While on a journey of trying to dispell some of the unknown magic surrounding the Azure/AppFabric/ServiceBus and Web/Worker Roles, I was hit with a challenge of:

“How much will my ServiceBus Connections cost me? How is Cost calculated? is it
cost effective?”


Yes and No.

So – quick one on ServiceBus. It allows you to auto-create an cloud based endpoint
to your on-premise application (you can also control how client requests/messages
are distributed through your endpoint, direct, multicast and queued)

The costings……

Richard has a great article here and
there’s the updated
FAQ
to guide you through.

Some key points:
– a ‘Connection’ is defined as either your application connecting OR one of your clients.
– a maximum of 2000 concurrent connections are allowed per ServiceBus namespace.
– you are charged on the average number of connections through the day/month
     – # of connections are sampled in 5 minute intervals and
must be connected longer than 10 secs (as per the current FAQ)

DATA Charges are EXTRA to above.

(This has the distinct feeling of early mobile phone plans where there were so
many moving parts and bits you paid for, that it was almost impossible to calculate
your monthly spend.

Azure definately needs caps and plans rather than sting you every step of the way)

So the situation I am currently facing is potentially a high volume public facing
port.

One solution to this is:
– use a webrole with it’s own endpoint the clients call into.
– Webrole talks to SB Endpoint
– SB endpoint talks to onpremise

Costs: DATA In/Out + Webrole + 2 SB Connections(for starters).

There’s a couple of cost calculators here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/

– http://azureroi.cloudapp.net/

Check them out,

Still unravelling the mysteries of the Cloud…

Blog Post by: Mick Badran