Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

What is a back-off mechanism? It's one of the most basic mechanism used for communication between two systems. The core idea of this mechanism is to decrease the frequency of requests send from system A to system B if there are no data or communication issues are detected. There are multiple implementation of this system, but I'm 100% sure that you use it directly of indirectly. A retry mechanism that increase the time period is a back-off mechanism. Why it is important in cloud solutions? In contrast with a classical system, a cloud subscription will come at the end of the month with a bill details that will contain all the costs. People discover often too late that there are many services where you pay also for each request (transaction) that you do on that service. For example, each request that is done to Azure Storage or to Azure Service Bus is billable. Of course the price is extremely low - Azure Service Bus costs is around 4 cents for 1.000.000 requests, but when ...

Calculating the cost consumption for a solution that runs in cloud can be sometimes challenging. First of all you need do a forecast of how many resources are required and secondly you need to put on the paper all things that are billable by the cloud provider. Azure Price Calculator The pricing calculator offered by Microsoft for Azure is a nice tool, that helps you to take into account all the items. It is able to persist the cost even if you close the tab and when you are done you can export it to an excel file. For basic estimations is good, but I expect that you'll end up pretty fast with a complex excel. Excel Calculator In the last few years, I was involved at least 2 time per month in Azure consumption estimations for different projects - from the small one that consume a few hundreds of euros per month to big ones where you end up with a bill that has six or seven figures per year.  You'll find different templates on the internet that you can use and ...