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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?

#171

Post by manv1 »

ttrrooppeerr wrote: post #16

> We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like Microsoft You will be threatened by your own unreliability of building something that's dependant on one region or one cloud.

A startup is about managing risks and spending your time/money appropriately. Your cloud provider running out of capacity isn't an obvious risk especially if it's just capacity for general compute.

For some clouds that seem to be run on a manual process (IBM, Oracle) that would be expected, since they're sort of clunky. For other places (Rackspace, etc) it would uncommon. For a major provider like Azure, well, it's bizarre. I mean, the whole point of cloud is that it's all-you-can-eat.

You would think that this would be something they would advertise/talk about up-front. But who would sign up if that was disclosed?

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

#173

Post by martinald »

janober wrote: post #20
xwowsersx wrote: post #10

Oof, that sucks and I feel for you. That said... > setting up in a new region would be complicated for us. Sounds to me like you've got a few weeks to get this working. Deprioritize all other work, get everyone working on this little DevOps/Infra project. You should've been multi-region from the outset, if not multi-cloud. When using the public cloud, we do tend to take it all for granted and don't even think about t…

Thanks a lot! You are totally right, it is for sure something we will find a solution for. But honestly, do I not want to. As a startup, you have very few resources and deliberately place some exact bets. Deprioritizing everything to work on something for a long time that was not prioritized, just to then end up again where you were before (a working cloud solution) is the last thing any startup should be forced to d…

I disagree with the other poster you should have been multiregion from the start. It adds a load of complexity and failure cases for early stage Startups.

Very poor position to be in, apparently this happened in azure UK recently too.

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

#174

Post by count »

rsynnott wrote: post #140
robertlagrant wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

In the AWS context, they are, in fact. That's the original point of them - so during big AZ failures your reserved instances had first dibs on the available capacity.

The billing thing became more of the point as big AZ failures are so rare.

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

#175

Post by astrostl »

xwowsersx wrote: post #10

Oof, that sucks and I feel for you. That said... > setting up in a new region would be complicated for us. Sounds to me like you've got a few weeks to get this working. Deprioritize all other work, get everyone working on this little DevOps/Infra project. You should've been multi-region from the outset, if not multi-cloud. When using the public cloud, we do tend to take it all for granted and don't even think about t…

"Multi-cloud from the outset" is probably the single-worst generic cloud advice that I think anyone could be given. In professional cloud consulting the rule of thumb is to do one cloud with excellence until you even think about another one. And even that is really just kicking the conversational can, as both becoming excellent and actually needing multi-cloud combined is one-in-a-billion.

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

#176

Post by aeyes »

rsynnott wrote: post #140
robertlagrant wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

On AWS instances are only reserved if you reserve a specific instance type in a specific zone. Reservations across multiple zones or savings plans don't reserve capacity.

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

#177

Post by logisticpeach »

xwowsersx wrote: post #21
xwowsersx wrote: post #10

Oof, that sucks and I feel for you. That said... > setting up in a new region would be complicated for us. Sounds to me like you've got a few weeks to get this working. Deprioritize all other work, get everyone working on this little DevOps/Infra project. You should've been multi-region from the outset, if not multi-cloud. When using the public cloud, we do tend to take it all for granted and don't even think about t…

I'll reply to my own comment in response to a since-deleted reply that went something to the effect of "this is terrible advice for a young startup trying to get to product market for": I'm totally on board with the idea of being scrappy and taking shortcuts in order to get to PMF as soon as possible. However, it seems the proof is in the pudding here. If you can't service customers due to lack of compute resources,…

I'd add to this by asking: how much more PMF can you get when you have a two week horizon of new customers before you literally run out of compute resource in a major cloud provider data centre?

Sounds like customers are coming in thick and fast.

If this is the dynamic and the company can't spare a few weeks to solve it, something has gone seriously wrong in a very interesting way.

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

#178

Post by sgerenser »

rsynnott wrote: post #140
robertlagrant wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Reminds me of the classic Seinfeld car reservation bit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2GmGSNvaM

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

#179

Post by xwowsersx »

janober wrote: post #44
xwowsersx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. It's not a fun position to be in. And sometimes you're correct to take calculated risks and maybe the expected value was positive here, despite what ended up happening. Without knowing the details about your services and infrastructure, it's hard for me to know what's involved in going multi-region now. Are you sure it's such a a gargantuan effort? I would've thought one person working full-time on this f…

Thanks a lot, is really super nice of you and appreciated! Luckily we have somebody very knowledgeable on our team. Will tell him to reach out if he wants to have a peer to brain-storm some ideas.

Glad to hear you have the right people. Good luck, my friend.

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

#180

Post by mhitza »

xwowsersx wrote: post #10

Oof, that sucks and I feel for you. That said... > setting up in a new region would be complicated for us. Sounds to me like you've got a few weeks to get this working. Deprioritize all other work, get everyone working on this little DevOps/Infra project. You should've been multi-region from the outset, if not multi-cloud. When using the public cloud, we do tend to take it all for granted and don't even think about t…

I take offense with you comment. It's not the first time I'm hearing about multi-region/multi-cloud in online tech forums, however reality doesn't match.

I don't want to be snarky, but when large service providers like AWS have their own crossregion downtime because one snowflake of a service in us-east-1 is down, I kind of dismiss the virtue signaling of high resilient multi-(az/region/cloud) ever existing in practice.

If you can somehow have a separate database per region/cloud, sure, I can understand that, but if you have to shard your database across many clouds, I'd dread having to tame such a beast, especially within a startup.

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