6 ms·

How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production

85 points by yuriyguts 12y ago

Some hidden gotchas you may encounter when using Azure Web Sites, especially in Shared mode and/or with LAMP stack.

codfrantic 12y ago
Is it actually common to limit users on cpu/memory use this way? I'd expect the limitations to simply be based on the resources made available to your processes...
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  These limits seem weird to me. CPU is a compressible resource. You can get by with less, and it's OK to temporarily soak up available surplus. Memory is incompressible. Either you can allocate it or you can't. It's not OK to "burst" in terms of space because you can't take memory away from a process. It has to give it up freely. So these are two completely unalike resources that should be treated very differently. A process routinely overusing CPU can simply be capped to a certain rate (I assume you can do this on Windows) but a process that grows too large should simply crash. It doesn't make any sense to take down an application for an hour because it used to much memory. I suspect that the reason for this enforcement is that Azure has taken some liberties with the isolation between sites and they can't figure out how to charge resources properly. But that is their problem and it shouldn't leak out through the interface and harm the customer.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  Yes, it's common but handled a little more idiomatically, by presenting your available resources as VM/instance/machine. Of course, you aren't given the ability to exceed those metrics in a traditional cloud environment.
edandersen 12y ago
Probably best to add "...for PHP Wordpress sites" to the title.
- scoj 12y ago
  I think that's very true. Azure websites is overall a great ASP.NET solution (one I'm planning on moving my SaaS product to).
bhhaskin 12y ago
I think this is a case of you get what you pay for. $10/month is extremely cheap for hosting. Cheap hosts are great for sharing simple sites or (in the case of digital ocean) simple services with little foot traffic.
- yuriyguts 12y ago
  Since we're not a professional Internet media (it's not even a commercial project), when we don't hit HN top, the traffic is very low. Currently we're serving this post from a traditional hosting worth about $7/mo, and it handles the HN burst amazingly well.
scoj 12y ago
Funny, I have all my SharpPLM stuff on Azure (free with Bizspark!). So I was going to set up a blog with Wordpress just like you guys did. Same initial experience, it was super easy and quick to get up and running. I haven't fully made it 'live' yet, but this gives me some pause whether I should. I think the WAWS platform is good overall, but there is probably too many layers of 'magic' happening under the skirt for this to be a great solution yet.
- facorreia 12y ago
  If you're using MySQL, make sure to select the appropriate plan tier, since the free tier is very limited and not meant for production. And put your configuration in IIS config files and/or in the Azure management portal. It doesn't run on Apache, so Apache configuration files will be ignored.
facorreia 12y ago
There are sure a number of things to keep in mind when migrating to Azure Web Sites. For instance, since it runs on IIS, Apache configuration files (.htaccess) won't have any effect. And the free MySQL plan is meant for development, not for production use.
outside1234 12y ago
I run a Wordpress site on Websites and it works great. Its not cheap hosting (I'm running a business so I just want my stuff all in one place) but it has been very solid when used at Standard with a paid MySQL database option (the free tier is for development - not production).
darksim905 12y ago
So because these guys are either bad at coding, had a site that was on heavy load for that service, or what else you want to call it, an entire platform isn't ready for service? Get real. From everything he told me, if I had a real site & wanted to make use of a lot of things for cheap I'd go for their free tier in a heartbeat.
- pekk 12y ago
  HN uses this reasoning all the time. For example, "I don't know how to use language x, so language x sucks for sysadmins" or "I don't know how to use language x, so it is too slow"
  - yuriyguts 12y ago
    While I must admit that the title of the post may seem too flashy, the main point I'm trying to make is not 'omg, the quotas are too low for this price', but rather: 'based on this experiment, Azure has given me too much trouble and hidden gotchas to consider it for small or middle-scale websites in the nearest future.'. Not notifying the user about pulling the plug on the website, or hiding a DB quota so deep in the documentation would not make a customer too happy. And while I've worked on (mostly non-Azure) cloud solutions for a couple of years and I'm prepared to read the fine print, I'm scared to imagine how a cloud newbie would feel about this.
tszming 12y ago
Besides the fact that you are using the free ClearDB plan which is not supposed for production use (and it is not related to Microsoft anyway), Azure website (shared) is a preview product [1], with no SLA, you should not consider them for any serious use anyway, so you've made two mistakes here. [1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites
- dav-id 12y ago
  Not only is the shared tier a preview product it also releases itself from memory when inactive which results in a slow warm up after this happens and a visitor lands on your site. Great for a personal blog but for a business where your customers expect things instantly, it is not so good.
  - pionar 12y ago
    > it also releases itself from memory when inactive. That's the nature of application pools in IIS. If the app pool goes inactive for a time, IIS kills the w3wp process running the app. You can set the timeout in the web.config (not in front of code right now, don't know the exact incantations). Does WAWS respect that? Though, the shutdown would be a good thing for a small site like what WAWS is intended for, because when the site isn't running, it's not still using resources. In my company's environment (our own datacenter), our monitoring tools keep the app pool from "timing out" because it hits a status page every 2 minutes. We manually (through a script) recycle app pools at a given time every night.
    - ahmelsayed 12y ago
