Tag: Azure

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A Penny Saved is a Ton of Serverless Compute Earned

Scott Guthrie recently shared one of my favorite anecdotes on his Azure Red Shirt Tour. A Microsoft customer regularly invokes 1 billion (yes, that’s with a “B”) Azure Functions per day. The customer reached out to support after the first month thinking there was a bug in the billing system, only to find out that the $72 was in fact correct. How is that possible? Azure Functions is a serverless compute platform that allows you to focus on code that only executes when triggered by events, and you only pay for CPU time and memory used during execution (versus a traditional web server where you are paying a fee even if your app is idle). This is called micro-billing, and is one key reason serverless computing is so powerful.

Curious about Azure Functions? Follow the link https://aka.ms/go-funcs to get up and running with your first function in minutes.

Scott Guthrie Red Shirt

Scott Guthrie on the Azure Red Shirt Tour

In fact, micro-billing is so important, it’s one of three rules I use to verify if a service is serverless. There is not an official set of rules and there is no standard for serverless. The closest thing to a standard is the whitepaper published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation titled CNCF WG-Serverless Whitepaper v1.0 (PDF). The paper describes serverless computing as “building and running applications that do not require server management.” The paper continues to state they are “executed, scaled, and billed in response to the exact demand needed at the moment.”

It’s easy to label almost everything serverless, but there is a difference between managed and serverless. A managed service takes care of responsibilities for you, such as standing up a website or hosting a Docker container. Serverless is a managed service but requires a bit more. Here is Jeremy’s Serverless Rules.

  1. The service should be capable of running entirely in the cloud. Running locally is fine and often preferred for developing, testing, and debugging, but ultimately it should end up in the cloud.
  2. You don’t have to configure a virtual machine or cluster. Docker is great, but containers require a Docker host to run. That host typically means setting up a VM and, for resiliency and scale, using an orchestrator like Kubernetes to scale the solution. There are also services like Azure Web Apps that provide a fully managed experience for running web apps and containers, but I don’t consider them serverless because they break the next rule.
  3. You only pay for active invocations and never for idle time. This rule is important, and the essence of micro-billing. ACI is a great way to run a container, but I pay for it even when it’s not being used. A function, on the other hand, only bills when it’s called.

These rules are why I stopped calling managed databases “serverless.” So, what, then, does qualify as serverless?

The Azure serverless platform includes Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Grid. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at Azure Functions.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions allows you to write code that is executed based on an event, or trigger. Triggers may include an HTTP request, a timer, a message in a queue, or any other number of important events. The code is passed details of the trigger but can also access bindings that make it easier to connect to resources like databases and storage. The serverless Azure Functions model is based on two parameters: invocations and gigabyte seconds.

Invocations are the number of times the function is invoked based on its trigger. Gigabyte seconds is a function of memory usage. Image a graph that shows time on the x-axis and memory consumption on the y-axis. Plot the memory usage of your function over time. Gigabyte seconds represent the area under the curve.

Let’s assume you have a microservice that is called every minute and takes one second to scan and aggregate data. It uses a steady 128 megabytes of memory during the run. Using the Azure Pricing Calculator, you’ll find that the cost is free. That’s because the first 400,000 Gigabyte seconds and 1 million invocations are free every month. Running every second (there are 2,628,000 seconds in a month) with double memory (256 megabytes), the entire monthly cost is estimated at $4.51.

Azure Functions pricing

Pricing calculator for Azure Functions

Recently I tweeted about my own experience with serverless cost (or lack thereof). I wrote a link-shortening tool. It uses a function to take long URLs and turn them into a shorter code I can easily share. I also have a function that takes the short code and performs the redirect, then stores the data in a queue. Another microservice processes items in the queue and stores metadata that I can analyze for later. I have tens of thousands of invocations per month and my total cost is less than a dollar.

Link shortener stats

A tweet about cost of running serverless code in Azure

Do I have your attention?

In future posts I will explore the cost model for Logic Apps and Event Grid. In the meantime…

Learn about and get started with your first Azure Function by following this link: https://aka.ms/go-funcs

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Exploring Azure App Service – Web Apps and SQL Azure

There is a good chance that your web app uses a database. In my previous post introducing Azure App Service, I showed some of the benefits of hosting apps in Azure App Service, and how easy it is to get a basic site running in a few clicks. In this post I’ll show how to set up a SQL Azure database along with an App Service Web App from Visual Studio, and apply Entity Framework automatically as part of publish.

Let’s get going

To get started, you’ll first need:

  • Visual Studio 2017 with the ASP.NET and web development workload installed (download now)
  • An Azure account:
  • Any ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core app that uses a SQL Database. For the purposes of this post, I’ll create a new ASP.NET Core app with Individual Authentication:
    • On the “New ASP.NET Core Web Application” dialog, click the “Change Authentication” button.
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  • Then select the “Individual User Accounts” radio button and click “OK”.
  • Click OK.

I can now run my project locally (F5) and create user accounts which will be stored in a SQL Server Express Local DB on my machine.

Publishing to App Service with a Database

Let’s publish our application to Azure. To do this, I’ll right click my project in Solution Explorer and choose “Publish”

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This brings up the Visual Studio publish target dialog, which will default to the Azure App Service pane with the “Create new” radio button selected. To continue click “Publish”.

This brings up the “Create App Service” dialog (see the “Key App Service Concepts” section of my previous post for an explanation of the fields). To create a SQL Database for our app to use, click the “Create a SQL Database” link in the top right section of the dialog.

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This will bring up the “Configure SQL Database” dialog.

