Azure Cost Monitor for Service Providers & Resellers

April 10, 2015April 9, 2015 de Azure Cost Monitor acm, azure, billing, cloud

Are you an Azure reseller or a cloud service provider offering Microsoft Azure services? If so, we start offering you a smarter way to have control about the cloud spendings of your customers or to give your customers a great monitoring tool, seamlessly integrated in your service architecture. The Azure Cost Monitor Reseller Portal is a new way for service providers and resellers to monitor, manage & measure costs in the Microsoft Azure cloud:

Besides the Enterprise Edition features, the portal will come with these additional features:

Customer Management Dashboard
Manage access to the Azure account or a specific subscription for your customers. Invite new users or assign an existing Azure Active Directory group to provide access rights.
Custom SSL & Domain support
Integrate the service seamlessly in your or the customers service architecture, with a service provider or customer specific domain incl. SSL certificates.
Custom pricing & currency support
Especially when you resell just a simple subscription or if you add some reseller service charges to the pricing, a custom pricing table helps you to manage this complexity.
Data access via RESTful API
A strong integration, e.g. into an existing data warehouse or CRM application is easy and simple with the existing RESTful API.
Allows to resell enterprise editions
Having a reseller edition allows every reseller and cloud service provider to resell Azure Cost Monitor enterprise editions with an individual margin.

Interested? Signup for the early adaptor program and get direct access to the current system.

We hope this feature makes it simple to maintain your customers with the Azure Cost Monitor and makes it much easier for you to manage and control all costs. Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Build your own Twitter – Part 2 – Azure Table Structures

March 26, 2015March 22, 2015 de Tutorials azure, cloud, SaaS

Azure Table Store offers a very important scalability feature which should be used when working with timelines. The partitionkey in every table allows Microsoft to put entities on different servers. Let’s recheck the limits of Azure Table Store to make a right decision (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-subscription-service-limits):

Azure Table Store returns 1000 entities per page. If the result contains more entities the client needs to query several times -> A timeline service should never page to render the first timeline
Azure Table Store returns 2000 entities with 1KB of size per second as a guaranteed SLA –> A timeline service should never request more data per page to stay performant
Azure Table Store allows to store up to 500TB per storage account, it could be stored in one table or different –> A timeline service should be able to handle several storage accounts, at least theoretically.

With all this limitations in mind it’s possible to build a table structure for the timeline service as follows:

timelines
The timlines table contains all timelines the system has registered. The partitionkey of this table is timeline identifier so every subjects timeline can be stored on different nodes. The partitionkey should be a key generated from the subjects identification, e.g. liveid{{UID of LiveId-Token}}. This prevents the system to lookup an other table to get the timeline identifier when the subject tries to render them.In addition the event which should be stored on several timelines can be identified by his event identifier as the row key. This allows the system to also implement removal jobs because a multiple stored event can be identified as the single one.
subjectFollowers
the subjectFollowers are a list of subjects following a specific subject. The partitionkey of this table is also the subject identifier so it’s easy to get all followers of a subject. In addition the row key becomes important because it identifies the subject who is following someone else. This gives a system the option to find all followers of a specific subject and all subjects a specific subject is following very fast. Works well in both directions.

This simple data structure allows the service to handle hundreds of different timelines and relations. Especially the background worker can now identify on which timeline the event needs to be stored.

Last but not least, when it comes to requesting the timeline content it will only be returned in pages of 250 elements to stay healthy with the performance. An other page can be requested at any time when the user starts paging.

Azure: Do never use EF automigrations when working in teams

March 1, 2015 de Misc azure, cloud, coding, SaaS

Todays number one approach in building database access libraries on ASP.NET based applications is the Entity Framework. Since Microsoft supports migration based database updates, which mostly look like copied from the approach Ruby on Rails offers since ages, it’s possible to use them in scenarios where continuous deployment is key.

The core model which fits perfectly into a development process around continuous delivery & deployment is a code-first approach. This means that the developer creates so called POCOs (Plain Old C# Object) and the system is able to generate the needed SQL changes, based on the current state of the database.

The Entity Framework has two options to generate the migration:

Auto Migrations
The Entity Framework tries to generate the database changes on runtime without any specific migrations implemented as code. Everything happens magically 😦
Explicit Migrations
The Entity Framework just runs the migration scripts written in a .NET based special DSL for database operations. Nothing happens magically 🙂 This needs the developers brain but is controllable even in large teams.

When you work in a team Auto Migrations are really a bad idea and should be disabled from the beginning. Assume developers do changes manually in the database which means the magic around AutoMigrations will generate a different set on instructions against this database as the next developer will get. The results of auto migrations in team environments are not reliable and repeatable.

So it’s a really good idea to disable automatic migrations from the start:

public Configuration() {
AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = false;
}

Auto Migrations do not have a win at all when it comes to projects with more than one developer or projects which are deployed automatically. Continuous deployment relies on a strict unit of work and as less magic as possible. This will also help to troubleshoot when the continuous deployment breaks the production and a rollback is required.

Microsoft also published a nice article with more information at the MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/data/jj554735.aspx

Azure Storage: Is the Geo Redundant Mode really required?

January 27, 2015January 25, 2015 de Misc azure, cloud, SaaS

Microsoft Azure offers different replication modes for Azure Storage. Every mode approximately doubles the costs for a TB of data. During a great workshop with Patrick Heyde we talked about stamp copies and I asked myself which mode I really needed.

First I took one step back, to identify all requirements I typically have in my projects for a highly scalable, fault safe, redundant storage :

When a hard-drive in a storage server brakes, my data still needs to be usable.
When Microsoft has huge power outage on a whole datacenter, I want to bring my app up and running again in another datacenter.
When I (or my customers) are removing data by accident, there needs to be an option to revert to a former snapshot.

So a review of the different replication modes compared to these requirements leads me to the following results:

When a hard-drive in a storage server brakes, my data still needs to be usable:
The Local Redundant Storage fulfils this requirement perfectly. Microsoft writes 3 different copies of every bit within one single data center. When a hard drive on a stamp or the whole stamp goes down, another one can take over and all data is available without any interruption.

When Microsoft has huge power outage on a whole datacenter, I want to bring my app up and running again in another datacenter:
Microsoft offers a geographical redundant storage mode that stores another 3 copies in another datacenter a hundred miles away. This helps a lot, because every application can use the secondary location to access to the data – but is it worth the price? The price for GRS is three times higher then for LRS.
An automated replication between two different LRS storages, hosted in a Azure WebJob might be a good solution the fulfill the requirement as well.

When I (or my customers) are removing data by accident, there needs to be an option to revert to a former snapshot:
Globally Redundant Storage is not helpful when it comes to removing data by accident. As soon as the data is removed from the primary storage, the system removes the data in the backup location as well, often within seconds.
But this requirement can also be fulfilled with a replication between two different LRS storages, as already described above. The whole application needs to be designed for this use cases.

So this review brings me to the conclusion that in my personal opinion GRS storage is not needed in most of the use cases. Normally several LRS storages and an application logic optimised on the specific data security requirements works well and preserves the budget.

What’s your opinion? Do you have use cases where GRS and Read-GRS are hard requirements? If you like, leave a short comment …