A Tale of SQL and Azure Trials
Today I am sharing real world user experience hosting SQL Server databases in both the Virtual Machine and SQL Azure platforms. Erik replies with much detail about their journey into the Cloud.
This is in response to your recent post on Azure. We’re using both Azure VM and SQL Azure, and have been since preview on both services. We’re also using Amazon EC2 to host some SQL and Web Servers. I’ll put some thoughts on each and how we’ve seen they compare to each other below. However, one thing I’m not sure of is your comment that in Azure VM you don’t have to manage your OS. I don’t think that is accurate. I believe that to be true of SQL Azure, where you don’t have to manage the OS or the software, but Azure VM, we’re still having to maintain. Perhaps you meant the host?
SQL Azure
- Great for getting Databases up and running quickly.
- Throttling is a bit of crapshoot as to when you will encounter it. It would be nice to know what the limits, but they don’t seem to be published. Also, the $$ proposed for the premium service is really high.
- There isn’t a great way to schedule to move data into the system. SQL Data Sync still gives us problems moving data up from on-premises. SSIS is more reliable, but takes custom development. Neither are very agile when working on new products that are in flux.
Azure VM
- Still a work in progress, but promising. We’ve had some boxes that we spin up from Azure gallery that are almost DOA. Some services you just can’t get to work, for example we had a hard time getting port 1433 public on multiple machines, no matter what endpoints we added or windows firewall changes we had to make. However, you can kill the box and start again. Once we’ve gotten a VM up and running, it’s rock solid for us. You just may have to take a few tries at getting the VM up and running.
- 10 gb/s connection to drives in storage is really noticeable, especially compared to Amazon EC2. In EC2, We had to stripe drives on provisioned IOPS disks in order to get close to the same I/O as we saw in preview on Azure.
- Replication is SLOW. We can’t figure this out, but the replication job sending a few hundred thousand commands to Azure VM may take hours whereas Amazon VM may take minutes. Both are going over a public port, and we’ve not tried Azure VPN to see if that helps.
All in all, we like both services. In some cases, we didn’t feel they were ready for production applications at the time we were rolling out our products. However, that gap is closing. We’ll continue to use both services, and will choose whichever one based on the need of our application. SQL Azure offers great premise in a platform as a service.
Do you have more to add? Has your experience been similar, or much different? Share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment below, or drop an Email to btaylor@sswug like Erik.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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