Windows Azure fails with pricing model.

Posted on July 14th, 2009

Microsoft announced the pricing for their Azure services today. On the whole they are pretty close to industry standards with one big exception.

If you deploy an application, rather than charging for compute power directly, you’re being charged for having the deployment active per hour. At $0.12 per hour this means a single application  is costing you the same as your own, entire EC2 server with Amazon.

Sure you can have multiple roles in an application package but since upgrading the package takes all those roles offline they really have to be roles working together and not with separate concerns.

Unless I’m really missing something (always a possibility) this will never work for me or my clients. We’ve already begun the migration work to take existing .NET services that were built for Azure and will be migrating them to Ruby for cheaper deployment options.

I can’t really compare SQL services etc just yet but as usual, it looks like the Microsoft option is always going to be far more costly than alternatives. A real pity.

Tags: Azure
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Going live with Windows Azure

Posted on June 8th, 2009

So of course you’re only going to do this if you’re nuts … right? Remember that I never said I wasn’t!

Here is the application that I needed to host. In my mind a perfect candidate for a compute cloud. It is basically a second stage monitoring service. I have various services deployed in other data centers. If one fails or goes offline the server it is on will restart it. (Stage 1) – but what if the entire server is down? This is my second service, every few minutes it checks data in the cloud (AMZ) for last contact times from a bunch of services. If anything has checked in within 5 minutes … bamb! I get some critical email warnings.

The application consisted of a Worker Role that does the monitoring and then a Web Role. This is used to expose a REST API to my mobile applications so that status information can also be pulled at any time. Due to the 1 project limit currently on Azure I bundled these two roles into one package.

Deployment was a snap. Just upload the package and configuration files and it hits staging without issue. Azure allows a staging to production promotion which is great. I hit the promote and then run buttons and all was well – the service deployed and run without issue.

It has been running without any noticed downtime for a few days now. Today a service outside Azure happened to fail and I received my email, awesome. Some notes about Azure so far:

• The only errors always seem to be from the actual web admin tool. You get the usual MS generic error and you have just try again.
• On one occasion the application said it was promoted to production and running but the DNS for the Web Role failed to register.
• The web admin site is too slow.

That is all for now. Next I’ll be testing the data services! I love Amazon’s high speed de-normalized database so looking for something similar.

Tags: Azure, Deployment
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Watch your time zones on Windows Azure!

Posted on June 8th, 2009

So I deployed some code to Windows Azure and was initially surprised that it was running differently than what I had observed locally.

Turns out and once you think of it its a no brainer … my code was running in a different time zone. All my other services were in EST but this was PST. The solution in my case is to keep everything as GMT and then do any necessary calculations :)

You might wonder if this is documented anywhere. To be honest, I have no idea since most of the documentation has been very poor. The website for Azure has circular links that will drive you nuts and the local SDK docs are just focused more on the API and are too incomplete as well.

Update: Since posting I’ve been told all servers will be and are currently in GMT time. Cool!

Tags: Azure
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Deployment to Windows Azure

Posted on June 4th, 2009

Here goes my first real deployment. The first thing you’ll notice is that you no longer need an application id. It looks like that was there for live authentication and so it has been decoupled for those not needing it by default.

To deploy you just upload the application package and service configuration file. By the way, just right click your worker role project and pick Publish to generate your files. Once uploaded, you get this cool staging/production screen.

Once uploaded you can change the configuration xml via the browser which is great! I’m about the hit run and see what happens …

Staging worked perfectly. I can’t find a way to view logs so I’m going to promote it to production next. As a test the service emails me the logs, so I can see it all working.

The promotion seemed to work however I did get a system error from the website. I will say this – the site needs some work, it is pretty slow and bulky. Come on MS make it fly! :)

Tags: Azure
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Using Windows Azure with Amazon Simple DB

Posted on June 4th, 2009

I have a great real world example of something that needs to be run in the cloud. Currently I have 2 types of applications running. One type is a sentinel and the other is a listener. There are many of these running today across three data centers. I want to know when one of these services has stopped functioning correctly.

My test is going to be to build a worker role that can run in Azure, connect to Amazon’s Simple DB service and look for status information sent from these other services. This will show connectivity between two different cloud technologies and allow me to test the availability and notification services of Azure. For example, is this new worker goes offline – how do I get notified?

I’ll be using my SDB .NET Provider which I haven’t yet released to the public. It allows me to hide the implementation of the Simple DB code so I can switch it out as required. It includes all Amazon libraries as well as SQS and a .NET Membership provider.

Here is the initial code block.

We’ll write an object to Amazon and then see if we can fetch it. This is making use of Amazon’s web services. I specifically didn’t put any exception handling around this start method because I want to see what the Azure system does when something goes wrong. The provider was configured using an app.config file.

When I tried to run – problem:

System.Security.SecurityException Message=Request for ConfigurationPermission failed while attempting to access configuration section at …. – lucky for me controlling the section permissions can be done in the config file. I set my section to requirePermission=false.

I don’t seem to be able to use a config file to setup the provider so I’m going to cheat for now and setup a stand alone instance without any config files and we’ll see how that does :) I did notice I’m probably supposed to put all the required config xml in the service configuration file so I’ll do that next time.

Here is a screenshot of the output, works like a charm. A test object was written and retrieved from Amazon Simple DB.

A couple notes. If you rename your worker role don’t forget to update your service definition file and configuration file. There does appear to be a problem with the developer fabric. I write information event entries to the log and they were not showing up but I knew the role was running. After restarting the fabric the messages started to appear again so I’ll see if I can report that as an issue. As an FYI I used a System Timer object to trigger my code, works great too.

In my next post, I’ll try deploy this to the real cloud :)

Tags: Amazon, Azure
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First Azure Worker Role

Posted on June 1st, 2009

Here are some of my findings around Microsoft’s upcoming Azure platform. I initially thought Amazon had it in the bag with EC2 but to be honest, I’m tired of running my own servers. Google’s app hosting is ok, if you like Java or Python technologies – which I do but I thought I’d try the full Visual Studio approach :)

I’m using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. First gotcha, I wanted to run my work role and was told I had to be running VS as administrator … boo really? Wasn’t that a freaking Vista problem. This is Windows 7 RC1 people!

If you’re not running SQL Express you’ll need to reconfigure the local data storage services, which have those lovely hidden options buried in a .config file. Thanks to the link for the location. (Changing Development Storage)

Get it right and you’ll get this nice little local storage window the first time you run something:

When your role gets running, you can load up the fabric UI to actually get control of your own Azure cloud. All this without having to actually deploy to the cloud yet. Pretty neat. Remember that a role is basically like a console application in the cloud. Here is my little default application running, the output is just like a console window:

So what comes next? I’m going to try embed my Amazon Simple DB provider and S3 library into a real role and throw in some workflow for fun. Might as well push it right :) I’ll also be fetching some data from AQS. (Amazon Queue Service). I’ve read a fair bit about thread issues or at least limits on how many instances of a role can run.

Right now I believe you’re limited to 1 instance of a role which kinda sucks. You can have threads which is fine but still puts severe caps on application scale capacity.

Tags: Azure
Filed under .NET, Software | 2 Comments »