Getting more bang for your buck from a Windows Azure solution can be achieved by paying attention to implementation details.
Asking the right questions will make a drastic difference.
- Do your roles have the right sizes? Choosing the right compute virtual machine size.
- Does your data really belong in your SQL database?
- Are your processes generating too many storage transactions?
- Are you transferring data between data centers?
- Are you using the right combination of services?
- Should you be using Service Bus Queues or Storage Queues?
- Do you really need Caching? If so, what kind and how big should it be?
- How many role instances do you really need to provide a reliable/ acceptable end user experience?
- How fresh does your presentation data really need to be? 5, 10, 60, 120 minutes old?
- How often should you be polling a Queue which is empty for most of the day? Use back off strategies.
- Should you be using CDN?
- Is your data compressed? Surprisingly, Size Matters in The Cloud!
These questions may seem like small details that don’t matter much. But they will greatly matter when it comes down to the application operation costs. When developing solutions around Windows Azure it’s imperative to keep an eye on details, because in the end, all that really matters is how much revenue is generated from an investment.
Are your applications using all the resources made available to them by the services you are paying for?
Alexandre Brisebois ☁ 