Azure @ Enterprise - Experiments with the smallest possible VM B1ls- Part 1 - Installing UI and Remote desktop

Experiments with the smallest possible VM Bl1s series

1. Installing UI and Remote Desktop
2. Installing web server
3. Installing proxy

Introduction

Though cloud providers come up with abstracted PaaS solutions, the IaaS will be there for a while. The main problem with virtual machines is their cost. If we want to host a web site, it is very cheap to use PaaS option. Even in Azure, there is a free tier for Azure App Service also a freemium option in Azure Functions. AWS had a very low-cost VM from the earlier. But Azure added a similar one named B1ls last year only in the burstable B series. 

This is a series of posts on experimenting with that machine. It has only1 vCPU and 512MiB RAM. There are some other attempts with B1ls series on the internet which are interesting ones even to deploy docker swarm cluster.

Azure v/s AWS low-cost VMs

Below is a simple comparison of Azure v/s AWS in this low-cost burstable VMs scenario.

Criteria	Azure B1ls	AWS T3.nano and T3a.nano	Comments
Cost	$.0052/h	$.0047/h for T3a.nano
CPU	1 vCPU	2 vCPU (up to 2.5 GHz)	Hz of Azure to be filled
Memory	512 MiB	.5 GiB
Storage	4 GiB SSD	TBD

Remote desktop

This experiment is to follow the Azure documentation to install a desktop environment into B1ls and try whether we can remote into. SSH works great.

The article followed is here. It uses xfce4 desktop environment which seems the lightweight option possible. Then xrdp to expose the remote desktop service.

After struggles, finally, I was able to get something thought not the full remote desktop. The screenshot is below.

Issued faced

Issue 1 - Not able to get lock to install

Error message

testadmin@PrimaryVM:~$ sudo apt-get -y install xfce4
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?
testadmin@PrimaryVM:~$ sudo apt-get -y install xfce4
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is an other process using it?

Troubleshooting

Followed all most all the techniques mentioned in this tutorial. Fortunately I was able to get it installed.

Issue 2 - Slowness

The installation was very slow. Finally, I had to take a workaround in the experiment by scaling up for the installation and scaling down to B1ls to do remote desktop.