CITYTECH Azure Calculator BETA

The CITYTECH Azure Calculator (CAC) is now ready with a BETA release! After a few last minute hiccups the application is up on CITYTECH’s Windows Azure instance and ready for use. Check it out here. The CITYTECH Azure Calculator is a Silverlight based application that is served up via Windows Azure. Currently the application runs completely within a users browser on the Silverlight framework. In future releases we hope to leverage some more Worker Roles to let Azure do alot of the heavy lifting.

For more information about the history of the CITYTECH Azure Calculator please check out my previous blog post.

The CAC is very simple to use. All you need to use the CAC is at least one IIS log file. If you don’t have any log files, but still want to see how the calculator works go to the About page and you can download a zip file with a few log files in it.

Once you have some IIS log files the CAC is very easy to use. Go to the Home page (Clicking on the CITYTECH Azure Calculator image will take you there) and click the Select Files button. This will open a dialog up that allows you to select multiple files. Once you have selected your files click the Process Files button.

The CAC will process for a little bit. (The processing time is based on the amount and size of the files that are uploaded) Once it is done processing you will be taken to the Usage page. The Usage page shows a graph that approximates how much it would cost to run the applications in the log files on Windows Azure.

For the CAC to work it has to make a lot of assumptions. In most cases these assumptions are accurate and represent the average size and cost of things. In special cases these assumptions may not accurately represent the applications that your web server runs. The CAC provides an Advanced tab that lets you update individual elements in your IIS log files and recalculate graph. Dynamic pages vary not only in size, but per request, so the advanced tab can be very useful in estimating database and transfer sizes.

The CAC was a fun application to build and we are looking forward to improving it with every release. We are looking forward to any feedback that can help make the calculator an even more accurate prediction tool!