A quick post about using Azure to test things…
I decided to see if I had gone over any of my allowances with my MSDN Azure Account. (These cost money and it’s always a good idea to check at least once a week)
I noticed that my Storage Transactions was costing me £1.36 so far this month. I’ve never been charged before as I had never gone over my allotted amount.
A quick check shows the problem. You have to get your brain out of the mindset of developing for local systems. In my mind I was thinking that I have a whole compute instance sitting at the back end processing jobs that gets put onto a queue. So I set the re-check rate to every 100ms as I wanted to maximise the usage of the compute instance. Each one of these checks to see if there is a job on the queue counts as a storage transaction. So basically I was getting At least 864,000 transactions per day. That’s $0.01 per 10,000 transactions over my limit (which is 2,000K) which would basically cost around $0.87 per day. I know this is not much but it quickly adds up. Imaging I decided to test ramping up and running 10 instances of the back end servers, that turns into $8.64 per day. I have now modified the code in the worker role to only check every minute. Which is not a problem as this is only a test system.
Cheers,
Jas
VB Magic 