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How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

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Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#31

Post by primitivesuave »

tszming wrote: post #11

Besides the fact that you are using the free ClearDB plan which is not supposed for production use (and it is not related to Microsoft anyway), Azure website (shared) is a preview product [1], with no SLA, you should not consider them for any serious use anyway, so you've made two mistakes here. [1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites

Microsoft is trying to compete in a very crowded space, so if the preview product sucks I doubt developers would be willing to try the production version. They should be making their preview a pain-free process that generates positive PR, rather than cutting off a site when the plan gets overutilized.

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#32

Post by cwyers »

marcosdumay wrote: post #21
callumjones wrote: post #14

Here's the take-away from this post * You treated the system's memory like it was some infinite resource. It's not, you need to make sure your application efficiently handles memory and takes measure to ensure it doesn't grow too large. Would you want it swapping on a regular host? * You thought you could get away with a free database that is used for development. You're using an application that isn't built well for…

Take-aways that must came with yours: * There is no way to calculate memory usage, it's completely opaque. The first thing the author told was how he was controlling memory usage, but that does not reflect on Azure's number. Also, swapping is a bit better than just having your site taken down with no warning. * Nearly all hosting providers have "free" database providing included in their price. (And until I read that…

Well, no, he told us how he was controlling WordPress' memory usage, but not the web server's or PHP's. And Azure includes free databases, both SQL Server and MySQL, there's just limits (20mb). Which, y'know, is how it works.

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#33

Post by yuriyguts »

eropple wrote: post #20

The bigger question, gone unanswered, is why your WordPress blog is configured such that three users can tap out 512MB of RAM. I run a few nontrivial WP installs averaging a couple thousand hits a day on 256MB VMs. My hunch is that anything that actually needs to tap out 512MB of RAM should be running on a plan that's more than $10/month.

Please see the details in my post, I tried to limit RAM usage via usual WordPress configuration tricks, but Azure didn't seem to respond. Perhaps an even bigger question is: why Azure hasn't configured the site itself, if it imposes quotas on it.

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#34

Post by yuriyguts »

numlocked wrote: post #24

I'm not sure where you expect to get great wordpress hosting for "10 times less" than $69/mo. That's not very much spend for a commercial website. Pagely, which has the scale economics advantage of doing nothing but hosting WP sites, starts at $24/mo. To hit the baseline level of "production readiness" with Heroku is going to run you at least $85/mo (2 dynos, 1 free, 1 @ $35/mo + $50/mo postgres instance). If Azure r…

Well, currently we're running the blog on a traditional shared hosting that costs less than $10/mo (you can easily find out which one :)) and it handles the blog amazingly well, even during HN bursts. The blog itself it not our primary line of duty, more of a side project actually. So when there's no new updates, it's quiet enough for a shared hosting to handle.

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#35

Post by yuriyguts »

pekk wrote: post #27
darksim905 wrote: post #10

So because these guys are either bad at coding, had a site that was on heavy load for that service, or what else you want to call it, an entire platform isn't ready for service? Get real. From everything he told me, if I had a real site & wanted to make use of a lot of things for cheap I'd go for their free tier in a heartbeat.

HN uses this reasoning all the time. For example, "I don't know how to use language x, so language x sucks for sysadmins" or "I don't know how to use language x, so it is too slow"

While I must admit that the title of the post may seem too flashy, the main point I'm trying to make is not 'omg, the quotas are too low for this price', but rather: 'based on this experiment, Azure has given me too much trouble and hidden gotchas to consider it for small or middle-scale websites in the nearest future.'. Not notifying the user about pulling the plug on the website, or hiding a DB quota so deep in the documentation would not make a customer too happy. And while I've worked on (mostly non-Azure) cloud solutions for a couple of years and I'm prepared to read the fine print, I'm scared to imagine how a cloud newbie would feel about this.

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#36

Post by tiffanyh »

tszming wrote: post #11

Besides the fact that you are using the free ClearDB plan which is not supposed for production use (and it is not related to Microsoft anyway), Azure website (shared) is a preview product [1], with no SLA, you should not consider them for any serious use anyway, so you've made two mistakes here. [1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites

Does anyone have experience with ClearDB?

Good, bad, why would you use it?

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#37

Post by yuriyguts »

bhhaskin wrote: post #4

I think this is a case of you get what you pay for. $10/month is extremely cheap for hosting. Cheap hosts are great for sharing simple sites or (in the case of digital ocean) simple services with little foot traffic.

Since we're not a professional Internet media (it's not even a commercial project), when we don't hit HN top, the traffic is very low. Currently we're serving this post from a traditional hosting worth about $7/mo, and it handles the HN burst amazingly well.

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#38

Post by yuriyguts »

cwyers wrote: post #32
marcosdumay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take-aways that must came with yours: * There is no way to calculate memory usage, it's completely opaque. The first thing the author told was how he was controlling memory usage, but that does not reflect on Azure's number. Also, swapping is a bit better than just having your site taken down with no warning. * Nearly all hosting providers have "free" database providing included in their price. (And until I read that…

Well, no, he told us how he was controlling WordPress' memory usage, but not the web server's or PHP's. And Azure includes free databases, both SQL Server and MySQL, there's just limits (20mb). Which, y'know, is how it works.

I tried to add php_value memory_limit 128M in .htaccess (it's mentioned in the post), but I wasn't aware that Azure pays no attention to .htaccess and I should've been modifying web.config instead.

But I'm a tech guy. As a customer, I would expect Azure to configure the server and PHP on its own and not bother me with the quotas at all :)

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#39

Post by yuriyguts »

callumjones wrote: post #14

Here's the take-away from this post * You treated the system's memory like it was some infinite resource. It's not, you need to make sure your application efficiently handles memory and takes measure to ensure it doesn't grow too large. Would you want it swapping on a regular host? * You thought you could get away with a free database that is used for development. You're using an application that isn't built well for…

Good points, but I must disagree on some details:

* We did not develop the application from scratch and therefore we cannot control its memory consumption, especially if it's a garbage-collected environment. We used WordPress as an existing application template provided by Azure. The development on our side was only about developing a custom WP theme, which is 90% frontend development. The developers barely touched the server side, and we tried to configure the environment to consume not more than X MB.

* Regarding not being built well for shared environments: WordPress powers about 60 million sites in the world, and I bet the vast majority of them runs on a shared hosting. Currently, this blog post is served from one of them :) During the typical days, our traffic is really too low for a dedicated environment, so it would really be an overkill.

Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

#40

Post by cwyers »

yuriyguts wrote: post #38
cwyers wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, he told us how he was controlling WordPress' memory usage, but not the web server's or PHP's. And Azure includes free databases, both SQL Server and MySQL, there's just limits (20mb). Which, y'know, is how it works.

I tried to add php_value memory_limit 128M in .htaccess (it's mentioned in the post), but I wasn't aware that Azure pays no attention to .htaccess and I should've been modifying web.config instead. But I'm a tech guy. As a customer, I would expect Azure to configure the server and PHP on its own and not bother me with the quotas at all :)

You're a tech guy, and you expected IIS to use Apache configuration files?

EDIT: And as a customer, you're expecting managed hosting from a service that clearly isn't a managed hosting provider? Yeesh. There really are managed hosting providers in the world, if that's what you want.

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