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.

Freemium - What is always free in clouds platforms

Background

There are any different pricing model in the software industry which doesn't require any money to be spend to use software. Trial, totally free, freemium, sand boxed trial account etc...They are different in their own way. Totally free and freemium are the models which really help us build something based on the offering. Freemium might not be a new word for a follower of this blog. There were posts which has freemium reference such as Serverless monitoring, online diagramming tools, tool box for open source more precisely developers who don't want to invest on tools.

Once again Freemium is a model where we can use systems in free but for advanced usage we need to pay. Event if we don't want advanced features the basic features are free for ever. Refer wiki for the Freemium

Freemium cloud features

Lets see what is there from Cloud providers in freemium tier. ie what is there always free which can help us to develop production prototypes and start own company without investing any money other than domain if we want.

Please note that, these are not the free account or free trial which we cannot depend on to put something into production.

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/always-free-usage-limits#container_name
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/free-account-faq/
https://firebase.google.com/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/free/?awsf.Free%20Tier%20Types=categories%23alwaysfree
https://www.heroku.com/pricing

Since the cloud providers may add more services as freemium, only links are provided not another copy paste which needs more time to make it up to date.

Freemium doesn't necessarily guarantee that it its free for lifetime. The vendors have their rights to change the pricing.

More links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3179785/cloud-computing/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud-which-free-tier-is-best.html
https://www.redpixie.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud

Azure @ Enterprise - Functions v/s AWS Lambda

Serverless @ enterprise

Serverless is a buzzword in the software industry right now after Microservices. As with any other technology revolution, startups will jump into it and Enterprise will only be entering to Serverless slowly. Earlier the technologies would be Enterprise ready from the starting itself. But now a days it seems Enterprise support is little behind at the technology edge. 

This post is an attempt to examine the Serverless offering is ready for enterprise. Since the series is Azure @ Enterprise, lets see from the Azure side.

Cost

If we consider cost, that was not a big factor for Enterprise. They usually buy big boxes to meet their peak load and enjoy during the normal load and struggle during the heavy load. Whatever capacity planning we do there are chances that the real load differ because of  unknowns.

But with the Cloud adoption, enterprise started thinking about cost. If they had embraced 2 pizza team strategy or Microservice architecture style or devOps teams there are high chances that small teams started maintaining services / applications end to end. In order to prove their success they are forced to reduce cost in the operations. Ultimately cost becomes a factor in Enterprise.

This think enterprise to adopt Serverless or true pay per use cloud offerings. At present in Azure, Functions are the real pay per use service. Hence the title limited to Functions. Cost wise, Functions has got good score.

Versioning

The versioning might be a concern if the enterprise is using blue green deployment where the applications move to production and there might be some rollbacks required.

In Azure Functions there is no versioning concept except pulling from the source control repo. But in Amazon lambda which is the Function equivalent in Amazon cloud, there is versioning. We can have smooth version control of Functions in even in the production environment.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable-functions-versioning

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/versioning-intro.html

Security

Next factor is securing the Enterprise. There will be less chance for the Enterprise to compromise on security because something is cheap. If we take that thought to Functions, there are 2 challenges with Functions right now.

Securing external internet facing Functions

This can be done via API Gateways. There is not much challenge in that once the suitable gateway is selected. It ensure there is no DDoS, brute force, injections etc...

Securing internal Functions

There could be lot of internal services which are supposed to be exposed inside Enterprise. Normally on premise network would be protected using appropriate measures. The end points might not be visible to outside. This is the area Functions lag.
Suppose we need to have an internal Function there are 2 options. One is to setup the firewall rules. Second to host inside vNet or virtual network. Then the Functions end point will not be accessible outside.
The best way is to use vNet but the problem here is pay per use Functions don't support hosting inside vNet unless they are under AppServiceEnvironment (ASE). AppServiceEnvironment provides an isolated environment for the Enterprise to host things. But the problem with ASE is that it is highly costly. around $1200/month. The real problem is that the cost is fixed regardless of the usage. We lost everything we talked about Serverless if it is fixed billing.

Amazon Lambda

Amazon have VPC instead of vNet. It doesn't seems there is a fixed high cost if we wanted to host Lambda inside the VPC. Please note the information is obtained from google and feel free to correct. 

Some links below on Lambda and VPC

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/internet-access-lambda-function/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/why-use-aws-lambda-in-a-custom-vpc/

More differences

There are more links out there which compare Azure Function with Lambda and Cloud Functions from Google cloud.

https://cloudacademy.com/blog/microsoft-azure-functions-vs-google-cloud-functions-fight-for-serverless-cloud-domination-continues/