Cloud Computing: How to Gain Peace of Mind with Spending Limits

Spending Limits:  Providing Peace of Mind to Everybody

It's a foregone conclusion that signing up subscribers to public cloud computing services requires a free test drive. All purveyors of IaaS and PaaS clouds offer free trials of varying durations and service levels¹.

Major cloud providers require submitting a valid credit card as the price of admission; some, such as HP, use the card for identification purposes only. Windows Azure has offered a variety of free trials since Microsoft released its flagship PaaS offering to the Web on February 1, 2010. Many IT operations and software development folks were reluctant to put their personal credit at risk of unlimited charges if they accidentally exceeded free resource limits, such as compute hours or GBs of data transfer.

Microsoft provided a solution that brings peace of mind to both the individual developer and to the manager of a team of developers when in December of 2011, it added the ability to set a spending limit. New users starting on or after that date can cap usage of Windows Azure resources to free trial limits.  This change was in conjunction with a major overhaul of the Widows Azure Web site (see Figure 1)

Figure 1. The new Windows Azure Web site landing page, as well as most other pages, includes a one-click link to the free-trial offering page at the upper right. The entire site sports a Metro-influenced design.

Another goal of the site redesign was to simplify the process of discovering, selecting and signing up for a free Windows Azure trial. Click the free-trial link to open the Windows Azure 3 Month Free Trial page, if you're not logged in with the Windows Live ID you used previously to create an Azure subscription. Otherwise, click the manage link. Clicking the See All Free Trial Details link opens a longer 3-Month Free Trial Page shown in part by Figure 2.

Figure 2. The 3-Month Free Trial details page lists the amount of each type of Windows Azure resources you receive. The page describes the pay-as-you go pricing that applies if you decline the $0 (USD) Spending cap and exceed the free usage limits.

Click the page's Read more about how Spending Limit works link to display a page that includes the following text:

Note: The former e-mail warning messages to trial subscribers sent when usage reached 75, 100 and 125 percent of free limits have been discontinued. Users with MSDN subscriber benefits for free Windows Azure and SQL Azure services might receive a renewal notice and a subscription name change to "Windows Azure Trial," but the spending limit doesn't apply to these subscriptions. Administrators can change the new subscription name by clicking the Edit Subscription Details link on the account Summary page to open a Make It Yours dialog with Subscription Name and Service Administrator text boxes.

Sign Up for the Trial

The new spending limit erases excuses for not giving Windows Azure a trial run. So click the Sign Up Now or Buy Now button on either 3 Month Free Trial page to display a Windows Live ID sign-in page. Signing in opens an "It Appears That You Are New to Windows Azure" page with the dialog shown in Figure 3 superimposed.

Figure 3. Users without MSDN subscriber or Microsoft Partner Cloud Essentials benefits see the first of three dialogs listing free Windows Azure resources.

Click the Right Arrow to display the Verify Your Account dialog. Enter your cellphone number and click the Send Text Message button. In a minute or so, you'll receive the verification code. Alternatively, click the Need Help Verifying Your Account link for instructions about calling Microsoft to obtain the code. Click the button to the right of the verification text box to acknowledge receipt and add a green check mark (see Figure 4.)

Figure 4. Verify your account by providing your cellphone number; typing the code you receive in the lower text box, and confirming the entry.

Click the right arrow to display dialog 3. After you submit your credit card details, a Welcome Back page opens. Click the Account button to open the Subscriptions page that displays your new account with a + link to add subscriptions (see Figure 5.) You'll also receive Purchase Confirmation and Welcome to 3-Month Free Trial messages by email.

Figure 5. The Subscriptions page acknowledges your new 3-Month Free Trial. Clicking the Add Subscription link opens a list of options for changing to pay-as-you go billing or 6-month plans for Windows Azure and SQL Azure that offer a discount in return for a six-month commitment.

The signup process makes sure that users don't lose free Windows Azure benefits to which they might be entitled. If you're an MSDN Professional or higher subscriber or are entitled to Microsoft Partner Cloud Essentials benefits, and if you log in with the Windows Live ID that you assigned to your subscription or Cloud Essentials program, you will see the dialog shown in Figure 6 or a similar one for Cloud Essentials.

Figure 6. MSDN Professional or higher subscribers receive benefits that increase with subscription grade and remain in effect for the duration of the subscription. Visual Studio Ultimate subscribers receive compute hours sufficient to run two small compute instances continuously. Two compute instances qualify for Windows Azure's 99.9% availability Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Monitor Your Resource Usage for More Peace of Mind

After receiving and entering your verification code, when you sign in with your Windows Live ID and click the Accounts link at the top of the page, a Summary page for your subscription opens (see Figure 7.)

Figure 7. The summary page indicates the total amount of resources of each category that are included in your trial with gray bars. (Values are for my Visual Studio Ultimate benefit.) Blue bars indicate usage to date. These results are for 9 days of the month of December 2011. 43% of storage transactions have been consumed in 30% of the month as the result of enabling detailed Windows Azure Storage Analytics, which are stored in table and blob storage.

Click the Billing History link at the top of the page to display a list of charges to your credit card to date (see Figure 8.)

