This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.
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This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.
Read the full post
In our previous articles, Introduction to SQL Server 2012 and Windows Azure Overview, we made references to Microsoft’s SQL Azure service. In this article we will take a closer look at its main features in more detail.
SQL Azure is a relational database solution with the capability to support both Windows Azure and on-premise applications with minimum latency. It is considered a managed service and it’s offered by Microsoft to allow you to build applications without concerning yourself about the storage they’ll use. Being a cloud service, SQL Azure gives you all the benefits of the cloud including:
- The hardware and software that support the SQL database are all managed by Microsoft
- Patching and maintenance are also managed by Microsoft
- High availability and fault tolerance are guaranteed by an SLA (Service-level agreement)
- Per usage billing and the availability to scale up or down whenever you have the need
All these features contribute to SQL Azure’s eased management. The service-level agreement is backed up by powerful and extremely secure datacenters offering you maximum protection of your databases. SQL Azure is built entirely on top of SQL Server and offers most of SQL Server’s features, such as the Tabular Data Streams (TDSs) for connecting, databases with tables, views, stored procedures, indexes, etc. They are all managed using the standard T-SQL language. SQL Azure allows you to store up to 150 GB of information in your database. If you need more storage for a database, you will have to spread it out over multiple databases and use parallel queries
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This blog post is part of the blog post series on Windows Azure. You can read the rest of this series here (part1 ; part2 ; part3).
There are very few organizations that apply as many security measures as Microsoft does for its Windows Azure service.
Listed below are some of the precautions Microsoft has implemented for Windows Azure to secure your applications and data:
For almost every organization, the datacenter is somewhere inside it. It’s not that hard for an intruder to find out the exact location. Microsoft keeps the information on the wherabouts of their datacenters strictly confidential.
Knowing all the different features of Windows Azure and what the corresponding fees are, can help you estimate your expenses for running an application in the cloud. It can also help you develop new applications in a way that they consume lower numbers of billable resources — drastically reducing your monthly bill.
Each instance of your Azure application runs on a separate virtual machine. You have to choose the type of these virtual machines depending on the needs of your application. Microsoft has provided the following details for comparison:
| Size | CPU cores | Memory | Disk Space Web / Worker Role |
Disk Space VM Role |
Bandwidth (Mbps) |
Cost Per Hour |
| ExtraSmall | Shared | 768 MB | ~ 20 GB | 20 GB | 5 | $0.04 |
| Small | 1 | 1.75 GB | ~ 230 GB | 165 GB | 100 | $0.12 |
| Medium | 2 | 3.5 GB | ~ 500 GB | 340 GB | 200 | $0.24 |
| Large | 4 | 7 GB | ~ 1 TB | 850 GB | 400 | $0.48 |
| ExtraLarge | 8 | 14 GB | ~ 2 TB | 1890 GB | 800 | $0.96 |
In the previous article in the Monitis blog we discussed the design of Windows Azure. In this article we will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of using that design — compared to an on-premises solution.
Let’s first look at the advantages of using Windows Azure:
As with other cloud services, Windows Azure charges the subscriber on per use basis. What this means is that if your application needs only two instances in the beginning, you will only pay for these two instances. At the moment your application starts needing four instances for example, you will start getting charged for those extra instances. This pricing model makes Windows Azure a great platform for applications that occasionally need a lot more resources than normal. It completely eliminates the need to purchase expensive hardware and software for building your applications.
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Monitis GFI is a specialist provider of web and Cloud monitoring services that include website monitoring, site load testing, transaction monitoring, application and database monitoring, Cloud resource monitoring, and server and internal network monitoring within one easy-to-use dashboard. Over 100,000 users worldwide have chosen Monitis as their provider of choice to increase uptime and user experience of their services and products. What makes Monitis' solutions different is that they are fast to deploy, feature-rich in technology and provide a comprehensive single-pane view of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and applications.