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Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
221–230 of 359 posts
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#222Oof, 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.
If you use generic enough services (container hosts, load balancers, VMs, object stores, even hosted SQL DBs, etc), then the multi-cloud journey is not that hard. The challenge comes when you have build a whole architecture on top of some AWS magic that simply does not have an easy alternative in the non-cloud world.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDPR isn't really related to the infrastructure, and isn't a problem if you built your product knowing you'll need to conform. Shopify is GDPR compliant, for all merchants, and runs on Google Cloud in multiple regions.
Genuine question: is knowledge on how to do this well known? Without that accessibility, I'm picturing folks operating in EU being unwilling to take the risk of not being compliant and just hosting everything in a single region.
GDPR is not some boogieman, it can be pain to do on existing products that were build pre GDPR, but if you are starting new project, being GDPR compliant is pretty straight forward and not hard/time consuming, unless you are explicitly trying to do something shady*
*privacy invasive that GDPR is explicitly set up to make harder, so duh
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#224I think there is some general rule in business that you should not depend on a provider that if they lost your business it would be less then one percent of their revenue. Or be ready when they drop the guillotine.
For anyone getting started, that means no dependencies at all. Even colocating would be out of the question, according to your metric.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#225> 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…
It's worth pointing out that every cloud is the same when it comes to capacity / capacity risk. They all apply a lot of time and effort to figuring out the optimal amount of capacity to order based on track record of both customer demand and supply chain satisfaction. Too much capacity is money spent getting no return, up front capex, ongoing opex, physical space in facilities etc. On cloud scales (averaged out over…
In my experience there are differences between clouds so while all have the same basic problem in practice some may be better than others. I've never had issues getting GPUs on AWS but GCP constantly has issues with GPU/TPU capacity.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#226In Norway East Azure were incapable of provisioning new VMs for several(4-5) days, caused by some IP issue. The only solution was 'try to provision in the night, and don't turn it off if you get one'. Their status page showed green through the whole period though, even though nothing needing compute worked. So that was cool....
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#227> 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…
It's worth pointing out that every cloud is the same when it comes to capacity / capacity risk. They all apply a lot of time and effort to figuring out the optimal amount of capacity to order based on track record of both customer demand and supply chain satisfaction. Too much capacity is money spent getting no return, up front capex, ongoing opex, physical space in facilities etc. On cloud scales (averaged out over…
It may be a risk borne by every cloud provider, but why does this only really happen to Microsoft among large providers?
As far as chip shortages, it probably helps that Amazon makes its own chips. Microsoft could do the same rather than running out of capacity and blaming chip shortages.
Microsoft had to know that at some point they were going to run out of capacity. They should've either did something about it or let customers know.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#228Oof, 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…
> Deprioritize all other work, get everyone working on this little DevOps/Infra project. This is doubly worthwhile as if this stumble kills the startup (it can happen) this will be excellent experience to take to the next employer :)
Also a lesson here is don’t create any prod asserts manually ever. Terraform or some other software to define your cloud assets. Then this issue is just a matter of adding a top level loop or maybe adding a region parameter to a layer of software. Cloud is only efficient if you take the software defined every thing seriously. Otherwise it is premium hosting where you are likely a small fish.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#229Every 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.
> Without the ability to rapidly and arbitrarily scale, they're just overpriced server farms.
I mean that's what cloud is (outsourced server farm). Sure they also offer services on top, but that's mostly because they want to lock you in, and can charge more for, so it's a win win for them.
And there is no magic here, someone has to get the chips, build servers and connect them to network. And while they will often overbuild for capacity, they will never do it to a degree, where they can't run out, because that would be way to expensive and not financially viable.
I don't think any cloud will ever be able to guarantee to never run out of resources.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> they're just overpriced server farms That's exactly what a cloud is. It's someone else's datacenter with an API.
A really good API that makes it close to a software defined everything world. Which has promise.