Azure Cost Optimization - Effective use of Azure App Service and App Service Plans

Abstract

Azure cost optimization is becoming a reality and must do for every organization. Limiting cloud spend is top most priority for many organizations to continue the show. While Microsoft Azure drives organizations to perform “Digital Transformation” and “App Modernization”; the IT Heads are finding it difficult to keep the cost low for cloud services. This does not mean that Microsoft Azure do not offer you choices to bring your Azure cost down rather cloud approach is meant to bring your IT cost down. However if you are not doing smartly then obviously you are not getting most out of your Azure journey. I have seen mainly the ignorance from IT Heads, IT admins, Cloud Administrators and lack of knowledge [Most of the time I call it Laziness] causing much of the problems. Microsoft Azure gives you enough choices, ways and tools to make sure you optimize the Azure cost. Remember Azure Cost Optimization is a journey and you have to continuously monitor it.

As always, my dear [and of course lazy] followers keep asking to bring down Azure cost and what are the effective ways of doing it. For you guys [and girls] I have started a dedicated page for “Azure Cost Optimization”. On this page I will be adding the tricks and tips for Azure cost optimization. Link of this page can be found at the end of article or on the top.

Let’s go!

Why Azure App service for cost optimization?

How many of you have seen KeyNote of Satya Nadella held in July 2019 at Microsoft Inspire conference? If not go watch it. Refer to below screenshot –

It was stated that in next 5 years, 500 million apps/ applications will be created. When we talk about creating so many applications definitely major chunk will be web applications, REST API and web hosted applications. The question where will be those applications hosted. The service which is scalable, resilient and easy to configure will win the race. Azure App Service exactly fits into it. Azure App Service is a platform which makes it super easy for hosting web-based applications primarily. The current momentum of Azure App service is also amazing.

So obviously Azure App service is the primary way of hosting web applications and will increase exponentially in coming future. So in essence it is important for us to know how can we save cost when we host our applications on Azure App Service. 

The costliest resource on cloud – Compute

Microsoft Azure is made of 3 basic building blocks – Network, Storage and Compute. All services are built on top of these building blocks. For any computing, processing , analysis you need compute power. For Azure, “Compute” is the most costly resource as compared to Networking and Storage. If you save on Compute then you perform major cloud cost optimization.

In Azure App service, the compute, network and storage for your application is provided by Azure App Service Plans.

Understanding Azure App Service Plans

For simplicity you can consider App Service Plan is a service which provides you a VM on which you host your application. As App Service is PaaS you can not login/ RDP/ SSH to the VM provided by App Service Plans. So in essence when you say you are paying for Azure App service hosting, you are actually paying for App Service Plans.

App service plans provide –

      1.      Compute – CPU and Memory
2.      Storage
3.      Network
4.      Location – refers to Azure regions

What you provide to App Service Plan is your  -

      1.      Config files
2.      Contents
3.      And code

Note - Any web application can belong to only one App Service Plan.

App Service Plan Pricing Sku, Sizes

Azure App Service Plans are offered in 6 different sizes –

      1.      FREE
2.      Shared
3.      Basic
4.      Standard
5.      Premium
6.      Isolated

Let us understand them one by one.

FREE –

Free means free. You are not charged a single penny for running your application with FREE tier. And of course it comes with limitation. Free tier can run your application for only 60 CPU Min/ day. This is not 1 hour in your watch. This is CPU running minutes. Post this your application will stop functioning.

Shared –

Shared means you are packed with other folks. Consider one big VM behind the scene and all Shared/ FREE App Service Plan hosted application are grouped together and hosted inside this big VM. So you are using a part of resources offered by this big VM. Of course there is no SLA for these deployments and performance of the application will not be guaranteed at all. Below diagram shows the same –

Smiley in above screenshot is your application and blue color boxes are other applications running. So there can be other customer’s applications running on this big VM in FREE and Shared plans and hence they are not recommended for production deployments.

Did you catch it?

Well we discussed about FREE and Shared app service plans and how you are offered resources in shared manner. So this strategy of running applications in FREE and Shared mode itself can help you to save your cost of running application in Azure App Service!!

Did you understand? Let me elaborate more!

Consider a scenario where you have a laptop and you install IIS/ Tomcat on it. Now in this laptop you can run / host multiple web applications inside same Tomcat/ IIS. This is what you do when you have a VM and you deploy multiple web applications on web server [like IIS/ tomcat] inside it. Exactly the same way FREE and Shared App service Plans are doing. They are allowing you to host your application for testing purpose and at the same time they allow other customers applications also run inside the same big VM offered behind these App Service Plans.

And this strategy you can extend to DEDICATED VMs you get in BASIC, Standard, Premium and Isolated App service plans.

Cost optimization in App Service Plans which offers dedicated VMs

Basic, Standard, Premium and Isolated App Service Plans offer you dedicated VMs behind the scene for hosting your application and you are never packed with other folks. So the entire VM that you get as a part of the App service plan is completely yours!

Let us take an example of Standard app Service plan. When you deploy an application in Standard you get dedicated VM behind the scene on which you application runs as shown –

These plans also offer you very powerful capability of “AutoScale”. The autoscale can be configured based on various metrics.

Important - When you scale the app service, in essence you scale the App Service Plan only. Hence when you say run my application with Standard App Service Plan with 2 instances then 2 VMs will be created under same App Service Plan. On both VMs your application will be automatically deployed without you having to do anything [this is power of PaaS – Azure App Service]. This is shown below –

Now, see you have got a complete VM capacity [compute and RAM] under your app service plan. So just like traditional way here also you can run multiple applications on single app service plan. And this is the secret of azure cost optimization in Azure App service. And When you scale, all applications get the scale benefits. All applications will be deployed on multiple VMs that gets provisioned inside your App Service Plan. This is shown below –

So if you are paying let us say 100$ for running 2 instances under App Service Plan with single application, now you can run 2,3,4…N number of applications at the same price of 100$. This is big!

Let us see how can we run multiple application in App Service Plan from Azure portal.

Configure multiple application to run in Azure App Service Plan

First I created a resource group and then created App service plan in Standard sku with settings as shown below –

Now we will create 2 web apps and deploy in this same App Service Plan. To configure same app service plan for various different application make sure that you select the same App Service Plan we created in above step as shown below –

In above diagram I am mixing two different types of Apps in same App Service Plan. I have added web app and API app in the same Azure App Service Plan. Same can be viewed from App Service Plan as well as shown below –

So we just saw how can you run multiple Azure App Service type applications in Single App Service Plan.

Bonus Tip

So to save cost, shall we always run the multiple applications in Single App Service Plan? Definitely No.

Running multiple application in single App service Plan with multiple or single instance may not be right choice always. It is also recommended to have different app service plan per application if –

-          Your application is resource intensive

-          Application has different scaling factors from other apps present in the same plan

-          Or application needs different geo-graphical location altogether.

Conclusion

And that’s it! Hope this article has given you a way to perform Azure Cost Optimization in Azure App Service.

This is #3^rd tip in Azure Cost Optimization. Please treat this optimization page as yours and come forward to contribute. I expect this page to become one stop solution for all Azure Cost Optimization requirements. Refer to all other Tips - https://sanganakauthority.blogspot.com/p/azure-cost-optimization.html

Happy Azure Cost Optimization!!

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