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Running Alteryx On Azure Virtual Machine

mutuelinvestor
8 - Asteroid

Alteryx is now available in the Microsoft Azure marketplace.  That means one can run Alteryx on an Azure VM.  Here is the Marketplace info:

 

Bring Your Own License enabled.

For many analysts in business groups such as marketing, sales, finance, or customer insight, the process to prep, blend and analyze data is slow and painful. It requires different tools and people to gather, cleanse and join data from different sources, more tools to build and publish analytic models, and even more to get it into the hands of business decision makers.

 

Alteryx Designer solves this by delivering a repeatable workflow for self-service data analytics that leads to deeper insights in hours, not the weeks typical of traditional approaches! Alteryx Designer empowers data analysts by combining data preparation, data blending, and analytics – predictive, statistical and spatial – using the same intuitive user interface.

 

I have some questions that I'm hoping some of you might be able to answer. 

 

1.  Has anyone tried Alteryx on the Azure VM and if so, what was or is your experience and how did you configure your VM?

 

2. Was the performance comparable to your desktop performance?

 

3. Were you able to scale up and scale down the power/configuration of your VM to meet you particular processing requirements?

 

4. Under the bring your own license enabled model, does that mean if I already have a license I can use that license on my desktop and an Azure VM.  Or, sadly, would I have to purchase another license.

 

Thanks in advance for you input. 

1 REPLY 1
dataMack
12 - Quasar

Yes - I have tried it personally using a MSDN subscription account and spinning up the machine from the marketplace link.  So far I've found the Azure platform to be quite robust and IMO is probably a good option if you use Alteryx infrequently (ex. mayboe only use it a couple hours each day) but you want a lot of power when you use it.

 

My day to day work machine is a ~3 year old Thinkpad laptop i5 /16GB of RAM, and I find that ALteryx runs quite fast on it.  On Azure, practically speaking, the sky is the limit on the specs you can throw at your machine.  I don't believe Alteryx benefits from more than 4 cores (maybe someone from Alteryx engineering can chime in here), but in my testing, I'll pick something like the 'Standard DS5 v2 (16 cores, 56 GB memory)' just to throw a ton of memory at Alteryx, which works great.

 

Here's the key with the cloud VMs if you are using them as a quasi-desktop machine and not a dedicated server- you want to be sure to turn them off when you are not using them so you don't continue to get charged.  In Azure it has to be in the 'Stopped (deallocated)' state to ensure you are not getting charged.  It only takes about 10 mins to spin it back up from this state when you need to use it.  The scale up /scale down can be done, but for me it just made sense to pick something powerful and turn it on and off as needed.

 

Under the bring your own license model, you would need to remove your license from your current machine before applying it to the new VM.  I believe in 10.1 (version on Azure marketplace) and forward if you try to apply your current license on a new machine, it will automatically prompt you about asking to remove it from the previous and reassign to the new.

I'll be at Inspire in San Diego the entire week, so please come find me if you want to discuss more.

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