Choosing a VM size
Overview
SFTP Gateway is an Azure marketplace machine image, and charges a software fee on top of the price of the VM.
When choosing a VM size, you want to balance price and performance. This article gives a general overview of the VM sizes you might want to consider.
VM Series
In general, you'll be looking at series A, B, or D.
See this page
for details.
- B series: This stands for "burst". The baseline performance is really low, but it can "burst" up to decent performance for short periods of time. This is ideal for something that sits idle all day, and handles light traffic when it does get used.
- A series: The A series is not burstable, so it can sustain traffic over time. It is affordable, but the baseline specs are fairly low. This is recommended for Dev/Test environments, or very light production workloads.
- D series: This is has good baseline performance, and is the first series rated for Production use.
There are also additional letters and numbers after the initial "series" letter. These refer to various versions, or modifications to memory and compute.
Recommended VM instance sizes
When testing SFTP Gateway in a demo or dev environment, the cheapest
instance size you can choose is a Standard_B1ms which is around 0.02 cents
per hour. This VM size has 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM. Also, it's burstable, which means
you're only paying a fraction of what it would normally cost for this level of
baseline performance.
When you are ready to go to production, you should consider using at least a
Standard_D2s_v3 which is around 0.096 cents per hour. This VM size has
2 vCPU and 8 GB of RAM. This is a production grade VM size, and it can handle
sustained traffic.
If you are going to production but your workload is very small (i.e. just a
few users sending files once a month), you might go with a Standard_A1_v2.
This VM size has 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM, and costs 0.036 cents per hour.
It costs more than a Standard_B1ms even though it has similar specs. But the
A series can handle sustained traffic, so you don't have to worry about
running out of burst credits.
Here is a helpful online tool when searching for VM pricing.