      While that is absolutely true for IIS and the Shared tier in Azure Websites (although it's fully configurable if you own the IIS box[1]), Dedicated tiers (when you own the whole VM) in Azure have a feature called Always On[2] Where there is no idle Time-out on the app itself, so even if the app remained idle for days, w3wp process won't be killed. Also if the app happen to shutdown for any reason (machine restart, Azure Update, Windows Update, app crash, etc) Azure Websites will make sure to send a request to the app to start it up and warm it, then the app can use Application Initialization[3] to do any more complex warmup [1] http://serverfault.com/a/595215/219792 http://serverfault.com/a/595215/219792 [2] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-configure/#howtochangeconfig http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-... [3] http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8/iis-80-application-initialization http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8/iis-...
pistle 12y ago
The free/cheap tier is pretty limiting especially for many modern CMS and unoptimized PHP type things. If your CMS is caching, big memory footprint and some DB thrashing. If you aren't caching, big DB thrashing and some memory consumption. I'd like a little more flexibility with the lower tiers since I've been "quotad" by memory limits when caching goes bonkers during CMS updates. Something like short-term overage allowances with warnings.
callumjones 12y ago
Here's the take-away from this post * You treated the system's memory like it was some infinite resource. It's not, you need to make sure your application efficiently handles memory and takes measure to ensure it doesn't grow too large. Would you want it swapping on a regular host? * You thought you could get away with a free database that is used for development. You're using an application that isn't built well for shared environments, it expects dedicated hosting. You'd be better off designing your blog around Azure Web Sites, knowing the advantages and disadvantages of the platform and taking advantage of them. Don't try to shoehorn it in.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Take-aways that must came with yours: * There is no way to calculate memory usage, it's completely opaque. The first thing the author told was how he was controlling memory usage, but that does not reflect on Azure's number. Also, swapping is a bit better than just having your site taken down with no warning. * Nearly all hosting providers have "free" database providing included in their price. (And until I read that artile, I wouldn't even think on adding that "nearly" at the beggining.) But yes, you shold know your environment, and not shoehorn it in.
  - kgreene2 12y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with nearly all hosting providers having free database services. Azure seems like it intends to be a competitor to AWS and Rackspace, both of which charge for their cloud databases. AWS RDS Pricing - https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/ Rackspace Cloud Database Pricing - http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/databases/pricing/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/databases/pricing/
    - twistedpair 12y ago
      Paying for provisioned performance is a pretty good idea, but the general script kiddie audience wants stuff to "just work." Obviously there is a divide between SLA quality services and bulk shared services like PHP on Dreamhost.
beachstartup 12y ago
golden rule of hosting / paas: the less someone pays, the more difficult they will be to satisfy. this holds all the way down to $0 (free), in which case, the customer is almost never satisfied. because they're getting almost no value for no money.
- yuriyguts 12y ago
  Very good point. But the main message I was trying to deliver is not about the bang for the buck, but rather the amount of issues/decisions WAWS tries to offload to the users instead of handling them intelligently on its side. It's not hard to send an email message, or automatically configure web.config knowing the predefined quota, but the impact on customer satisfaction could be huge.
quarterto 12y ago
> Error establishing a database connection I see what they did there
chuckouellet 12y ago
Our SaaS is on Azure Websites until day one and it has been a pleasure to use, since they added the Always On feature and the new SQL Database pricing tier that allows you to have more robusts SQL databases everything runs very smoothly and fast. We can deploy several times a day without having any downtimes, load balancing, etc.
eropple 12y ago
The bigger question, gone unanswered, is why your WordPress blog is configured such that three users can tap out 512MB of RAM. I run a few nontrivial WP installs averaging a couple thousand hits a day on 256MB VMs. My hunch is that anything that actually needs to tap out 512MB of RAM should be running on a plan that's more than $10/month.
- yuriyguts 12y ago
  Please see the details in my post, I tried to limit RAM usage via usual WordPress configuration tricks, but Azure didn't seem to respond. Perhaps an even bigger question is: why Azure hasn't configured the site itself, if it imposes quotas on it.
  - carlospaulino 12y ago
    This is a mistake on your part, because IIS ignores the .htaccess file. Azure web sites uses a .user.ini file to setup php. See the documentation here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-php-configure/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-...
  - eropple 12y ago
    I read the post, thanks. Setting aside that .htaccess is Apache-only, needing to allocate 128M per request in WordPress doesn't ring any alarm bells for you? Every trivial WP site I've ever run worked comfortably with under 64M/request (and then you use use supercache, static caching, etc. to reduce the average individual request to something in the single digits). Azure doesn't configure it for you because it assumes you're knowledgeable. It reacts more harshly than I'd like for sure if you go over, but expecting you to do your work (for cheap) doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
numlocked 12y ago
I'm not sure where you expect to get great wordpress hosting for "10 times less" than $69/mo. That's not very much spend for a commercial website. Pagely, which has the scale economics advantage of doing nothing but hosting WP sites, starts at $24/mo. To hit the baseline level of "production readiness" with Heroku is going to run you at least $85/mo (2 dynos, 1 free, 1 @ $35/mo + $50/mo postgres instance). If Azure really wasn't sending log events that memory quotas were being exceeded then I agree the alerting leaves something to be desired. But the DB quota was clearly sending "database error" log messages. Dunno what else you want them to do there.
- yuriyguts 12y ago
  Well, currently we're running the blog on a traditional shared hosting that costs less than $10/mo (you can easily find out which one :)) and it handles the blog amazingly well, even during HN bursts. The blog itself it not our primary line of duty, more of a side project actually. So when there's no new updates, it's quiet enough for a shared hosting to handle.
gtirloni 12y ago
After they mentioned they were using the shared instance I just stopped reading.
cwyers 12y ago
tl;dr: Using Apache config files to configure IIS doesn't work.

