Tag: Azure

I am trying to setup cheapest development environment for Azure Kubernetes journey. I am provisioing this service in East US so all prices are in USD;

az aks create –name myakscluster

This will bring up Standard_DS2_v2 node that cost $106.58 at the time of this writing.

I like to drop it a smaller VM. AKS specification are that every AKS cluster will have at minimum one node pool and node pool require a VM SKU of at least 2 vCPUs and 4GM memory. The cheapest VM at that configuration is Standard_B2s that cost about $30.37.

–node-count 1 –node-vm-size Standard_B2s

AKS uses a Load Balancer and by default the Standard sku @ ~$30/month will be selected. The Basic sku is free, but the Load Balancer sku cannot be changed once the cluster has been created, so we must set it at time of creation.

–load-balancer-sku basic

Disk size defaults to 100GB which for this VM is a Premium SSD p10 @ 19.79/month. Minimum disk size is 30 so we’ll choose the 32GB p4 @ $1.54/month.

The cheapest cluster power shell is;
az aks create -n myakscluster \
–node-count 1 \
–node-vm-size Standard_B2s \
–load-balancer-sku basic \
–node-osdisk-size 32

Hope, this will save some money on compute, storage and networking during development.

In order to read a blob file from a Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, you need to know the following:

• The storage account connection string. This is the long string that looks like this:
  DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;
  AccountName=someaccounfname;
  AccountKey=AVeryLongCrypticalStringThatContainsALotOfChars==
• The blob storage container name. This is the name in the list of “Blobs”.
• The blob file name. This is the name of the blob inside the container. A file name can be in form of a path, as blobs are structured as a file structure inside the container. For ecample: folder/folder/file.extension

You also need this NuGet package:

Windows.Azure.Storage

The code is pretty simple:

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Blob;
 
public string GetBlob(string containerName, string fileName)
{
  string connectionString = $"yourconnectionstring";
 
  // Setup the connection to the storage account
  CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(connectionString);
   
  // Connect to the blob storage
  CloudBlobClient serviceClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();
  // Connect to the blob container
  CloudBlobContainer container = serviceClient.GetContainerReference($"{containerName}");
  // Connect to the blob file
  CloudBlockBlob blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference($"{fileName}");
  // Get the blob file as text
  string contents = blob.DownloadTextAsync().Result;
   
  return contents;
}

The usage is equally easy:

GetBlob(“containername”, “my/file.json”);