Deploying a High-Traffic Website in Azure

Ensure Availability and Responsiveness while Minimizing Cost

Question

You develop a website.

You plan to host the website in Azure.

You expect the website to experience high traffic volumes after it is published.

You must ensure that the website remains available and responsive while minimizing cost.

You need to deploy the website.

What should you do?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

D.

Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) offers 3 modes:Standard, Free, and Shared.

Standard mode carries an enterprise-grade SLA (Service Level Agreement) of 99.9% monthly, even for sites with just one instance.

Standard mode runs on dedicated instances, making it different from the other ways to buy Windows Azure Web Sites.

Incorrect Answers: B: Shared and Free modes do not offer the scaling flexibility of Standard, and they have some important limits.

Shared mode, just as the name states, also uses shared Compute resources, and also has a CPU limit.

So, while neither Free nor Shared is likely to be the best choice for your production environment due to these limits.

The best option to deploy the website in Azure, while ensuring that it remains available and responsive while minimizing cost is option D. Deploy the website to an App Service that uses the Standard service tier. Configure the App Service plan to automatically scale when the CPU load is high.

Explanation:

Option A: Deploy the website to a virtual machine. Configure the virtual machine to automatically scale when the CPU load is high. While using a virtual machine (VM) provides a high level of customization, VMs require more management and are more expensive to maintain, especially when dealing with high traffic volumes. Additionally, automatic scaling requires additional configuration, which adds to management complexity.

Option B: Deploy the website to an App Service that uses the Shared service tier. Configure the App Service plan to automatically scale when the CPU load is high. Using an App Service is a more cost-effective approach than using a virtual machine. However, the Shared service tier may not be suitable for high traffic volumes, as it can have performance issues. Additionally, Shared service tier does not support auto-scaling, which means that scaling must be done manually.

Option C: Deploy the website to a virtual machine. Configure a Scale Set to increase the virtual machine instance count when the CPU load is high. Using a Scale Set in Azure is a good way to manage virtual machine instances. However, just like option A, it is more expensive to maintain and requires additional configuration to set up.

Option D: Deploy the website to an App Service that uses the Standard service tier. Configure the App Service plan to automatically scale when the CPU load is high. Using an App Service that is configured to use the Standard service tier provides a cost-effective and scalable solution for hosting a website in Azure. With the Standard service tier, automatic scaling is available, which means that Azure can automatically adjust the number of instances of the App Service plan based on the CPU load. This approach ensures that the website remains available and responsive, while minimizing cost.

In conclusion, option D is the best solution for deploying the website to Azure because it is cost-effective, scalable, and allows for automatic scaling.