  • Note: If you are using a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription, many regions will not let you create a SQL Azure database so I recommend choosing “East US” or “West US 2” depending on where you are located (we are adding logic in in the Visual Studio 2017 15.8 update to remove those regions if that’s the case, but for now you’ll need to choose an appropriate region). To do this, click the “New…” button next to your “Hosting Plan Dropdown” and pick the appropriate region (“East US” or “West US 2”).
  • Since I don’t have an existing SQL Server, the first thing I need to do is create a server to host the database, so I’ll click the “New…” button next to the “SQL Server” dropdown,
  • Choose a location for the database.
  • Provide an administrator user name and password for the server
  • Click “OK”
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  • Make sure the connection string name field matches the name of the connection string your application uses to access the database (if using a new project, it is “DefaultConnection” which will be prepopulated for you).
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  • Click OK
  • Then click the “Create” button on the “Create App Service” dialog

It should take ~2-3 minutes to create all of the resources in Azure, then your application will publish and a browser will open to your home page.

Configuring EF Migrations

At this point there is a database for your app to use in the cloud, but EF migrations have not been applied, so any functionality that relies on the database (e.g. Registering for a user account) will result in an error.

To apply EF migrations to the database:

  • Click the “Configure…” button on the publish summary page
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  • Navigate to the “Settings” tab
  • When it finishes discovering data contexts, expand the “Entity Framework Migrations” section, and check the “Apply this migration on publish” for all of the contexts it finds
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  • Click “Save”
  • Click Publish again, in the output window you should see “Generating Entity framework SQL Scripts” and then “Generating Entity framework SQL Scripts completed successfully”
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That’s it, your web app and SQL Azure database are both configured and running in the cloud.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post showed you how easy it is to try App Service and SQL Azure. We believe that for most people, App Service is the easiest place to get started with cloud development, even if you need to move to other services in the future for further capabilities (compare hosting options). As always, let us know if you run into any issues, or have any questions below or via Twitter.

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Exploring Azure App Service – Introduction

Have you ever needed to quickly stand up a web site, or web API app that was publicly available? Is your team or organization thinking about moving to the cloud but aren’t sure the best place to start? One of the first places you should look is Azure App Service Web Apps. In this post we’ll look at how easy it is to get started, and a quick overview of key concepts.

App Service offers the following benefits:

  • A fully managed platform, meaning Azure automatically updates the operating system and runtime as security and stability fixes are released.
  • 10 free plans to every subscriber, so it won’t cost you money or credits to try your app in Azure.
  • First class support in Visual Studio, meaning that you can go from your app running on your local machine to running in App Service in less than 2 minutes.
  • If offers deployment slots, which enable you to stage multiple versions of your app, and route varying amounts of traffic to the various versions (i.e. do A/B testing, or a ringed release model).
  • Scale up and down quickly and automatically based on load
  • For a more see Why use Web Apps?

In this blog post, I’ll provide an overview of App Service’s key features and concepts by walking through using Visual Studio to publish an ASP.NET application to Azure App Service.

Let’s get going

To get started, you’ll first need:

  • Visual Studio 2017 with the ASP.NET and web development workload installed (download now)
  • An Azure account:
  • Any ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core app, for the purposes of this post, I’ll use a basic ASP.NET Core app

To start I’ll right click my project in Solution Explorer and choose “Publish”

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This brings up the Visual Studio publish target dialog, which will default to the Azure App Service pane. The “Create new” radio button is already selected to, so I’ll click the “Publish” button on the bottom right.

This will open the Create App Service dialog in Visual Studio.

Key App Service Concepts

The dialog has four fields that represent key concepts of creating an App Service:

  1. App Name: Will be the default public facing URL in Azure (it will be of the form https://<App_Name>.azurewebsites.net –you can configure domain names later if needed).
  2. Subscription: The Azure Subscription to create the resources in if you have more than one
  3. Resource Group: Groups your application and any dependent resources (SQL Databases, Storage Accounts, etc., see resource group design to learn more). To edit the name, click “New…”.
  4. Hosting Plan: The hosting plan is a set of reserved resources for your app. You can choose to host multiple apps in a single hosting plan (we’ll explore this further in a minute).

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One concept that can be confusing is the relationship between the “Hosting Plan” (or App Service plan”) and the “App Service”:

  • The Hosting/App Service plan is the virtual machine resources you are reserving in Azure to host your application. This is what you are paying or using credits for.
  • The App Service is your app and associated settings that run inside of the plan. You can run multiple apps (App Services) in the same plan (virtual machine) with the same implications as sharing any other server or VM between apps.

To explore the App Service plan further, click the “New…” button next to the Hosting Plan dropdown to open the “Configure Hosting Plan” dialog that has three fields:

  1. App Service Plan: A non-public facing name for the plan.
  2. Location: Is the region your app will run in. You generally want to pick a region that is close to customers that will be accessing the site.
  3. Size: The size of the virtual machine you want to reserve for your application and the capabilities you want (e.g. deployment slots require a Standard or Premium plan).
    Note: Free and Shared plans run in the same VM as other App Service apps and are intended for development and testing, see App Service plan overview for more details

Publishing the app

At this point I’m ready to publish my app to App Service. The bottom right panel of the Create App Service dialog will show me all the resources I’m going to create in Azure (in this case a Hosting Plan and App Service). Everything looks good, so I just need to click “Create”:

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Visual Studio will create all the resources on my behalf, publish my application, and open my default browser to the URL of the published application.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this overview of App Service concepts has been helpful and inspired you to give App Service a try. We believe that for many people, App Service is the easiest place to get started with cloud development, even if you need to move to other services in the future for further capabilities (compare hosting options to see additional choices). As always, let us know if you run into any issues, or have any questions below or via Twitter.  If you’re interested in exploring more, see the next post in our series introducing how to setup and use SQL Server with App Service