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Category: Cloud

Tips for Reducing Cloud Costs

Published 2020-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Manas Narkar has a few tips for reducing the amount of money you spend on cloud infrastructure:

Cost optimization is a continuous process that evolves as you build your solutions. It starts with the initial architecture and continues throughout the entire solution lifecycle. Getting the architecture right will save you a lot of effort and money down the road. Having said that, you should regularly review your architectural approach and selection of services to adapt to business changes.

A fully cost-optimized system optimizes cloud resources without sacrificing performance and efficiency. When it comes to cost optimization, you can use several tools and techniques. The information below lists some of the core principles that you can apply to any cloud solution.

Costing items in the cloud is a good bit different than on-premises, to the point where entirely different architectures succeed.

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The Key Concepts of Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2020-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Whiteley takes a look at what Azure Synapse Analytics really is:

You might have seen that I’ve been pretty busy recently, digging into the new Azure Synapse Analytics preview, announced back at Microsoft Build 2020. I’ve explored the spark engine, SQL serverless/On-Demand and various other bits… but I’m still getting the same question of “Cool!…. but what actually is it?”. One of the problems here is that Azure SQL Data Warehouse was rebranded as “Azure Synapse Analytics”… but it’s not the same as the full workspace. Having two products, both talked about in Marketing, one generally available, one still in preview – it’s no wonder people are still confused!

Simon also has a video, which I recommend so that you can enjoy the funny way he pronounces “Synapse.” That said, next time I’m in the UK, it’ll be just as fair for someone to point out the funny way I pronounce “Synapse.” Also, you should watch the video because Simon knows the topic cold and does a great job of explaining things.

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Improving Async Stats Update Concurrency

Published 2020-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Dimitri Furman announces a change in Azure SQL Database:

In Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, the background process that updates statistics asynchronously can now wait for the schema modification lock on a low priority queue. This improves concurrency for workloads with frequent query plan (re)compilations.

New behavior is enabled with the ASYNC_STATS_UPDATE_WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY database-scoped configuration. This feature is currently in public preview.

Dimitri does a good job of explaining what this means and how it can make life a little better for people querying tables with statistics updates.

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Understanding the RESOURCE_GOVERNOR_IDLE Wait Type in Azure

Published 2020-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Josh Darnell does some sleuthing:

With a big gap between CPU and elapsed time, it’s often worthwhile to check wait statistics. If the query was running, but not using CPU, it seems reasonable that it was waiting on something. Normally, with on-prem SQL Server, you’d have to check sys.dm_os_wait_stats, and take a diff of the cumulative values before and after.

However, thanks to (relatively) recent enhancements to execution plans (which keep getting better and better!), we can see a subset of what resources the query waited on right in the plan.

Looking at the plan from my Azure query, here’s what I see:

<Wait WaitType="SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD" WaitTimeMs="5733" WaitCount="323" />
<Wait WaitType="RESOURCE_GOVERNOR_IDLE" WaitTimeMs="5545" WaitCount="430" />

Notice that there were 5.5 seconds of RESOURCE_GOVERNOR_IDLE waits during this query. That explains the 5 second gap in CPU and elapsed time. But what does it mean?

Click through to learn more about this in the context of Azure SQL Database.

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Including Headers in Zero-Row ADF Data Flows

Published 2020-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Kromer meets a challenge:

Today, we don’t have an option in data flows in ADF to include headers when your transformations result in zero rows. But you can build the logic to handle this scenario. So, until we add a checkbox feature to include headers, you can use this technique below to achieve this.

Click through for the explanation, as well as a completed version you can take for your own.

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E-Mail Alerting in ADF.procfwk

Published 2020-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew has an update to the Azure Data Factory Procedural Framework:

The primary goal of this release was to implement email alerting within the existing processing framework and using existing metadata driven practices to deliver this in an easy to control, flexible and granular way. That said, the following statements have been met in terms of alerting capabilities and design.

Read on for the full change list.

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E-mailing Query Results via Logic Apps + Azure Data Factory

Published 2020-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev has to send an e-mail:

It is a very simple concept, you have a database query result, either a direct database table output or a stored procedure returned result that needs to be sent as email notification. This email could serve as a status report of your daily data processing job or alert notification with some metrics that require immediate attention, and you want to be as user-friendly as possible with this message aka HTML format for your dataset is required.

I’ve built this solution approach over a year go and wanted to document and share it after recently using it in one of my projects. Again, I agree, there other more or less effective ways to achieve the very same goal, this blog post is just a recollection of my efforts to send HTML formatted SQL query results using Azure Data Factory and Logic App.

It’s a bit more effort than sp_send_dbmail, though also considerably more flexible.

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Reducing Costs in Azure

Published 2020-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Robertshaw has a few tips for saving money in Azure:

4. Enterprise Dev/Test subscriptions

Enterprise Dev/Test subscriptions are provided as part of Microsoft Enterprise Agreements (EA).  They’re designed for teams of Visual Studio subscribers to run development and test workloads in Azure but at discounted rates, specifically on Windows virtual machines and exclusive gallery images.  This is significant because I see many clients using regular Azure subscriptions for development and test, which means they’re potentially paying more than they need to.

One additional point I’d make, though it kind of fits in with points 7 and 9, is to try to make your own services “cloud-first.” In other words, a typical cloud migration takes services built for on-prem data centers, converts the servers into VMs, ships those VMs up into Azure/AWS/Google/whatever, and then you end up paying more than you did on-prem.

Instead, read up a bit on cloud architecture and see how you might be able to change a service to fit that model. Instead of having a server running all the time, is it possible to store messages in a queue and have functions process these messages on a given schedule? Can you use expensive tools like Azure Synapse Analytics to perform nightly data processing and move the results to a much less expensive Azure SQL Database?

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