Introducing the CITYTECH Azure Calculator

For the last month the .NET Nerds (Seth, Rohit and I ) have been huddled in the CITYTECH nerdery working on a project to show off some of the great features of the Windows Azure platform. Our goal for the project was to create something both useful and interesting. After many refactors of both ideas and code I am very happy to introduce the CITYTECH Azure Calculator (CAC)! The CAC is in its final stages of testing and will be available in the next 24 hours.

So what is the CAC? The CAC is a calculator that figures out how much it would cost to run a website on Windows Azure. When we settled on the idea of creating a calculator we were aware of the other calculators that are out there. Most notably the Microsoft ROI Calculator which can be found here. When developing the CAC we wanted to provide the functionality of the calculators that are currently out there while adding a way to seed real data.

This is achieved through the processing of IIS log files. Each URL is treated as a unique event in the system. The date and time that each URL is accessed is tracked along with the bytes that were sent to and from the server. (If they are available… more on that later!) Once the size of each unique request to each URL is tracked the events are run through a series of calculations that show in graph form how much it would cost to run a site on Windows Azure.

The only real issue that we had with the calculations revolved around the fact that you need a chart as complex as the Baseketball Playoff Bracket to figure out how much it costs to run a site.

The other problem that showed itself several weeks into development: missing transfer sizes. By default IIS log files do not have the bytes in and bytes out set. This resulted in a rather large list of assumptions that we will be posting with the calculator. We had to divide up each unique element into different categories and assign default sizes for each. We are looking forward to getting some feedback on our assumptions!

I am looking forward to the BETA release of the CITYTECH Azure Calculator and hopefully lots of great feedback for future versions. After the release I will be posting a series of blogs about how best to use the CAC as well as how it works!

Sneak Peak at the home page!