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Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

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Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#131

Post by l-p »

> We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like Microsoft

You're new to Azure I guess.

I'm glad the outage I had yesterday was only the third major one this year, though the one in august made me lose days of traffic, months of back and forth with their support, and a good chunk of my sanity and patience in face of blatant documented lies and general incompetence.

One consumer-grade fiber link is enough to serve my company's traffic and with two months of what we pay MS for their barely working cloud I could buy enough hardware to host our product for a year of two of sustained growth.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#132

Post by alexeldeib »

janober wrote: post #101
alexeldeib wrote: post #90

What VM sizes? Besides what’s already been said, internal capacity differs HUGELY based on VM SKU. If you need GPUs or something it’ll be tough. But a lot of the newer v4/v5 general compute SKUs (D/Da/E/Ea/etc) have plenty of capacity in many regions. If changing regions sounds like a pain, consider gambling on other VM size availability. (azure employee)

Actually nothing fancy, for sure no GPUs. Just Standard_E4s_v4.

Ah, bummer. If it helps, you can try this to list out VM sizes with comparable capabilities and see if you have better luck with any others (--all not really necessary since it filters by NotAvailableForSubscription and similar):

  az vm list-skus -l germanynorth -r virtualMachines --all > germanynorth.json
  jq '.[] | select( any( .capabilities[]; (.name == "vCPUs" and (.value | tonumber) >= 4 )) and any(.capabilities[]; (.name == "MemoryGB" and ( .value | tonumber ) >= 32) ) )' germanynorth.json
4/32 because that's what E4s_v4 would have.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#134

Post by cyptus »

janober wrote: post #101
alexeldeib wrote: post #90

What VM sizes? Besides what’s already been said, internal capacity differs HUGELY based on VM SKU. If you need GPUs or something it’ll be tough. But a lot of the newer v4/v5 general compute SKUs (D/Da/E/Ea/etc) have plenty of capacity in many regions. If changing regions sounds like a pain, consider gambling on other VM size availability. (azure employee)

Actually nothing fancy, for sure no GPUs. Just Standard_E4s_v4.

same goes for every App service, no matter which instance size

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#135

Post by DannyBee »

Most of Europe expects the winter to be quite painful from a power perspective. It would not be surprising if cloud providers (major power users) are being asked to not increase (or even decrease) power usage.

The timeframe they gave would match that kind of ask.

I wonder whether you see the same behavior from other cloud providers there (ie if you ask them whether new capacity is available, what do they say)

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#136

Post by crmd »

andrewstuart wrote: post #27

Message to cloud providers: List what you do you have available so we can choose. Do not force users to randomly guess and be refused until eventually finding something available.

I need big m4n instances with 100gbe for product demos, and spinning them up lately is like trying to get Taylor Swift tickets on Ticketmaster. We end up wasting money running them for days at a time instead of on demand because we’re afraid of losing them.

It’s infuriating that AWS doesn’t have an API that returns a list of AZs with available inventory for a given instance type.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#137

Post by cyptus »

cyptus wrote: post #124

we have the same issue and escalated it through multiple azure teams. our quota has been silently set to 0 while there where still instances running. this worked fine until auto-scale scaled the instances down in the night to 1. at the start of the day auto scale was not able to scale back up to the initial amount which did lead into heavy performance issues and outages. we needed to move the instances as azure suppo…

Interesting is that you can get instances in dev/test subscriptions without any trouble.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#138

Post by bagels »

Innominate wrote: post #121
bri3d wrote: post #23

Every cloud provider will have these issues with specific instance types in specific regions, although the Azure Germany situation sounds perhaps a bit more dire. At my past (much larger) employers we’ve always run into hardware capacity issues with AWS too - we’re just able to work around them. Building on cloud requires a lot of trade offs, one being a need for very robust cross-region capability and the ability to…

As much as this happens, I don't feel it's something to be expected or even okay. The major cloud services are expensive. This extra cost is supposed to provide for cloud services' high level of flexibility. Running out of capacity should be a rare event and treated as a high priority problem to be fixed asap. Without the ability to rapidly and arbitrarily scale, they're just overpriced server farms.

Some problems can't be fixed (eg. chip supply chain problems) even if you have more money.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#139

Post by wstuartcl »

gtirloni wrote: post #62
andrewstuart wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is my actual experience using azure.

I can go on Azure right now and create an instance and nobody will check anything manually and email me back something. Maybe you're confusing Azure with some other small town colocation provider.

"an instance" lol

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#140

Post by rsynnott »

robertlagrant wrote: post #102
rsynnott wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the meantime you can still commit to reserved instances, there is just not a guarantee of getting those instances when you need them. ... wait, what? How are they defining 'reserved'?

It's a billing mechanism. You pay less if you guarantee use. Sadly, they don't guarantee availability of things to use :)

Yup, I'm aware of reserved instances (from an AWS PoV) but I always assumed they were, at least theoretically, well, reserved!
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