Month: July 2017

Azure Costs: Public Preview CSP Support

de Azure Cost Monitor , , , , , ,

Today we’re very excited to announce the start of the public preview for Cloud Solution Providers.  After several weeks and months of continous improvements in the azure costs platform, we now start the public preview phase of the CSP support.  

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The great new CSP portal gives you access to the spendings your customers are generating. There are a couple of use cases we would like to point out:  

Enroll into the CSP program:
 When visiting our new CSP portal the system will require enrolling into the CSP program. You can do this with an existing Azure Costs account or in case you would like to differentiate between internal spendings and customer spendings, just use an additional account!

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Register Accounts:
Microsoft requires every CSP to sign into the CSP program for every geographical region separately. As an internal reseller you will have accounts for USD, EUR or AUD and several more. Azure Costs allows you to register every single CSP account, to track costs in different currencies and countries separately.		 7b12c995-0c67-4b6c-b20c-a2c19cae071e
Activate Customers:
 During the registration process Azure Costs imports all existing customers. This does not mean Azure Costs tracks spendings. If you would like to track spendings for a specific customer, activate this customer in the “New/Not-Activated Customers” widget. The spending information of every activated customer will be imported automatically.		 2e47b12a-fbbc-4cad-bcab-3cd2b70fb138

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our new portal for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. To become part of the public preview of the CSP support an existing enterprise plan is required.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

 

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Git Deployment – Shallow Clone Support in Azure App Services – The missing piece

de Misc , , , ,

Azure App Services and the open source project KuduSync behind this great Azure Service is a huge time saver for agile teams. Especially DevOps teams will like the continuous deployment features.  Personally I focus a lot on the Git based deployment which enables you to roll back and forward in seconds whenever it is required. Beside that, it is possible to work with standard tools available on market to implement continuous deployment or integration.

Deployments - Microsoft Azure 2017-07-18 06-48-11

When I started working with Azure App Services building Node.js apps, I wrote a little node package called Azure Deploy. It allowed me to push changes as part of a build process directly into the Azure App Service. Originally, CodeShip was the service of choice for the build process but since I need to support Git Repositories beside GitHub, BitBucket and GitLabs, I migrated to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and the integrated build platform.

vso-build-tasks

After several months and hundreds of deploys, which means hundreds of commits to the local git repository, it became a fairly complex and fat thing. This is normally not a problem but my Azure Deploy package clones the local git repository from Azure App Service to a temp directory and copies the build output over it. Last but not least it commits and pushes the changes back to Azure. The big repository took more than 4 minutes to clone so I was wondering if I can use Shallow Clone to get only the latest state of the repository.

This idea works well on Unix based git servers, on GitHub or even in Visual Studio Team Services as well. But when you try to clone a local Git Repository of Azure App Services via Shallow Clone option

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jquery/jquery.git jquery

it ends up with an error. The error and its background is also documented in the GitHub project of KuduSync here. So what to do now?

Another nice option of Azure App Services is the option to pull changes from a Git Repository instantly after a commit. This works well in VSTS, based on GitHooks but also with GitHub and a couple other platforms. It’s also possible to clone via shallow clone flag from these repositories which closes the loop. The final solution is to commit into a VSTS or GitHub hosted publishing repository which triggers a pull deployment in Azure App Services.

At the end this change reduced the whole deployment time from 5 up to 9 minutes, down to approx. 90 seconds. You can find the updated Azure Deploy component in the NPM registry here.

Azure Costs: Exporting data via API

de Azure Cost Monitor , , , ,

Azure Costs now offers direct API access to integrate the processed and aggregated data directly in 3rd party applications like Qlik or Tableau. This option allows customers on an enterprise plan or higher to render or analyse the Azure Costs data in existing BI solutions.

Exporting data via API is very simple. Just follow the steps below:

  1. Register an application as trustee to control which data can be access from the 3rd party application in the team management view.

    ApiCredentials

  2. The application contains a client_id and a client_secret which can be used for the oAuth2 client credentials flow. Just issue a new security token at least every hour from the Azure Costs STS. We recommend to issue a token whenever you start a new transaction to ensure that permission changes are affective.

    curl -X POST -d “client_id={{YOUR CLIENT ID}}&client_secret={{YOUR CLIENT SECERT}}&grant_type=client_credentials” https://azure-costs.com/sts/issue/oauth/token

  3. Export the required report from the export api which returns the data in JSON format. Every single object describes one service including the quantity, costs and other meta information. The required teamId, contract number can be extracted from the URL of the Azure Costs dashboard

    curl -H “Authorization: Bearer {{ISSUED TOKEN}}” https:/api.azure-costs.com/api/v1/teams/{{teamId}}/contracts/{{contractId}}/reports/{{Year}}-{{Month}}/export?cache={{DATE-OF-THE-DAY}}

Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your Azure Costs account. The feature is part of any enterprise plan.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.