Microsoft announced Azure Container Apps, a new service for running serverless containers in the cloud. This appears to be similar to the Container Instances service, which is also for deploying fully-managed containers.
What are the key differences between these two services?
I have a large, busy site; it currently runs completely on a dedicated server that I rent each month for ~$700.
It has three parts that I think I could carve off to a cloud solution:
Media (image/video) file hosting. Currently I have something like 236 GB of static images, currently all just parked on my server. If I moved these to the cloud I would probably combine with a CDN (to minimize the cost of data transfer out of the cloud service for every image request).
Database. Currently running MySQL with about 3 GB of data on my server.
Web server. The same server runs nginx serving static files and PHP.
I'm not having any production issues now but I expect my site to double in traffic/server load next year. So I want to think about scalability now.
My question is this: how can I figure out if it would be cost-effective to move any/all of these onto a cloud platform, instead of keeping them on my current server?
(I already know some of the other factors in place: it would be easier to do backups with cloud, I wouldn't have one point of failure like I do now with my single server, etc. But I have no sense of how much more/less it would cost to carve off one of these services. How can I compute that?)
EDIT - thank you all for these amazing answers and comments. A few folks have asked for more info so I'm summarizing all below and adding a little more data:
Data Transfer ("Bandwidth") Used - the site sends ~17 TB outbound data per month (!) and I am planning to double that figure next year (!!). Almost all of this outbound is static media (pics and video clips), so perhaps a CDN would be a good idea, not only for better discoverability but to move the burden of transmitting all that data to the CDN network, so the media storage server doesn't have so much data transfer directly. --EDIT: it seems that CDNs are damn expensive for this much data transfer. So maybe the static media stays on a simple server that gives me a very high bandwidth cap (hello OVH!) and if I can find a cost-effective way to put a CDN in front of it, terrific.
Traffic Not Spiky - my traffic is fairly steady; my goal with moving to a more cloud-based solution is to be able to easily scale up. I.e. my current setup has everything on one hard drive and the drive is 60% full; this infrastructure literally couldn't deal with double the amount of data (and I'm not sure it would have enough computing power to run the web server and DB server at double the traffic, either).
Static Media - As I mentioned above, I have about 236 GB of static media, mostly all images and video clips. This seems like the most obvious (and maybe easiest?) piece to carve off first and put in the cloud.
Database - while the DB runs fine now, I will be having some more complex queries soon and like the idea of something a little more powerful there. So while I don't think my current needs (power and amount of data) dictate that I should move the DB server into the cloud, it's all about being able to scale up.
Busy Hours - I always have at least 1,000 users on the site 24/7, voraciously consuming media. The server is never idle.
Currently Dedicated Server - I misspoke earlier and said it was colo (implying that I owned the hardware). That was wrong. I have a dedicated server (owned by my hosting company) that I rent each month. Not a big distinction but just want to mention.
I have just created an AKS cluster using a standard az aks create ... --ssh-key-value ....
According to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/kubernetes-service-principal,
an AKS cluster is created, and because an existing service principal is not specified, a service principal is created for the cluster.
Where can I find the created SP? Thanks
I have five apps in an Azure App Service Plan, all different copies of the same app for different clients. It's an ASP.NET MVC app with an SQL database.
This morning I woke up to slow and non-responsive sites, sometimes resulting in a 503 error. Upon checking the CPU/Memory metrics for the App Service Plan I discovered the CPU pegged at 100%:
And the graph of the individual sites' CPU time shows them all going off at the same time, though some worse than others:
I tried to resolve the issue by doing an Advanced Application Restart, but the blade wouldn't load - I assume because it was trying to get information from the server that couldn't respond.
In the end I tried stopping each of the sites one by one, which brought the CPU back to zero, then starting them back up again, which seemed to have resolved the issue, but now a few of them are starting to climb back up.
I experienced a similar issue a couple of weeks ago and assumed I was growing too big for my App Plan, so upgraded from S1 to S2 and it'd been fine until today.
I'm at a total loss as to how to figure out what the cause of this CPU hungry behaviour is. Can anyone point me in the right direction of how I can start to diagnose this?
The Windows Azure Web Sites offers two options 32bits or 64bits. New sites come with 32bits by default. For a server configuration it feels a bit odd because, AFAIK, the vast majority of web servers have been in 64bits config for years now. Considering the usual use cases for ASP.NET sites, are there any reasons to favor 32bits over 64bits?