85 points by yuriyguts 12y ago

Some hidden gotchas you may encounter when using Azure Web Sites, especially in Shared mode and/or with LAMP stack.

Is it actually common to limit users on cpu/memory use this way? I'd expect the limitations to simply be based on the resources made available to your processes...

thrownaway2424 12y ago
These limits seem weird to me. CPU is a compressible resource. You can get by with less, and it's OK to temporarily soak up available surplus. Memory is incompressible. Either you can allocate it or you can't. It's not OK to "burst" in terms of space because you can't take memory away from a process. It has to give it up freely. So these are two completely unalike resources that should be treated very differently. A process routinely overusing CPU can simply be capped to a certain rate (I assume you can do this on Windows) but a process that grows too large should simply crash. It doesn't make any sense to take down an application for an hour because it used to much memory. I suspect that the reason for this enforcement is that Azure has taken some liberties with the isolation between sites and they can't figure out how to charge resources properly. But that is their problem and it shouldn't leak out through the interface and harm the customer.
nkozyra 12y ago
Yes, it's common but handled a little more idiomatically, by presenting your available resources as VM/instance/machine. Of course, you aren't given the ability to exceed those metrics in a traditional cloud environment.

edandersen 12y ago

Probably best to add "...for PHP Wordpress sites" to the title.

scoj 12y ago
I think that's very true. Azure websites is overall a great ASP.NET solution (one I'm planning on moving my SaaS product to).

bhhaskin 12y ago

I think this is a case of you get what you pay for. $10/month is extremely cheap for hosting. Cheap hosts are great for sharing simple sites or (in the case of digital ocean) simple services with little foot traffic.

yuriyguts 12y ago
Since we're not a professional Internet media (it's not even a commercial project), when we don't hit HN top, the traffic is very low. Currently we're serving this post from a traditional hosting worth about $7/mo, and it handles the HN burst amazingly well.

scoj 12y ago

Funny, I have all my SharpPLM stuff on Azure (free with Bizspark!). So I was going to set up a blog with Wordpress just like you guys did. Same initial experience, it was super easy and quick to get up and running. I haven't fully made it 'live' yet, but this gives me some pause whether I should. I think the WAWS platform is good overall, but there is probably too many layers of 'magic' happening under the skirt for this to be a great solution yet.

