So I recently did something that I didn’t expect to have financial consequences. I switched from Azure CDN to Azure FrontDoor Standard. Sounds like a simple thing to do considering Microsoft was suggesting I do the move - move from one product to another. Unfortunately the implications were that I would now have to pay £34 per month to ensure my blog was running smooth! This is up nearly 33 times what it cost me before! And the warning didn’t actually tell me that there was a base price involved.
Don’t believe me?
Unfortunately, there is no undo button for this. So I just wasted time and money by accepting a migration from CDN to Front Door.
In case they change the pricing, I’m going to put the screenshots here.
Azure CDN Pricing at the time of writing. Azure Front Door pricing at the time of writing. Notice the base price?
Why did I migrate?
I have a quirk. An urge to click a button that says Upgrade, Update now, etc. I don’t do it when I see it in an email from a suspicious sender or spelling. But when my operating system tells me that an update is ready, I just can’t wait to get it done. It bothers me if I don’t. Lingers in my mind that this thing is looming behind the scenes, awaiting a couple of minutes, to give me something new.
This is an annoying urge, and I am not sure what to do about it. Often, the consequences have been nothing bad but meh. In this case however, I regret pressing the button to migrate to Azure Front Door.
The warning that got me. On Azure portal, there was a simple link to migrate to Azure Front Door, which made it so easy to click and get it done.
Silly me.
What are the benefits
My blog has lightning fast load times now! It is faster than ever before. The DNS setup for multiple domains is a lot clearer on the portal! But honestly, I don’t need more than half of the features that Azure Front Door gives for £35 base price.
In reality Azure Front Door is actually a global Layer 7 load balancer and application accelerator ensuring content is delivered as fast as possible to the people requesting it.
Azure CDN on the other hand is primarily something meant to cache and deliver static content from edge locations, typical CDN things.
For a blog like mine, I don’t really need Front Door at all! It isn’t even that popular a site! There are a multitude of configuration options on Front Door, but because I literally got it configured automatically, I didn’t have to go through any of the configuration complexities.
On the one hand, Azure Front Door migration process was cleverly done. But on the other, the failure to declare the pricing up front just annoys me.
What do I do?
I have plenty of options. I have been mulling over the idea of moving the blog from Azure to AWS. This is exactly my intention now. An opportunity to make use of the little AWS that I have been playing with.
AWS now has something called AWS Amplify which is specifically meant for web application hosting and things like blogs. Neatly abstracts out all the complexity on the AWS console, with easy integration to source control repositories and CI/CD pipelines! It is a developer’s dream.
I’ll publish my journey of migrating this from Azure to AWS Amplify soon. It might take an afternoon - 3-4 hours to polish things up.
Until then, have a nice time.