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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?

#181

Post by sammy2255 »

crmd wrote: post #136
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.

Which regions are you trying?

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

#182

Post by janober »

l-p wrote: post #131

> 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 consume…

We actually use Azure for ~2 years now. It worked the most time reasonably well, even though we had also a few issues. But our current issue + ready your and other comments will probably result in looking for a new home.

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

#183

Post by wstuartcl »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #81

I used to be a technical seller for Azure. This situation is obviously not great for you as a customer but there are proactive steps you can take to prevent this going forward. Reach out to your sales team and work with them on your roadmap for compute requirements going forward. The sales team has a forecast tool that feeds back into the department that buys and racks the equipment. If you can provide enough lead ti…

What you describe is like the inverse of 90% of the reason companies host in the cloud. What makes needing to forcast and reach out to a sales guy to eventually stock hardware for your needs (while now competing against other customers for those resources) any better than hosting on prem.

AWS for sure has had resource constraints in different AZs (especially during flack Friday and holiday loads) but I have never had an issue finding resources to spin up especially if I was willing to be flexible on vm type.

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

#184

Post by gumby »

astrostl wrote: post #175
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.

That pretty much binds your hands since in our experience the one provider who can do “one cloud with excellence” is AWS.

(As an aside I also agree that multi cloud from the get go is a YAGNI violation. Just keep in the back of your mind “could we have an alternative to this?” when using your provider’s proprietary features.)

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

#186

Post by ghayes »

astrostl wrote: post #175
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.

Completely agree, though certain aspects, such as running on k8s or Docker might make it easier to switch if you ever decide to, versus say, being tightly coupled with many bespoke cloud products.

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

#187

Post by wstuartcl »

jesseryoung wrote: post #95

Ran into a similar issue last year in the East US region. We contracted support and they gave a similar response. From my understanding talking to people who use AWS and GCP this isn't uncommon across cloud platforms. While we could've just swapped a deployment parameter to deploy to another region, we opted to just use a different SKU of VMs for a short period and switch back to the VMs when they were available agai…

yeah AWS tends to have capacity issues during high volume periods like black Friday (I think this is now actually because most large users pre reserve a buffer pool of vms sitting unused) -- but I have never had an issue where AWS has told me there would be no capacity for months. Its usually swapping AZ or regions or being slightly flexible on your sku. And if you are sensitive to this and find it happening take a look at your sku loadout you may be choosing a very high demand vm type and shifting just slightly gets way more capacity.

^^ and by capacity I am talking like 10's or 100s of vms being available not 1.

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

#188

Post by trasz2 »

>We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability

Daily reminder that cloud services are vastly less reliable than traditional hosting; it’s just that they manipulate the terminology to deflect that, replacing reliability with availability, aka “making impression of working”.

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

#189

Post by steelframe »

RajT88 wrote: post #143

Get in touch with your CSAM. They will be able to get you assigned a capacity manager, if you don't already have one assigned. It is the function of the capacity manager to help you plan ahead based on what the data center capacities look like going into the future. Meet monthly with your capacity manager. Get representation across different technology interests - database, compute, storage, event hubs, etc. Don't ev…

> Get in touch with your CSAM

Well that's an unfortunate acronym collision.

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

#190

Post by janober »

ig1 wrote: post #167

Ask your VCs/angels for help, this is the kind of thing they can definitely help with. (Speaking from experience - one of our portfolio companies had a similar challenge and we used our network to get to one of the execs of the vendor involved)

Thanks a lot. Yes that is also something we are trying in parallel.
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