Sunday, September 9, 2018

DiceRoller - something actually usable!

Got some time to continue work on the diceroller, working on the website so actual humans can use the system.  And while it's super simple so far, there's a usable page at https://dicerollerxyz.azurewebsites.net   give it a try.

Yeah, the URL has changed again.  I haven't had much time to work on the site for a little while, due to life.  When I first signed up to use Azure, I got 30 days to use a free $200 worth of cloud processing.  When it got close to the end of that free trial time, they encouraged me to sign up for the "pay-as-you-go" system.  Since the site is in development and what's running in Azure is just for testing, no real traffic, it shouldn't add up to anything significant.  So I was a little surprised when I loaded the Azure dashboard, and it told me I had incurred about $7 in charges, and projected $28 per month charge.  For no usage.

It seems that Azure charges a token fee for each app service, even with no traffic.  About 31 cents a day.  And with my micro-service model, I already had 3 sites running, and would like stand up 2 more and the actual website.  While it's just pocket change, it would add up.  But since it was charging per app service, there was an easy solution: combine them.  Ideally, with microservices, each site runs completely separately; but I didn't want to pay 6 times more just for architectural purity.  So I combined all the microservices and the website into a single app service.  Each microservice can still call each other as if they were hosted separately, it'll just happen to be the same base URL.  So sue me. :)