Azure experience ok?

mindlube

Has anyone had any issues or problems with Windows Azure? Is Azure what Photon Cloud is actually running on?

I am doing the 1 month trial of Azure because I am having massive problems with cloudsigma. (good thing I am still in development of my game- haha)

So far I am *superbly* impressed with Azure. Everything just works. They also have an xsmall instance that is only $15/month. It's 768MB RAM and 1 cpu, with Win2012 server/datacenter is the OS. 2012 server seems pretty snappy and easier on RAM than 2008 server. The OS + Photon server uses only about 50-70% of memory on the xsmall.

So while the xsmall might seem very underpowered, but at only $15/month, I would get like dozens of these VMs to scale out my photon indie - unlimited servers license My photon app is not doing any computations it's just read/writing to a couchbase cluster, for the most part.

They also have the latest Ubuntu linux versions, and it all just works. I can leave SSH or RDP connections open for days and dont experience drops or connections, unlike with cloudsigma.

I am aware that Photon has made a SOA / PASK package for Azure, and thankful to know that exists, but that seems like to much complication & work for me at this point. Instead just deploying by hand the photon server to VMs on Azure.

mindlube

Ah, the xsmall is so cheap because it's also superlimited on bandwidth Found this on a stackoverflow posting. It's not very well publicized:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud/gg663909.aspx

[Deleted User]

Hi mindlube!

We are working with Azure and can recommend it in general, but Photon Cloud is not actually running there - at least not yet, for several reasons.

The latency seems to be pretty good so far, but there are a few limitations one should keep in mind:

- Network Traffic (not bandwidth, the actual amount of traffic) is not cheap on Azure. Just make a calculation how much traffic you expect and compare prices.

- Azure does not guarantee an uptime for single VMs. You need to make a redundant setup and define "availability sets". They will shut down VMs for maintenance and if they have a failure on a host system, it might take a noticeable time before a VM comes up again, so if you are going live on Azure, you might want to take that advice serious.

That being said: the XS machine might be sufficient for development (and you don't need more than 5mpbs there), but I would not recommend to use it as a production server. A shared core and 768MB RAM is a very close call - although Photon runs on it, you might see performance problems very soon - regardless of the bandwidth limit.

Of course, if you are working on an "Indie" project, and don't expect more than, say, 50-100 CCU, it might work for you, but if you expect larger amounts of traffic, you'll run into trouble very soon. The good news is that you can easily upgrade a machine, so you can just start with the XS instance and see how long it lasts, and upgrade / downgrade on demand.

As a side note: We've developed the whole "PASK" ("Photon on Azure SDK") concept before it was possible to run real VMs there. We still like the flexibility, we planned to use it as a basis for a solution to add / remove instances dynamically, based on current workload - but I definitely agree, most of us are more used to "just set up a VM and run Photon", so it is an easier approach most times.

mindlube

Thanks Nicole glad to hear the advice / feedback! I think you are referring to "availability sets". Yep it's critical information to know and glad you prompted me to read this:
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manag ... ilability/

One of the other advantages of Azure w/ Photon server, as I have experienced, is that they do the ethernet & storage drivers correctly in their virtualized environment. They also do OS licensing and activation correctly. With other cloud providers, they don't really seem to have any Windows expertise, so we are left trying out different VirtIO drivers to troubleshoot stability issues, OS activation may be hit or miss, etc.

[Deleted User]

Availability Sets, of course. Fixed the typo. Thanks!

And also thanks for sharing your experience. It would be cool if you could update the thread with further experiences, for example if you run a load test or use Azure as a production service.