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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?

#261

Post by Twirrim »

more_corn wrote: post #238
Twirrim wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All cloud providers are NOT equal here. Amazon over-provisions and sells the excess capacity as spot instances.

So does google, so does azure etc. etc. https://cloud.google.com/spot-vms, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/virtual-machines/...

Spot instances exist just to try to turn over-provisions in to not a complete loss. You're at least making some money from your mistake.

edit: You should consider "spot instances" in general to be a failure as far as a cloud provider is concerned. It means you've got your guesses wrong. You always want a buffer zone, but not that much of a buffer zone. The biggest single cost for cloud providers is the per-rack OpEx, the cost of powering, cooling etc.

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

#262

Post by oneplane »

gtirloni wrote: post #41
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

Yes it’s weird that you have to ask them for instances which some actual physical person looks at your request, thinks about it and says yes or no to. Instead of providing you with a list of the resources they do have, you have to play this weird game where you ask for specific instances in specific regions and then within several hours someone emails back to say yes or no. If it’s no, you have to guess again where y…

Is this a joke comment?

No, Microsoft still isn't up to the 'use what you want, pay for your usage' level that other companies tend to be. They even still mix "licensing" with "usage" so you have to pay for something to then be allowed to pay for using it...

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

#263

Post by TexanFeller »

Infinite scaling clouds, they said. In AWS at work we spin up large numbers of EMR nodes and every few days get stuck waiting for availability of certain instance types in our region too. I guess we could reserve more, but that defeats a lot of scale up and down advantages.

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

#264

Post by option »

MattGaiser wrote: post #250
option wrote: post #63

I’ve heard from a friend who works at Microsoft that due to energy crisis in Europe plus their data locality laws, Microsoft is indeed running short on datacenter capacity there and can’t do anything about it no matter how much they are willing to spend.

Couldn't even put up their own solar panels?

lol, what?

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

#265

Post by plantain »

I'm baffled to read stories that suggest Azure is a viable competitor to GCP/AWS - they're an absolute nightmare on capacity.

It took me six months to get approved to start six instances! With multiple escalations including being forcibly changed to invoice billing - for which they never match the invoices automatically, every payment requires we file a ticket.

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

#266

Post by mirekrusin »

TexanFeller wrote: post #263

Infinite scaling clouds, they said. In AWS at work we spin up large numbers of EMR nodes and every few days get stuck waiting for availability of certain instance types in our region too. I guess we could reserve more, but that defeats a lot of scale up and down advantages.

Serverless runs out of servers.

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

#268

Post by flippingbits »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #251
adrr wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure has some of the biggest outages like when they went down on Feb29th for the whole day. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/summary-of-windows-az...

10 years ago, has there been something similar recently?

The last one I remember is this one from August this year: https://redmondmag.com/articles/2022/08/30/microsoft-blames-... It was not a complete outage but these DNS issues caused a lot of pain.

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

#269

Post by userbinator »

natch wrote: post #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 canno…

That's also the name of the DRM system it had.

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

#270

Post by arcturus17 »

DannyBee wrote: post #135

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)

> It would not be surprising if cloud providers (major power users) are being asked to not increase (or even decrease) power usage.

I doubt it. It will be easier - and probably safer - to ask citizens and physical industry (eg, factories) to bear the brunt than to risk having problems in critical IT infrastructure. Ask people and factories to turn the heat 3 degrees down and the effects will be more or less predictable. Asking to shut compute power down at random will have unpredictable consequences.

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