When will Windows Azure be justified?

I had a great conversation with Frans Bouma on Twitter, and he asked me a series of questions about the price of the cloud, but it was hard to answer it within 140 words. The pricing of the cloud is not very clear and difficult to figure out, because it's a complicated wife.

Frans wants to transfer the site of their products to Microsoft and computing platform Azure, but he thinks it's too expensive for a website. That's a good question.

This is my own question and answer about azure sites and pricing, and I often get emails from people about similar puzzles, so I write them out, and if you're going to email me questions later (although I still have a lot of keystrokes) Translator Note: This comes from the author's interesting test on a website called keysleft.com "), and I will show you this article.

Statement: This is my own writing, not marketing. I'm sure they'll call me as soon as they see this article. But that doesn't make it untrue.

I wasn't a fan of Azure until last June. Now all my sites are running in the cloud, except for this blog site (which has been running on OrcsWeb for years).

Now, I have 13 sites, two virtual machines (one Linux and one Windows) running on Azure. 11 sites run on a cloud virtual machine located in the western United States, and two other sites in other data centers.

Q: I have a small website running on a custom field and I pay 5 dollars a month for the fee. Do I need to transfer it to azure?

A: Maybe not. When you can get at least 10 free sites from a data center in the cloud (more than 10 strictly), if you want a custom field to point to it, you need at least a "shared" (multi-tenant, meaning you are going to get a CPU) site, which is 9.68 dollars for one months and has been running. If 9.68 dollars is a luxury for you, stick with your current 5-dollar one-month mainframe. However, although you have only one shared site but they use the same management tools and deployment subsystems, it depends on the value you use. Free site development and testing is good, you can try new concepts, and then slowly began to spend money on it.

If you want to take a few bucks for one months, I don't think it's fair to simply go compare azure and a random 4.99-dollar PHP host. Because you have the command line management tools, a lot of deployment options, flexible scale, in a few minutes to be able to handle everything you want, and so on.

Q: If I pay 10 dollars a month without any problems, what can I get from a shared site?

A: Whether it's 1 or 500 sites, all sites are able to get git deployed (and redeployed, also known as the "divine button"), as well as from Visual Studio and TFS deployments. Everyone has got the same infrastructure and Control Panel. You can also extend to up to 6 shared instances if you need to.

Each instance is a copy of your code running on a different shared server, using the appropriate CPU and memory quotas. We chose to limit the number of instances to 6 because more than 6 instances cost more than a standard server. In shared mode, you can add sites to 100 single data centers, with up to 6 instances per site.

Q: What if I run my site on my own virtual machine instead of using a hosted Web site?

A: If you know what you're doing, you can run your site in a virtual machine, but you need to set up your own IIS and manage this site. You need to keep updating the virtual machine and configure it as you want it to. However, you can also get a-particularly small VM, 15 dollars a month, with 768MB memory, which is also good. I run a MySQL instance on top and an Apache PHP.

Q: When should I use a virtual machine instead of a Web site?

A. It boils down to what you want to manage. If you're good at managing VMS, you want to be more flexible, you can do that. If you want the operating system to build and update automatically, and include automatic deployment options and scaling, then use the site.

Q: Free, shared and standard sites. What's the difference?

A: Free means it is free, no uptime guarantee, it is low priority. I put demos, testing and development on this free platform. I also run some services unrelated to the site, because no one can see it. You are not able to use custom fields or free SSL on the above.

Sharing means you get some computers and a lot of people are sharing this computer with you. Most small Web sites (<20,000 PV) can work properly in this shared environment.

Standard, often referred to as reserved. You have your own virtual machine and can run asp.net,node.js,php etc. (Standard mode and free mode can run things the same). You can use the quota from a single core, 1.75G of memory up to four cores and 7G of memory. I will run all my sites on a small instance of 1 standard modes. Even small, I still have nearly 2G of RAM, even if some of my site (such as hanselminutes) will use the cache, high load will use 100-300 megabytes of RAM, but I have never encountered any problems.

If you need more than one server to run your site, you can extend a standard server instance to 10, and if you need more than 10 server instances, you can contact technical support services and they will help you figure it out.

Here are the things about the cloud and azure itself. If you pack everything too loosely, it won't save you money.

You can use the Azure site to put 500 sites on one instance. This is not a typographical error. The more you invest, the more value you can get from the vm/standard example.

Tip: Pack together as much as possible. Be aware that if you are running more than 8 sites on azure, you need to move them to standard/retention mode. It will be cheaper. Also, if you have a bunch of sites in a data center (like me, I have more than 10 sites in the western United States), you want to put them all on the same VM. If you can keep all the sites open and effectively serve, you can easily turn existing instances into "free." "Because you paid for this instance, despite using it."

Q: Are you crazy, what kind of website can provide the value, also can pack so small?

A: There are a lot of small sites, such as my podcast, one months have to do tens of thousands of or even hundreds of thousands of of clicks. If you work on a small web site with a data broker, when you pack about 6 to 8 sites, you can start saving a lot of money.

This is Azure's pricing calculator. In my opinion, it is foolish to share more than 8 sites in a shared mode. Any more than 8 shared sites is a waste of money.

As you can see, sharing 8 is costing 77 dollars? It's a lot of money to me. I'm going to stick to my 5 dollar mainframe. If you can, you should probably pack up 8 sites and deploy them to a 5 dollar machine.

However, when you move to standard mode, everything gets cheaper. Once you have 1 standard Web virtual machines, you can put a lot of stuff on it.

Again, each site is completely separate, isolated, and individually deployed and managed, but they share your same virtual machine. The value of it is that you never have to think about VM management. It always keeps up to date, monitors malware, fixes patches to the operating system, and handles everything. Web sites run on virtual machines, and you interact with FTP,GIT deployments or MS deployments. You can run Asp.net,php,python and Node.js,python,hell, the classic ASP, as long as you want.

Your payment method is based on time, 0.10 dollars per hour. If it runs for one months, it's 74.40 dollars. Run all of my Web sites on this VM. It's actually a bit big and I might just as well use a "mini virtual machine" that would suffice if they would do a mini virtual machine (the Microsoft team told me that this product was coming soon). Note that I will be charged 0.10 dollars per hour even if my site has no traffic, I am essentially paying the "leased" CPU from the cloud.

Q: When do I adjust size and how?

A: I have talked to a lot of clients, but the most talked about is the problem of too much traffic on the public website. What they need is the ability to expand, if the site becomes more and more famous. You can scale up (for example, a larger instance) or expand outward (more instances).

You can set up your website automatically to expand and shrink if your site has hacker news or your application becomes popular. The cloud will add (and delete) instances to ensure that the request can be processed. It will never be higher or lower than the settings you choose.

This is also a way to control costs. In this screenshot I will never have more than 3 instances, so if it is attacked, my site may be down, but I can decide how much it expands. I want to balance cost and usability. I can change my settings arbitrarily, even if I want to scale from 1 small VMS to 10 large VMS, from 1 to 40 cores.

Q: Will cloud sites run uninterrupted, 24/7?

A: If you have a bunch of sites in a standard virtual machine, the VM will run and you will need to pay for this VM. If a Web site is not used for several hours, it will be put into sleep, freeing up resources for other sites on the same virtual machine. If you're worried about Web site warm-up slow, you can use the monitoring function settings so that it not only ensures that the site has been started, but also keeps them in a warm state.

Q: I have an MSDN subscription, what can I get from it?

Connecting to your MSDN and Azure accounts, you can get 150 dollars a month for Azure's credit limit, so you have two virtual machines running free for one months.