How to get an idea abour compute needs based on current hardware configuration?

Question

Hi,

We are investigating option to move our web based SaaS product to Azure (both Windows Azure for ASP.NET and SQL Azure for DB). But I am having troubles to estimate our compute needs to be honest. Right now we are running everything of one server (we don't need high up-time at this time, so it is fine) and it serves us very well, no slow downs, nobody complains. The server hardware is as following: CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66GHz, RAM 4GB, 3 x 143GB (15K) in RAID5. We have 1 database about 2GB (it grows arround 1GB every 6 month or so), two websites (one gets almost no traffic, second is major one) and few little background processes. We do get a lot in-bound traffic (people upload files ~15GB a month).

So my question is... What will we need to get in Azure terms to "match" that performance?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi,

When you decide to move to Azure you'll want to implement some auto-scalling logic in order to be the most cost effective you can on the cloud.

You'll want to add more instances when your app has more requests and turn them down when there's less requests.

I suggest you take a look to Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) in order to implement that kind of logic.

You start with minimum roles and then grow as needed.

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Answer 2

Hi Vitor,

Thank you for your promt answer. Everything you wrote does make sense, but I would still like to understand how compute can be converted to true hardware, because we need to know which compute instance to start with anyway. Any idea?

Thanks!

Answer 3

Hi,

Yes, every Windows Azure Compute Core is equivalent to 1.6GHz. (Extra Small is 1GHz)

Virtual Machine Size	CPU Cores	Memory	Cost Per Hour
Extra Small	Shared	768 MB	$0.04
Small	1	1.75 GB	$0.12
Medium	2	3.5 GB	$0.24
Large	4	7 GB	$0.48
Extra Large	8	14 GB	$0.96

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Answer 4

Vitor,

Is it fair to make an assumption that these are resources we get for our application only? Meaning that OS "things" won't consume any of these resources?

Thanks!

Answer 5

Hi,

Not quite but almost. The VM's have one stripped down version os Windows Server 2008/2008R2. The VM's resources are used by SO also but the SO himself is "just running your app".

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