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Windows Azure provides the IaaS offering to host or run the user’s applications with virtual machines. A virtual machine is a server, which the user can access, control or manage as per the requirement and is created from the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). The guide demonstrates how to detach a data disk from a Linux virtual machine and delete it from the storage in Windows Azure.

The virtual machine in Azure offers various kinds of disks, such as an OS disk, a local temporary disk or a data disk. The data disk is an optional disk, which is similar to a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). Azure allows creating a blank disk in the Azure cloud as well as importing the local data disk to Azure. Windows Azure allows attaching or detaching a data disk any time to an Azure cloud VM. However, there is a cap for attaching the maximum number of disks based on the VM size.

When a disk is detached from the VM, it is not automatically deleted from the storage. This disk can be reused and attached to the same or another VM. In a Linux machine, where the data disk is mounted to the VM, it is required to unmount it first before detaching.

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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing compute resources for the application hosted on Amazon AWS cloud. Auto Scaling ensures that the number of Amazon EC2 instances increases seamlessly when the demand escalates for maintaining the application performance, and decreases automatically when the demand declines for minimizing the costs. This guide demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling to scale manually with a fixed number of instances.

AWS does not provide an AWS Management console for Auto Scaling. Thus, all the operations should be performed through CLI or AWS APIs. When the user wants to configure Auto Scaling for their resources, it is required to follow certain steps. The first step is to create a launch configuration, which defines resources, such as the AMI, EBS or Instance Type, or detailed monitoring to be added by Auto Scaling.

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This tutorial explains how to setup a basic Windows Azure virtual network. This step-by-step process explains how to import an existing virtual network or create a new custom virtual network. A key benefit of creating a virtual network in Windows Azure is that you can set up DNS servers or configure connectivity. Configuring your connectivity settings enables secure site-to-site connectivity between your Azure Cloud and on-premise network. Check out the video tutorial!

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Windows Azure Web Sites offer a really nice and easy way to host applications written in a variety of languages. It also supports a variety of ways to push code, including Git, GitHub, Team Foundation Service, Codeplex, and Dropbox. For simplicity sake (and because I hadn’t tried it yet), I chose to deploy via Dropbox.

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With Windows Azure, you can easily deploy Web Sites using popular open source apps such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, DotNetNuke, and Umbraco. This video tutorial walks you through the process of creating a new Web Site on WordPress with a MySQL database as well as how you can monitor website activity and pages published.

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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing computer resources for the application hosted on AWS. The user can achieve Auto Scaling in different ways, such as maintaining the number of healthy instances or adding/ removing instances based on demand. The present guide demonstrates how to create, view or delete an Auto Scaling configuration.

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In part one I described the AWS EBS snapshot mechanism. In this part I will drill deeper on how to calculate the EBS snapshot cost. I  will show how to be able to do a rough estimation or even to perform an accurate cost analysis using monitoring tools.

Rough estimation

In order to estimate how large your EBS snapshots will be, you need to know how much your volumes are changing. One way would be to guesstimate,we can use a simple thumb rule that is often used in- backup planning: A typical data volume of a production server changes about 3% a day. Let’s try and calculate the cost. Assuming a 1TB EBS volume, that is 70% full at first. We take snapshots and keep them for 30 days. So, the first full will be taking 700GB (70% of 1TB). For the incremental snapshots we can multiply 30 (days) by 30GB (3% of 1TB) and we reach 900GB. Add them together and we reach about 1.6TB of total snapshot storage. AWS compresses the snapshots when they are stored in S3.

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Windows Azure is Microsoft’s platform, which offers Public Cloud. Azure provides the IaaS offering to host or run the user’s applications with Virtual Machines. The virtual machine is a server, which the user can access, control or manage as per the requirement and is created from the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD).

The present guide demonstrates how to attach a data disk to a Linux virtual machine in Windows Azure.

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After creating a virtual machine in Windows Azure, it’s time to create and upload a virtual hard disk. Microsoft Windows Azure has created this step-by-step video tutorial to demonstrate the process of attaching a virtual hard disk that you can then open and interact with.

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Creating a virtual machine (VM) in Windows Azure is a quick and easy process. This video walks you, step-by-step, through the process of creating a new VM in the Azure cloud that you can control and manage.

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