Metering and Billing on Windows Azure

Question

Hi ,

How Metering And Billing is managed in Windows Azure , say for example my Applications has paid  features and Free Features , in that case how can end user subscribes for paid features/Fee Features and metering will be done based on the usage of features.

Answer 1

Hello, do you mean you want the Windows Azure platform to expose a feature to help you calculate how much your customers need to pay you based on how much computation power they use? As described in http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazure/thread/84bc4009-362e-405c-9dbd-4e2c54722049/, this is not supported today.

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Lante, shanaolanxing This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Answer 2

Is there an API to show Blob storage size?

Answer 3

Not directly. For now, you will have to enumerate all the blobs and add their sizes together (you don't need to download each blob, just get their properties). In the future, we may expose an API to return the overall size of the storage account.

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Lante, shanaolanxing This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Answer 4

Hey Yi-Lun Luo,
This means that at least that we must conduct a storage transactions in order to enumerate blobs and sum their sizes. I don't think it is good. Regardless of how how cheap the transactions are.

I think that API for overall storage sizes should be exposed, not may be exposed... You don't want developers to spend their time in writing "Storage-aware" custom logics and save data separately in order to have track over storage usage. This would be madness ...

And if we can enumerate Blobs, what about tables and queues? Enumerate them also ? I thnik customers should have possibility to know exact ammount of data at every moment and for period. It is not "customer-friendly" to say "Well, you put your blobs and tables data and queues here, but at the end of the month we will tell you how far had you gone with the bill" :)

Answer 5

I agree with Anton not everyone is going to be a 'facebook' where the bill is paid for by the deep pocketed VC and supported by ad revenues. Many systems will be a subscription model with a 'fair use policy' and without any means of easily monitoring data ingress & outgress and storage space then its going to be !fun running a model based on making a profit - for the ISV that is ;).

Although Azure is great architectutarally these issues to me are the current show stoppers. I mean why should I have to write a handler to work out how much download/upload is happening per user? Sounds easy right, but then of course I need extra processing to handle the downloads as they are now going through my web role(s) so I have to spin up many more instances because of the extra load of handling downloads directly, so end result is I spend considerable cash on extra instances rather than pointing my users directly at their storage.

Same for storage enumeration of course it all adds to the instance count.

The old adage comes to mind "you cannot control what you cannot measure"

Howard

Answer 6

I'll first like to say that this observation is important. Folks should have a common way of determining the size of a resource.  And, that concern should belong to the platform, not application. Perspective-wise, platforms have not provided an API for knowing the sizes of databases. Admins have to periodically check and move things around. On the cloud, the API is the 'Admin's eyes'. So, folks need an API that is primed for the cloud paradigm.

Having said that, I can understand how some persons would see this as a 'show-stopper' ... and they may be right. Personally, the things I categorize as show stoppers are things that are (1) crucial for my business and (2) has no known workaround. 

For those persons for whom item (1) is true, the team can help whip up a small sample code that can make it easy for developers to examine their storage sizes, blob sizes, table sizes, etc.

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Pita.O:
http://www.arizentax.com/
http://www.cgi.com

Answer 7

Hi Pita.O

That would certainly help as long as the code sample encompassed bandwidth consumption also. Of course the potential way out of this is (as per an earlier post of mine) ...

If when an account holder gets his monthly statement then it breaks out on a storage account by storage account basis how each storage account was billed

i.e.
Storage account 1 - 10Gb in, 100Gb out, Store used 20Gb, transactions 60Mb
Storage account 2 - 50Gb in, 500Gb out, Store used 380Gb, transactions 200Mb

Then you could have a storage account per 'tenanted account client', which of course makes a stronger argument for data isolation also as some people are wary of their data and cloud (lets not worry about SQL for the purposes of this data isolation benefit for now :-) ).

I dont know the gotchas of using a storage account per tenanted client, but I would personally be more happy with this approach in light of nothing else for the meantime. I am also happy to have a 'my company' storage account that contains the Q's etc if having multiple Q's is one of the gotchas as for me blob storage will be FAR bigger than a few Q's.

If this isnt a possibility then a code sample would be great of course, but I would also ask for a white paper of some sorts that details out what the expectations should be of the number of extra instances that you need JUST to service file download/upload through a 'xfer counter' and storage size through a 'storage size server'. If this is just unquantifiable then it makes the expected costs also unquantifiable.

On a platform API note - I can query the size of a folder and therefore its content size quite easily in windows (even if there is a Db in it !!), heck I can even leverage WMI and write a vb script to do it !!!

I'm gonna sit back and wait for PDC announcements but immediately after I need to make a platform choice.

Regards

Howard

Answer 8

simple question around this very topic..


Will the PDC expose any answers to this conundrum or are commercial (billing) questions rather than technology questions the wrong place for this forum?

Thanks

Howard

Answer 9

Hi Yi-Lun Luo,

Thanks for all ur replies..

 

Regards,

Madhavi.

 

Answer 10

Can this thread be taken out of this posting and put on its own? Madhavi has naturally marked it as answered as his question was answered. However there are other unanswered questions around this thread topic that I and others have asked within this thread, and I for one dont consider these other questions to be answered. My worry is that an answered thread gets no airtime from MSFT and it will be left unanswered.

Answer 11

Go ahead Howard. Just start a new thread and re-ask the question.

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Pita.O:
http://www.arizentax.com/
http://www.cgi.com

Answer 12

Pita.O

OK, I'll see what gives at the PDC and repost if necessary. Thanks all for your help.

H