Azure Web Hosting

Azure Web Hosting : With the latest release of AZURE Web and the new AZUER Portal Preview, Microsoft has introduced a new concept:

Azure Web Hosting

 A web hosting plan allows you to independently consolidate and scale sites within a subscription. The best way to understand how this works is to review a scenario: Joe runs a successful web agency and currently has two major clients, the legendary Contoso International Corporation and the lesser-known company, Fabrikam. Joe bundles web hosting and website management as part of its contract with its clients and uses Azure Sites to provide the hosting and management experience. His web agency develops multiple websites for each of the clients. Joe decided that to run Contoso’s websites, he would need at least 5 mid-size servers (2 virtual cores, 3.5 GB of RAM) at the standard level to meet the expected load and the memory footprint of the applications. On the one hand, its Fabrikam nodes will only need one small instance size server (1 virtual kernel, 1.75 GB of RAM) at the standard level with an automatic metric configured to scale up to 3 instances to handle peak load and stay within budget Before the new Web Hosting Plans feature, Joe had two options:

1. Hosting both site groups within its current Azure subscription, using Standard instances.

 Advantages:

• Easy to implement, with little administrative expenses.

Disadvantages:

• Scaling efficiency: Applications have different download profiles and while one calls small servers, the other requires a medium instance size. This will require Joe to need to use the average instance size for their workloads although for some applications it might be excessive and cost more.
• Annoying neighbors: Since all Joe apps run on a common set of standard instances, if a Contoso app sees an increase in traffic, or starts to exceed expected memory usage, then Fabrikam apps will be affected by that as well.
• Billing: Since all standard instances are treated as a group, there is no way to separate the cost by customer (Fabricam invoice versus Contoso invoice)

      2. Create two independent subscriptions for each customer and manage them independently.

 Advantages:

• Complete isolation: there are no common resources between the two subscribers
• Bills: The bills can be divided according to the subscription.

Disadvantages:

• Management complexity: Customer subscription mapping has to be done by the subscription owner.
• Access Control: Create and manage co-moderators for each subscription to ensure the right group of people gets the correct access.

With the introduction of web hosting plans, Joe now has a third choice:

     3. Create a web hosting plan for each of his contracts and allocate the necessary resources for each.

 Advantages:

• Better Isolation: With isolation at the web hosting plan level, Contoso Applications will not interfere with Fabrikam or vice versa, as each will run in its web hosting plan using dedicated resources.
• Scope efficiency: Each web hosting plan can be independently scaled and can be configured with different instance sizes and auto-scale as needed.
• Management overhead: less administrative expenses than standalone contributions (shown in Option 2)

Disadvantages:

• Isolation: Not the same level of isolation as for independent subscriptions

After introducing a web hosting plan for Azure Web sites, of course, each of the above options has its own pros and cons, but web hosting plans provide a better option for managing multiple groups of sites with minimal overhead and complications.