facorreia 12y ago
If you're using MySQL, make sure to select the appropriate plan tier, since the free tier is very limited and not meant for production. And put your configuration in IIS config files and/or in the Azure management portal. It doesn't run on Apache, so Apache configuration files will be ignored.

facorreia 12y ago

There are sure a number of things to keep in mind when migrating to Azure Web Sites. For instance, since it runs on IIS, Apache configuration files (.htaccess) won't have any effect. And the free MySQL plan is meant for development, not for production use.

outside1234 12y ago

I run a Wordpress site on Websites and it works great. Its not cheap hosting (I'm running a business so I just want my stuff all in one place) but it has been very solid when used at Standard with a paid MySQL database option (the free tier is for development - not production).

darksim905 12y ago

So because these guys are either bad at coding, had a site that was on heavy load for that service, or what else you want to call it, an entire platform isn't ready for service? Get real. From everything he told me, if I had a real site & wanted to make use of a lot of things for cheap I'd go for their free tier in a heartbeat.

pekk 12y ago
HN uses this reasoning all the time. For example, "I don't know how to use language x, so language x sucks for sysadmins" or "I don't know how to use language x, so it is too slow"
- yuriyguts 12y ago
  While I must admit that the title of the post may seem too flashy, the main point I'm trying to make is not 'omg, the quotas are too low for this price', but rather: 'based on this experiment, Azure has given me too much trouble and hidden gotchas to consider it for small or middle-scale websites in the nearest future.'. Not notifying the user about pulling the plug on the website, or hiding a DB quota so deep in the documentation would not make a customer too happy. And while I've worked on (mostly non-Azure) cloud solutions for a couple of years and I'm prepared to read the fine print, I'm scared to imagine how a cloud newbie would feel about this.

tszming 12y ago

Besides the fact that you are using the free ClearDB plan which is not supposed for production use (and it is not related to Microsoft anyway), Azure website (shared) is a preview product [1], with no SLA, you should not consider them for any serious use anyway, so you've made two mistakes here. [1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites

dav-id 12y ago
Not only is the shared tier a preview product it also releases itself from memory when inactive which results in a slow warm up after this happens and a visitor lands on your site. Great for a personal blog but for a business where your customers expect things instantly, it is not so good.
- pionar 12y ago
  > it also releases itself from memory when inactive. That's the nature of application pools in IIS. If the app pool goes inactive for a time, IIS kills the w3wp process running the app. You can set the timeout in the web.config (not in front of code right now, don't know the exact incantations). Does WAWS respect that? Though, the shutdown would be a good thing for a small site like what WAWS is intended for, because when the site isn't running, it's not still using resources. In my company's environment (our own datacenter), our monitoring tools keep the app pool from "timing out" because it hits a status page every 2 minutes. We manually (through a script) recycle app pools at a given time every night.
  - ahmelsayed 12y ago
    While that is absolutely true for IIS and the Shared tier in Azure Websites (although it's fully configurable if you own the IIS box[1]), Dedicated tiers (when you own the whole VM) in Azure have a feature called Always On[2] Where there is no idle Time-out on the app itself, so even if the app remained idle for days, w3wp process won't be killed. Also if the app happen to shutdown for any reason (machine restart, Azure Update, Windows Update, app crash, etc) Azure Websites will make sure to send a request to the app to start it up and warm it, then the app can use Application Initialization[3] to do any more complex warmup [1] http://serverfault.com/a/595215/219792 http://serverfault.com/a/595215/219792 [2] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-configure/#howtochangeconfig http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-... [3] http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8/iis-80-application-initialization http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8/iis-...

pistle 12y ago

The free/cheap tier is pretty limiting especially for many modern CMS and unoptimized PHP type things. If your CMS is caching, big memory footprint and some DB thrashing. If you aren't caching, big DB thrashing and some memory consumption. I'd like a little more flexibility with the lower tiers since I've been "quotad" by memory limits when caching goes bonkers during CMS updates. Something like short-term overage allowances with warnings.

callumjones 12y ago

Here's the take-away from this post * You treated the system's memory like it was some infinite resource. It's not, you need to make sure your application efficiently handles memory and takes measure to ensure it doesn't grow too large. Would you want it swapping on a regular host? * You thought you could get away with a free database that is used for development. You're using an application that isn't built well for shared environments, it expects dedicated hosting. You'd be better off designing your blog around Azure Web Sites, knowing the advantages and disadvantages of the platform and taking advantage of them. Don't try to shoehorn it in.

marcosdumay 12y ago
Take-aways that must came with yours: * There is no way to calculate memory usage, it's completely opaque. The first thing the author told was how he was controlling memory usage, but that does not reflect on Azure's number. Also, swapping is a bit better than just having your site taken down with no warning. * Nearly all hosting providers have "free" database providing included in their price. (And until I read that artile, I wouldn't even think on adding that "nearly" at the beggining.) But yes, you shold know your environment, and not shoehorn it in.
- kgreene2 12y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with nearly all hosting providers having free database services. Azure seems like it intends to be a competitor to AWS and Rackspace, both of which charge for their cloud databases. AWS RDS Pricing - https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/ Rackspace Cloud Database Pricing - http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/databases/pricing/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/databases/pricing/
  - twistedpair 12y ago
    Paying for provisioned performance is a pretty good idea, but the general script kiddie audience wants stuff to "just work." Obviously there is a divide between SLA quality services and bulk shared services like PHP on Dreamhost.

beachstartup 12y ago

golden rule of hosting / paas: the less someone pays, the more difficult they will be to satisfy. this holds all the way down to $0 (free), in which case, the customer is almost never satisfied. because they're getting almost no value for no money.

yuriyguts 12y ago
Very good point. But the main message I was trying to deliver is not about the bang for the buck, but rather the amount of issues/decisions WAWS tries to offload to the users instead of handling them intelligently on its side. It's not hard to send an email message, or automatically configure web.config knowing the predefined quota, but the impact on customer satisfaction could be huge.

quarterto 12y ago

> Error establishing a database connection I see what they did there

chuckouellet 12y ago

Our SaaS is on Azure Websites until day one and it has been a pleasure to use, since they added the Always On feature and the new SQL Database pricing tier that allows you to have more robusts SQL databases everything runs very smoothly and fast. We can deploy several times a day without having any downtimes, load balancing, etc.

eropple 12y ago

The bigger question, gone unanswered, is why your WordPress blog is configured such that three users can tap out 512MB of RAM. I run a few nontrivial WP installs averaging a couple thousand hits a day on 256MB VMs. My hunch is that anything that actually needs to tap out 512MB of RAM should be running on a plan that's more than $10/month.

yuriyguts 12y ago
Please see the details in my post, I tried to limit RAM usage via usual WordPress configuration tricks, but Azure didn't seem to respond. Perhaps an even bigger question is: why Azure hasn't configured the site itself, if it imposes quotas on it.
- carlospaulino 12y ago
  This is a mistake on your part, because IIS ignores the .htaccess file. Azure web sites uses a .user.ini file to setup php. See the documentation here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-php-configure/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-...
- eropple 12y ago
  I read the post, thanks. Setting aside that .htaccess is Apache-only, needing to allocate 128M per request in WordPress doesn't ring any alarm bells for you? Every trivial WP site I've ever run worked comfortably with under 64M/request (and then you use use supercache, static caching, etc. to reduce the average individual request to something in the single digits). Azure doesn't configure it for you because it assumes you're knowledgeable. It reacts more harshly than I'd like for sure if you go over, but expecting you to do your work (for cheap) doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

numlocked 12y ago

I'm not sure where you expect to get great wordpress hosting for "10 times less" than $69/mo. That's not very much spend for a commercial website. Pagely, which has the scale economics advantage of doing nothing but hosting WP sites, starts at $24/mo. To hit the baseline level of "production readiness" with Heroku is going to run you at least $85/mo (2 dynos, 1 free, 1 @ $35/mo + $50/mo postgres instance). If Azure really wasn't sending log events that memory quotas were being exceeded then I agree the alerting leaves something to be desired. But the DB quota was clearly sending "database error" log messages. Dunno what else you want them to do there.

yuriyguts 12y ago
Well, currently we're running the blog on a traditional shared hosting that costs less than $10/mo (you can easily find out which one :)) and it handles the blog amazingly well, even during HN bursts. The blog itself it not our primary line of duty, more of a side project actually. So when there's no new updates, it's quiet enough for a shared hosting to handle.

gtirloni 12y ago

After they mentioned they were using the shared instance I just stopped reading.

cwyers 12y ago

tl;dr: Using Apache config files to configure IIS doesn't work.