We are now beginning our enjoyable journey of moving DocRead and DocSurvey to the Cloud. As you can imagine we are busy researching the various areas that need to be taken into account to move a solution such as ours to the Cloud. We are intending to share and discuss as much of this as possible – so that we can learn and others can also learn from the discussions here.
So, onto the question …
DocRead requires it’s own database and also several background jobs to process tasks, monitor audiences / groups and also to synchronise metadata from SharePoint into our DB. In large orgs we also send a ton of e-mail to remind people to read those documents! These (along with a few other pieces) mandate that we will need to utilise a separate Cloud Service to host the database and also do the processing away from 365. We also want to host a version SharePoint Foundation for customers that don’t have 365, On-Premise SharePoint or are still using SharePoint 2007.
- How much does Azure cost and how does that compare to the likes of Fpweb.net / Amazon?
- Is hosting one Farm (with multi-tenants) still the way to go?
- Is it trivial to pay for more capacity (as we need it) and how fast can we upgrade?Â
- What monitoring tools are in place?
- What’s the SLA with Azure?
I am researching this as we speak, so will share …
Mark,
Scaling
If you have 5 instances of your VM running, you can set rules (based on CPU usage) to autoscale.
This means it will automatically turn on or turn off an instance based on CPU usage rules.
Availability
availability is something you might want to take a look at.
Depending on your Azure set up (considering how many instances you will run), the SLA will be different.
For instance:
For Cloud Services, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains, your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time.
- For all Internet facing Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set, we guarantee you will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time.
- For Virtual Network, we guarantee a 99.9% Virtual Network Gateway availability.
Monitoring
This is worth looking at if you want to monitor your Azure environment.
Hope it helps.
