I’m sure Microsoft is just as surprised as you are. Almost every European facility I ever worked with was constrained by either space or power so you had to be really on top of your capacity management. Facilities in the US seem to have unlimited power and floor space so you never have to deal with either issue.
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?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why not run them elsewhere? There’s lots of providers apart from AWS/Azure/GCP. Or buy a machine and put it in your office. Self hosting can often be cheaper and more available and probably faster than using a cloud.
We used to run demos on a local hardware cluster, but we found that prospective customers were reacting negatively to demos that were not on the same platform they would be running in production (AWS).
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#153Is there a secondary market for reselling Azure capacity? Can you bid against other Azure customers?
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#154Stockouts have happened on both AWS and GCP too. Most of the time the problem is no longer a problem if you build your infrastructure not to rely on a single region or availability zone. On EC2 especially, even if you can't change to a different region, try changing to a new instance type and that might work.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#155Who else has heard countless times something like "with company X's cloud platform you don't need to file a ticket and wait weeks for another team to provision a physical server, just spin some more up bro." The reality is you do, you've just outsourced the problem.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#156People saying "shame on you for not being multi-region" are missing the point: This is a German company with German customers subject to German data residency laws. For them to store German data in a region besides Germany requires getting informed consent from the "data subject", who must be "pre-informed about the potential risks involved in cross-border data transfer". [1] This is why Azure has a dedicated German…
No reason why Azure can't run multiple "regions" within Germany proper. Their current region is in Frankfurt; no reason why they couldn't launch regions in Munich or Hamburg as well. Then German companies could go multi-region while staying fully compliant with German data sovereignty laws.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#157This is nothing new, Azure has been having capacity problem for over a year now[1]. Germany is not the only region affected at all, it's the case for a number of instance types in some of their larger US regions as well. In the meantime you can still commit to reserved instances, there is just not a guarantee of getting those instances when you need them. The biggest advice I can give is 1. keep trying and grabbing c…
>Azure has been having capacity problem for over a year now
This is also a problem internally for Microsoft. GitHub and LinkedIn still operate in private datacenters due to Azure capacity issues
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#158>We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like Microsoft
Had you never heard about (and this is unfortunately not a joke) Microsoft’s music service they once had, shut down after a few short years leaving customers without the ability to listen to the music they had paid to listen to?
The service was called, this was the trademarked name, Microsoft “Plays for Sure.” You cannot make this stuff up.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#159help
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#160Interesting semi-confirmed anecdote: when lockdown hit, Azure began to refuse to allocate servers. One of the main reasons was they prioritised servers in this way: 1. Government/health/defence cloud customers 2. Teams, which was exploding in use and they wanted to capitalise on it 3. Regular cloud customers
Yeah this was real. I remember this. For a while they selectively deprioritized customers, like you say. I'm not judging, just confirming the observation.