Azure Web apps and Azure SQL databases are primary components in Sitecore environments deployed on Azure PAAS. For example a XP Topology, Sitecore 9.0.2 ARM Templates deploys around
- 9 web apps in 6 different App Service Plans(Except XP-Single)
- 12 SQL databases in various service tiers
As for Azure consumption, an Azure month is typically counted for 732 hours. Azure web apps in Shared/Basic/Standard/Premium/Isolated tier will get charged even when the web-app in the App Service Plan is stopped.
Say we have a scenario where developers don’t use the Sitecore environment during weekends i.e approx 4 weekends or 8 days/month. That will be around 192 hrs/month of used usage per month.
If we can scale down our web apps to Free tier during the non-business hours, that would save around 10(web apps) * 192 = 1920 hrs/month for all the web apps in a specific environment. Using Automation we can scale up the web apps to their normal tiers on a monday morning.
For Sitecore web apps, where we have Application settings with below setting, scaling down to Free tier is not a straight forward choice.
- Always On enabled for all Basic/Standard web apps
- Platform = 64-Bit
- xConnect, Marketing Automation web apps use client certificate a specific flag is set in to enable Client certificate settings
In order to scale down the web apps to Free tier we might have set the settings to false. This is a sample script which can help achieve that. Obviously this script doesn’t cater to all the requirements and scenarios so definitely can be improved.
Script for Scaling Down- Web apps:
Script for Scaling Up- Web apps:
