Hello,

as I am new to azure I would like to understand something if someone could guide me. In order to use Azure cloud services for hosting a website with an SQL db, how can I know the sizing needed beforehand? I mean how many and which capacity of instances. (db size and bandwidth are quite straightforward to measure in advance) 

Do you go only trial and see? I need it to calculate the costs that are going to be needed, but I would like to know that as an estimation before starting actually implementing it. Is there a tool or some pathway one could use for that matter?

Thank you in advance.

Hi there,

The sizing will depend completely on what you application is consuming in terms of CPU power, Memory usage and throughput needed. Same goes for the database. There are many options and it is indeed quite difficult to know what to choose upfront.

The best approach in my experience is to pick f.e. a Basic tier deployment (App Service Hosting plan with a B1 VM hosting your site) and find out if the reponse times are adequate for what you need. For the database you could start with a Standard level (S0) and test where the bottleneck (in case there is one) is located, that could be the DB througput or your website performance.

It is quite simple to scale up from there and eventual outscaling to multiple web server VM's for you site is very simple in Azure (scripting, autoscaling, manually in the portal).

Using the standard build in monitoring features you can quite easily measure your site's response time and compare the results after you switched to a different set of resources.

I have seen many project where a B1 Hosting plan and S0 database were enough, but I would count on that without testing.

Can I assume you already took a look at the Azure pricing calculator?

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=data-management

In terms of costs your Compute hours probably are the biggest part of your monthly billing followed by the DB and then storage (blobs etc.,bandwidth and at the bottom and your transactions on storage). But again that is just based on my experiences with smaller sized web site audiences.

Was this helpful for you? 

yes I think its a start!

Thank you very much for sharing. Definitely, would like to use afterwards backup solution as also VM redundancy for safety. But that would be the next steps, as it seems also Azure gives you a lot of tools to play with and experiment. But first things first and I would have to calculate an approx starting cost.

I checked the pricing tool already but I should know what I am looking for first. Also, as I have seen, biztalk services might cover up the initial costs needed for smn to start with.

Thanks again!