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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?

#351

Post by toomuchtodo »

dangus wrote: post #348
toomuchtodo wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O365 = teams, docs, outlook, etc. workspace tools AD = identity, access, privileging, SSO

I know what they are. No company I’ve worked for recently used them. In my mind they’re legacy business products. Sure, most businesses use them, but I don’t necessarily believe that is a forever thing. At one point most businesses had mainframes.

Refuse reality at your own peril. These tools are actively used at scale across most enterprises, and likely will be for the majority of your career. More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Azure/O365.

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

#352

Post by kennxfl »

gumby wrote: post #184
astrostl wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.)

Just to steel man your statement: You should strive for excellence in deployment with all providers (dabble) but have your initial core setup on one cloud (YAGNI principle) until when multicloud capacity is needed (at scale)

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

#353

Post by foxandmouse »

Is this related to the hardware shortage during the pandemic? I'm assuming they couldn't scale at the rate which they intended pre-pandemic..

This seems like a much larger issue than they're making it seem. The promise of the cloud was unlimited scalability. I never thought of cloud resources as finite.

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

#354

Post by dangus »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #351
dangus wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what they are. No company I’ve worked for recently used them. In my mind they’re legacy business products. Sure, most businesses use them, but I don’t necessarily believe that is a forever thing. At one point most businesses had mainframes.

Refuse reality at your own peril. These tools are actively used at scale across most enterprises, and likely will be for the majority of your career. More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Azure/O365.

How many Fortune 500 companies were founded in the SaaS era?

I'm going to guess that the 5% that don't use Azure/Office 365 represent newer entrants to the Fortune 500.

71% of Fortune 500 companies use mainframes [3], and yet they are considered a dead technology with essentially no future. Do you know anyone or anyone who knows anyone who learned how to develop on mainframes in college in the current millennium? It sure wasn't part of my CS curriculum!

Small businesses represent almost half of US economic activity [1] and represent 99.7% of firms with paid employees [2]

[1] https://advocacy.sba.gov/2019/01/30/small-businesses-generat...

[2] https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/0609...

[3] https://www.precisely.com/blog/mainframe/9-mainframe-statist...

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

#355

Post by boarush »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #305
hitpointdrew wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as chip shortages, it probably helps that Amazon makes its own chips. IDK what chips you are talking about, all x86 (which I assume is most of their compute) is Intel or AMD. If they make their own they are only making the ARM instances.

AWS has three processors: Graviton, Inferentia, and Trainium. They're made in-house. https://aws.amazon.com/silicon-innovation/

And none of the above are x86. Even if they're making their own silicon, it is for specialized use (ML) and not general server provisioning.

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

#356

Post by nevf1 »

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.

Totally agree. If the service you're providing is so important, build your system so it can fly on one engine or at least land safely. Multi-cloud is the equivalence of trying to transfer all of your passengers to a different aircraft mid-air.

Multi-cloud should only be for mission critical infrastructure. Very little infrastructure is mission critical. Most other use cases can be temporarily wallpapered over with an "Under maintenance" page unless there's a good reason otherwise.

Multi-cloud introduces more risk than it prevents. Which is why things like simulated failovers and BCP testing is constantly required.

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

#357

Post by llama052 »

Twirrim wrote: post #260
whoknew1122 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

There's all sorts of examples of AWS failing to be able to provide capacity too. Just do a search for "aws InsufficientInstanceCapacity" or similar. I remember Fortnite talking about capacity limits in relation to an incident, but I'm struggling to find the post-mortem I saw it in. Even when Microsoft was being open about Azure having difficulty getting Intel chips, AWS, GCP etc. were in the same position and just no…

AWS has capacity issues you can generally mitigate. Azure however will just lock you out of a solution completely and tell you to switch regions as if that was some trivial thing.

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

#358

Post by snotrockets »

salawat wrote: post #232
snotrockets wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Being multicloud from the outset” is a very silly idea for most use cases. The way to get more from most cloud is by becoming a partner, not just a customer. And the way to do that is increase dependency and usage.

t. Sales department of Cloud provider

Good sales (which I'm not), is all about aligning with the customer: solve their problems for them, and they'd be happy to pay for it. Getting them to buy stuff they won't need is a sure way to loose future business.

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

#359

Post by RajT88 »

steelframe wrote: post #189
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.

I thought for sure it was a military term (recalling SAM missiles), until I saw it in the news just today.

GODDAMN.

Sidebar: MSFT is the king of acronym collisions.

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