited time offer and will expire after few months? if it is limited so I can't transfer my live websites on azure.
The information provided by #hhaggan is off a bit. If you read this page containing the benefits details for Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, you'll see the following:
For the first month after activation of your benefit, you receive $200
of Windows Azure credits. After the first month, you receive $50 of
Windows Azure credits every month
So it's not a continued $200 monthly.
I couldn't tell if you're intending to use your MSDN Azure benefit for dev/test or production. These Azure credits are for dev/test purposes, and not for production, as documented on the abovementioned web page. Under Use Rights:
Windows Azure MSDN benefit is intended for development and test
purposes. We reserve the right to suspend any instance (VM or cloud
service) that runs continuously for more than 120 hours or if we
determine that the instance is being used for production. Production
workloads must be run on regular subscriptions.
The MSDN Subscriber will have free of charge Windows Azure account that worth 200$ per month. it all depends on your usage, you can use all the resources in one day, one week or even with the best consumption use your resources for the whole month, however if you exceed the limit it will not charge you. the Credit card used here is mainly to provide a guaranteed identity. the offer should be for the whole year of subscription.
I hope this helps you let me know if you need anything else.
My 3 months trial account Windows Azure has already been disabled in 3 weeks. How's that possible? I had nothing on my project, just a simple Asp.Net web page.
I don't think anybody knew my page and made constant requests.
I can't find a statistics section on Management Portal to check what was my traffic...etc.
Does anybody know where I can check my Hosted Service's statistics?
Thanks
The trial provides 750 compute hours monthly. Once you deploy your app, the meter is ticking. That is, as long as something is deployed, it's a metered resource. Whether consuming 0% or 100% cpu/network/memory, you pay hourly.
Now: If you deployed a single Small instance for your asp.net site, you shouldn't have consumed 750 hours in 3 weeks. Is it possible you deployed with Medium instances? Or deployed with 2 Small instances? Do you have more than one Role in your deployment (since each would have at least one instance)?
One bit of advice I give, when doing dev work: at the end of the day, when you're not actively working on a project, delete the deployment (you can always re-deploy to the same place later). This helps save tremendously on consumed hours.
You aren't charged based on access to a hosted service (i.e. compute instance). As long as you have something deployed there, you are charged. No one can ever go to it and it still costs you money.
At the portal, you have to delete whatever hosted services you have there in order to preserve credits. For example if you had up both a Production and a Staging instance, they would charge you compute hours for both. You have to actually delete the instances in order to conserve compute hours on your bill.
As for stats, the only way you can get access stats that I know of is by using the azure diagnostics features. They used to have a lot more detail on their bills (in / out transfers, etc) but the bills are a lot shorter now.
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.
The main question is: do I have to pay for unused resources? For instance, Azure pricing calculator says approximately $30/month for XS box. This includes about 750 hours. What if I don't use them all? This is normal for early stage, while development is in progress.
This is just to make it clear if its cheaper to have a virtual hosting for development and beta-testing purposes.
Not exactly a programming question.
That said: Windows Azure Compute instances are metered by the hour, and metering happens when you have deployed instances (whether running or stopped). If you're doing dev work, deploy for an hour or two (or how long it takes you to test), then delete the deployment. Very easy to delete, very easy to redeploy. Just don't delete the actual hosted service definition (urlname.cloudapp.net, associated certificates, affinity group, etc.). Following this pattern, it's easy to test with 5-10 concurrent instances in a deployment throughout the month - just remember to delete the deployment after each test cycle.
#Bart is partially right about SQL Azure being billed for the month. It's actually amortized daily. This also means: If you set up a 5GB db and only have 99MB on a given day (or days), you're billed at the $4.999 monthly rate / # of days in month). That's about 17 cents daily if you stay under 100MB. And if you delete the db, you're no longer billed.
Same goes for Cache - the cost is amortized daily.
I'd look at the full pricing page here.
You do not have to pay for unused resources in SOME of the services.
In your example, if you deploy a website for 10 hours you will be billed for the 10 hours of usage. PLUS any transactions/bandwidth associated with it.
However, some the services do have a flat fee. For example, if you deploy a 5 gig DB to SQL Azure and u do not use it...u will be billed the monthly rate even if it just sits there.
Also your definition of "use it" needs to be clear. Azure will bill you, if you have ANYTHING deployed. Even if the VM is stopped, you are getting billed. Therefore, the best solution is to:
- monitor your usage (its updated multiple times per day)
- use a free trial, MSDN account or promotion to see what the charges will be
- call MIcrosoft...Azure is the hot thing now and they WILL give you a break on charges if they are within reason.
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.