I’m a big believer in doing research and practicing processes and procedures until they don’t break anymore. In my job, breaking things means downtimes and unhappy customers. Because of this, I like to put a lot of time in documentation, trials, practice, etc to make sure everything works the way it should be. I might even say I’m a little bit obsessive. Human beings change, systems rarely do.
One of the “secrets” of Azure is fairly simple. Shut down the server when you’re not using it. You’re still going to pay for storage costs and lots of other services, but you aren’t going to be charged for the running server. This gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility. If you don’t have an MSDN account, you will need to use your CC. I know, it’s a little scary and I have made the mistake of not turning off the server before and REALLY paid the price…
But, by being able to spin up a complete SQL 2019/Server 2019 instance in a matter of minutes gives you the ability to have a system ready to go for all of your practicing!
Other little secrets: On those premade servers, check the disk allocation. Like I said, you get charged for storage no matter what. They come with big expensive drives. Maybe you don’t need anything more than a few GB of storage? I do believe in ramping up the Compute SKU though. The small servers are cheap AND slow. I’d rather provision a burly server knowing that I will only be using it for a few hours at a time. The response time makes all the difference.
Also, Azure doesn’t clean up after itself very well either. When you drop a server, NONE of the other components are deleted, INCLUDING storage. You will be quietly billed for these additional pieces until they are deleted. Be sure to look at everything from your dashboard once in awhile and make sure everything is nice and tidy.
Another fun secret that’s not really a secret, you can provision a server in most any region you want for your testing. I was recently doing some CosmosDB work and I set up a three region deployment in West US, North Europe, and East China! How cool is that!?! Again just push the buttons and it’s all there. When you’re done, just strip it down. Unfortunately you can’t turn off CosmosDB, so it’s best to start learning your ARM templates (hand raised) so you can easily deploy your testing environments?
Why again is this important? Last year I had a complicated migration scenario and I needed extra time to make it happen. I spent Thanksgiving week working on that scenario and I broke it multiple times before I was confident in rolling out the migration in Production. When the time came, it was almost a non-event. That’s the power of testing and Azure is one good way to give you that test environment for a very low cost.
Any “secrets” that you have?
