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azurebillingazure-worker-rolesazure-web-rolesazure-virtual-machine

Azure Cloud Service Billing Use Case

I was hoping I'd be able to find Azure billing 'use cases' somewhere on the MS site or on StackOverflow.

Maybe I'm being paranoid but I'm trying to be certain before I tell a customer that it'll cost $XXX.00 to move his app to Azure.

I've got an MVC site running on a server in his office. It's a data-based app using SQL-Server. Data intensive but just about 20-30 users. The purpose of going to "The Cloud" is not scalability but reliability.

Lets just say I need a Cloud Service with 2 medium VMs (2 so that we have fail-over capability) and a 1GB SQL Database. Say $2 worth of Bandwidth (15 gb) would probably be enough. Geo Redundant Storage: all the stuff besides the DB is comprised of Code. Very little in the way of resources, total less than 20 megs.

So, my question: By running a Web and Worker am I using two instances? One for Web and one for Worker? If so, can I run the app in just a Web Role? I don't run a separate service. What if I did run both Web and Worker roles for the same site, would that be an extra instance (4 instances instead of 2)?

So, by running a Web and/or Worker role am I ALSO incuring a Virtual Machine instance? If not, does the scenario change if I occasionally RDP into the Web/Worker instance?

Thanks for any insight into this. Also, does anyone know of a MS site that has billing 'use cases' like this?

Solution

  • Based on your description, I'm not sure why you'd want a Worker role. Worker roles are ideal for handling transactions, processing, etc. but I'm not sure if you need that. For example, worker roles can process submitted orders, resize images, etc. Basically any process that you'd like to abstract from the user interface.

    Since you mention that you want fail-over capability, you should probably use at least two of whatever role(s) you choose. For example you will need a Web role for your MVC web site. You'll need two instances of whatever size you choose to qualify for Microsoft's Cloud Services SLA uptime guarantee of 99.5%.

    Should you decide you need a Worker role, you'd need two instances of that as well.

    It's not required to use a minimum of two instances per role type, but it's certainly recommended for production apps, and is required for SLA coverage.