About auto scale in Azure

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About auto scale in Azure

Yuta Harada 101

Hi There!

I am a newbie who just started using Azure.

I have a question about auto scaling resources on Azure.

"Azure SQL Managed Instance" and "Azure Storage Data Lake Gen2" have the ability to automatically improve performance and increase capacity?

We would like to know if there is a feature that would allow for automatic scaling if usage is seen to be above a certain level.

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Answer 1

Alberto Morillo 34,671 MVP Volunteer Moderator

There is no direct auto-scaling of Azure SQL Managed Instance. For auto-scaling the Azure SQL Managed Instance we can use the PowerShell or Azure CLI scripts. Here you will find how to do it with CLI. Here you will find how to create an automated task to scale up/down the Azure SQL Managed Instance.

On the other hand, Data Lake Storage Gen2 is scalable by design and you don't have to configure automatic scaling up. It has a Hierarchical Namespace (HNS) that allows this massively scalable storage service to arrange your data like a filesystem with a hierarchy of directories. All analytics frameworks (eg. Spark, Hive, etc.) are built with an implicit assumption that the underlying storage service is a hierarchical filesystem. Data Lake Storage achieves overwhelming performance using HNS and this make it the number one driver of value for big data analytics workloads.

In addition, Data Lake Storage Gen2 is able to store and serve many exabytes of data. This amount of storage is available with throughput measured in gigabits per second (Gbps) at high levels of input/output operations per second (IOPS). Processing is executed at near-constant per-request latencies that are measured at the service, account, and file levels.

Hope this helps.

Yuta Harada 101 Reputation points

2022-07-11T08:51:22.477+00:00

Thank you for your answer!

I understand that "Azure SQL Managed Instance" does not have auto-scaling functionality, and if necessary, we need to build it via CLI, etc., and that "Azure Storage Data Lake Gen2" is designed to be scalable, so we do not need to worry about scaling when building it.

I am sorry to keep asking different questions, but could you also tell me about the following?

Do "Azure SQL Managed Instance" and "Azure Storage Data Lake Gen2" have a function to check the monthly usage?
I heard from an acquaintance that it is possible to get the information about the usage of Azure SQL Managed Instance from the audit log, but I couldn't find such a description in the official documentation, so I would like to know if you know!
Alberto Morillo 34,671 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2022-07-11T10:19:40.11+00:00

Your questions are welcome on Microsoft QA no matter what questions you make.

About your question about getting information about the usage of Azure Managed Instance, are you asking the question from a billing perspective or from computing resources consumption perspective?
Yuta Harada 101 Reputation points

2022-07-11T23:49:18.123+00:00

Thank you for your reply.

For Azure SQL Managed Instance, we would like to check the usage in terms of computing resource consumption.
If it is Azure Storage Data Lake Gen2, we are interested in understanding the amount of data stored and I/O related usage.
Alberto Morillo 34,671 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2022-07-12T00:21:13.43+00:00

Please let me know if this serves the purpose of monitoring resource consumption (CPU, IO, free space, etc) on Azure SQL MI.

About Azure Data Lake Gen2, you will find the metrics needed on Azure Monitor as explained on this documentation. Check out the capacity metrics and the transaction metrics available on Azure Monitor.

Hope this helps.
Yuta Harada 101 Reputation points

2022-07-14T09:18:43.247+00:00

Sorry for the late reply.
Thank you for your response!

●Regarding Azure Data Lake Gen2, I understood that we can use AzureMonitor's metric function to monitor the status of resources.

●We would like to know if there is any solution other than the one you provided that can achieve the following requirements for Azure SQL MI.

A function that can output reports on CPU usage, memory usage, etc. for each instance for the year and month.
The purpose of using the above function is to report the resource usage status of the month to the system users on a monthly basis during the system operation.
For this purpose, it would be desirable to be able to visualize the usage status in graphs, etc., and to output the data in pdf or other formats.
Yuta Harada 101 Reputation points

2022-07-14T09:23:40.683+00:00

We would like to confirm some additional information.

You mentioned that when scaling Azzure SQL MI, we can create a CLI or PowerShell to handle the scaling, but can this be done without stopping MI?
Alberto Morillo 34,671 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2022-07-14T10:27:07.447+00:00

No. Hardware changes occur during scale up/down and the SQL Server isnatnce needs to be reconfigured accordingly. The scaling operation with its hardware changes from Standard to Premium can take 2.5 hours, for example. This invloves a downtime and a rollback of any transactions in progress. SO basically scaling up/down without stopping the instance is not possible.

The most smooth scaling I have seen is on Azure SQL Elastic Pools. It is really fast.

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About auto scale in Azure

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