Figure 8. Here are the last five of nine months of billing history for my Visual Studio Ultimate subscription on the first page. (Click the Older link at the bottom of the page to display earlier bills, if any.) The ~$3.50 charges are for exceeding the free storage transactions limit, as mentioned in Figure 7's caption. The $43.38 charge includes about $40.00 resulting from incorrectly specifying two Extra-Small instead of two Small compute instances.

Manage Your Hosted Services, Create a Storage Account, and Add a SQL Azure Database

Click the Manage link on the Account Overview or Billing History page to redirect and login, if requested, to the Windows Azure Management Portal, which opens with Getting Started details for the New Portal and Windows Azure. Click the navigation pane's Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN button to open the Deployment Health page and click the Subscriptions row's Active (1) link in the Status column to open the Properties page for Hosted Services (see Figure 9.)

Figure 9. The Windows Azure Management Portal's Hosted Services page displays the properties of the 3-Month Free Trial subscription. Deploying a C# or VB Cloud project from Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1 increments the number of hosted services to 1 and enables the icons in the Deployments, Instances and Remote Access groups.

To create a new storage account click the Storage Accounts (0) node in the navigation pane to display the Storage and Custom Domain groups and click the New Storage Account icon to open the Create a New Storage Account dialog (see Figure 10.)

Figure 10. Creating a new storage account requires adding a URL prefix and selecting one of six Microsoft data centers that support Windows Azure or three geographic regions that contain two data centers. Alternatively, you can create an affinity group that you can use to group Azure storage and deployed instances in a single location.

After you add the URL prefix and select a region or add an affinity group, click OK to create the first storage account, which takes a few minutes to generate and to resolve its DNS name. This process enables all icons in the Storage group (see Figure 11.)

Figure 11. The first storage account and AGSouthCentralUS affinity group added to the 3 Month Free Trial account. Click the View Access Keys icon to open a dialog with Base64-encoded (secret) access keys to specify the Windows Azure storage account for Visual Studio projects and third-party storage management utilities.

Tip: Search the CodePlex community site with "Azure table" and "Azure blob" phrases to discover more than 84 open-source projects for populating and managing Access storage.

The last step in setting up your trial account is to create a SQL Azure server and, optionally, database in the SQL Azure Portal. Click the navigation pane's Database button to display the Subscription, Server, Database, Import and Export CTP and View ribbon groups. Click the 3-Month Free Trial subscription node to enable the Server Group's Create button. Click that button to open the Create a New Server dialog and select the same region you specified for your storage account.

Click Next to open a second dialog, type an administrative user name and password, which must contain at least eight characters and contain three of the four following classes:

Confirm the password and click next to open a dialog for adding firewall rules to permit direct access by IP address. Click Add to open a dialog that displays the IP address range to enable for server access, 66.123.163.242 through 66.123.163.245 for the example of Figure 12.

Figure 12. This dialog lets you enable one or more IP address ranges to access the SQL Azure server. The dialog displays the auto detected address of your computer. To allow server access from any IP address, specify a range of 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. However, enabling public access to a database is uncommon; in most cases, only your Windows Azure Web or worker roles access the database. Click OK to return to the first dialog.

Mark the Allow Other Windows Azure Services to Access This Server check box to permit your hosted services to access the server, as shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13. The Create a New Server dialog lets you control what IP addresses, including those used by Windows Azure services, can access the new server you're creating.

Click Finish to return to the Subscription Information pane and select the 3-Month Free Trial subscription. Click to select the new server name you added in the server names list to enable icons in the Server, Database and Import and Export CTP groups, as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14. Creating a new server adds its details to the servers list and populates its Properties pane. Selecting a server in the list enables many other administrative operations, such as adding a database.

Click the Database group's Create button to open the Create Database dialog, type a name for the database, and accept the 1-GB Web Database default, as shown in Figure 15.

Figure 15. The 3-Month Free Trial subscription includes the smallest (1-GB, maximum) Web database. The largest Web database is 5 GB. Business databases range in size from 10-GB to 150-GB.

Click OK to create the database and return to the Subscription Information page. Expand the server node to display an item in the navigation pane for the new database, OakmontU for this example. Select the database to display its Properties pane (see Figure 16.)

Figure 16. The Database Information screen provides basic properties of new databases.

The primary programmatic difference between connecting to SQL Server and SQL Azure are database connection strings. Click the Connection Strings group's View button to open a connection string dialog, which contains sample strings (without passwords) for ADO.NET, ODBC, PHP and JDBC programs (see Figure 17.)

Figure 17. SQL Azure connection strings for ADO.NET, ODBC, PHP and JDBC programming are similar to those for SQL Server. SQL Azure requires SQL Server authentication; it doesn't support Windows authentication.

Microsoft provides several tools for moving data from existing databases into SQL Azure, including the SQL Azure Migration Wizard, now in version 3.8; SQL Server Migration Assistant 5.1 automates migrating Oracle, Sybase, MySQL and Microsoft Access databases to SQL Azure.

In Conclusion

The simplicity of provisioning the hosted service, storage account, database server and database for the 3-Month Free Trial as described here demonstrates the primary advantage of PaaS compared to IaaS offerings. Now that Microsoft has removed the last hurdle—inadvertent credit card charges—for trial subscriptions, it's time for developers who haven't dipped their toes in cloud computing waters to take a deep dive.

Reference

How much are free cloud computing services worth? Article for offers by Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, and Windows Azure.

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