Azure API Management – What are my networking options?

Introduction

A very common discussion to have with enterprises around Azure API Management (“APIM”) is the aspect of network integration. At the end of the day, the response to that is very simple… Only the developer & premium SKU allow VNET integration. The integration is achieved by doing “injection”, which means that the service is “dedicated” to you and “the machines” are placed directly in your VNET. Azure APIM does not leverage private link (yet?)… Which then opens the next discussion, as the premium SKU is about 3,42 Euro per hour, where the basic SKU floats at about 20 Eurocent per hour. At this point, for most organizations, the cost impact will take priority over the most optimal design. Where today’s post will take a look at the various options at hand.

Update (March 2022)

Since the initial post, the ability to leverage private endpoints have been made available ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/private-endpoint. This concept will probably be more interesting to you than the approaches mentioned in this post!

Flavors / Tiers

When taking a look at the pricing info, you will notice there are multiple flavors you can choose from ;

• The consumption tier is the one where you are charged for the amount of calls you make. It is an awesome model in terms of linking your business outcome to the cost model at hand. The downside is, that is does not offer a developer portal or any typical enterprise features (like VNET integration or a self-hosted gateway).
• The basic and standard tiers are economic tiers at both about 45 and 130 Euros per month. They do include a developer portal.
• The developer and premium tiers are the ones typically picked by enterprises due to their VNET integration, HA/DR options (for Premium) and the self-hosted gateway.

Logic Apps ; When do I go for a consumption or a fixed pricing model?

Introduction

Today’s post is about the Logic Apps billing model. As you might know, the Integrated Service Environment has been generally available since May 2019. Since then, there is a consumption plan and a fixed price approach for Logic Apps. Lately I have noticed that this still remains confusing… Let us try to demystify this one then? 😉

 

Bibliography

• Pricing Page ; https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/logic-apps/
• Documentation on Pricing & Billing ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-pricing
• Service Limits ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-limits-and-config#throughput-limits

How to estimate the costs of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster?

Introduction

Aside from the variety of technical questions, a very common discussion around Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is … “What will it cost me?”. In today’s post we’ll dissect how the pricing dynamics work and how you can optimize the cost for your cluster(s). Where this might not be rocket science, I do have noticed some organizations struggling with this. So with this I hope to help those out… 😉

VMchooser now supports Azure Migrate Exports

Introduction

The “BulkUploader” module of VMchooser has existed for quite some time. It is without doubt the most loved capability by all the visitors/users. Though where many are accustomed to working with the CSV Input file, do know that you can now also use the export files of Azure Migrate! For today’s post, let’s go through the process…

 

Let’s take a look

Go to your Azure Migrate project

Understanding the budget impact of Azure Networking on your architecture

Introduction

Today’s post will be about “demystifying” the possible network costs you might incur when using Azure services. Once you understand the basics behind the billing model, you’ll soon find that you can tweak these to your advantage!

 

Cost Drivers

When looking towards the costs, there are several pricing pages you should visit to know the cost drivers of your architecture…

• Azure Bandwidth : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/
• Azure Virtual Network Peering : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-network/
• Azure VPN Gateway : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/vpn-gateway/
• Azure Express Route : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/expressroute/

Though I can feel you… It’s not always easy to understand when what is triggered.

 

Updates (!)

• 23/08 – Updated HL overview to v2.0 to include costs due to zone architecture
• 23/08 – Source files for the drawing can be found here.

 

High Level Overview

Underneath you can find an overview of the possible cost drivers. We’ll go into depth on the individual flows in this post.

Serverless On-Demand Scaling : Pushing the pedal when you need it…

Introduction

A lot of workloads are driven by peak consumption. From my experience, there aren’t the amount of workloads that have a constant performance need are in the minority. Now here comes the interesting opportunity when leveraging serverless architectures… Here you only pay for your actual consumption. So if you tweak your architecture to leverage this, then you can get huge gains!

For today’s post, I’ll be using VMchooser once again as an example. A lot has changed since the last post on the anatomy of this application. Here is an updated drawing of the high level architecture ;

Underneath you can see the flow that’ll be used when doing a “Bulk Mapping” (aka “CSV Upload”). The webapp (“frontend”) will store the CSV as a blob on the storage account. Once a new blob arrives, a function will be triggered that will examine the CSV file and put every entry onto a queue. Once a message is published onto the queue, another function will start processing this message. By using this pattern, I’m transforming this job into parallel processing job where each entry is handled (about) simultaneously. The downside of this, is that there will be contention/competition for the back-end resources (being the data store). Luckily, CosmosDB can scale on the fly too… We can adapt the request units as needed; up or down! So let’s do a small PoC and see who this could work…

Azure Serverless Performance / Cost Monitoring – Retrieving CosmosDB Request Charges per Function

What Azure Virtual Machine size should I pick?!?

Introduction

Remember the last time you went shopping for a shirt? Then you surely also recall the moment in time when you were looking to find the right shirt size for yourself…

You probably also noticed that sizes might differ a bit depending on the context. A  woman’s size vs & men’s size is totally different. There are geographical differences… and some people just like to wear cloths that have more “free space”.

So is today’s post about buying cloths? Hell no… 😉 But it’s to point out that there are analogies between finding the right shirt for you, and finding the right Azure Virtual Machine. Today we’ll delve into the aspects that will guide you a given T-shirt size in Azure ; for instance, why choose an FS1 above an A1_V2, where they both have 1 core & 2GB of memory. Though there is a price difference of 10€ per month on them.

Azure : IT Governance in the cloud

Introduction

During the weekend I saw the following tweet passing by …

Hosting company Verelox has had all their customers dedicated and virtual servers wiped. Their statement: pic.twitter.com/XvAQcofJKu

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) June 10, 2017

Apparently, a hosting company (allegedly) got all their data wiped by an ex-admin. Now I can imagine people thinking that this is something that is part of the territory when it boils down to cloud. So I wanted to write a blog post entailing what you do to set up a governance structure in Azure. Here I’m aware that the above tweet is more related to the security aspect of governance, it’s a part of it nevertheless.

 

Governance?!?

Let’s get started on our scope… IT Governance can cover a lot of ground. In essence, the goal is to assure that the investment in IT generates business value and the risks that are associated with IT projects are mitigated. Though I found that CIO.com has a nice definition on it ;

Simply put, it’s putting structure around how organizations align IT strategy with business strategy, ensuring that companies stay on track to achieve their strategies and goals, and implementing good ways to measure IT’s performance. It makes sure that all stakeholders’ interests are taken into account and that processes provide measurable results. An IT governance framework should answer some key questions, such as how the IT department is functioning overall, what key metrics management needs and what return IT is giving back to the business from the investment it’s making.

So let’s take a look at how we can put an enterprise-grade structure around the management of Azure!

 

TL;DR = Azure Enterprise Scaffold

For those who want to skip the post below… When talking about governance in Azure, the best place that summarizes it the following page in our documentation ; “The Azure Enterprise Scaffold“.

Comparing Costs : Is Cloud more expensive than an On Premises setup?

Introduction

In my role as a Cloud Solution Architect, I’m often faced with the statement that cloud is expensive. My reply is always that Cloud is not expensive (more expensive than On Premises) if you take into account all the costs involved. As this is an easy statement to make… I made an effort to create a cost comparison for four different scenario’s (in term of deployment size) and stacked “OnPremises” vs “Cloud”.

In this post we’ll discuss this calculation and ensure that we are comparing apples to apples!

 

Design Decisions