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 time, they will make sure you have compute resources available in your subscriptions.
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?
#82This is nothing new, Azure has been having capacity problem for over a year now[1]. Germany is not the only region affected at all, it's the case for a number of instance types in some of their larger US regions as well. In the meantime you can still commit to reserved instances, there is just not a guarantee of getting those instances when you need them. The biggest advice I can give is 1. keep trying and grabbing c…
> In the meantime you can still commit to reserved instances, there is just not a guarantee of getting those instances when you need them.
... wait, what? How are they defining 'reserved'?
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an insidious argument to make. When building a startup you should choose 1 reliable cloud provider and use their best practices to support high availability.
No matter the provider, their best practices all say to be multi-region.
Multi-AZ and then grow into multi-region if the need arises. Multi-region is a huge lift the moment all your data must live in two regions simultaneously. Very few shops are experienced enough to run clusters across datacenters in a way that can handle the unhappy paths.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is my actual experience using azure.
I can go on Azure right now and create an instance and nobody will check anything manually and email me back something. Maybe you're confusing Azure with some other small town colocation provider.
If you want 1 instance, you're right. If you want 10 - 20 instances of one type in a region, the other poster's experience matches my own: you have to open a support request to ask for a quota increase, and that is not an automated process.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
No matter the provider, their best practices all say to be multi-region.
Def not true with AWS, unless you reach a particular scale. Not for product market fit. My technology choices would be fully managed services so I could focus on my actual business.
def true with everything. what a ridiculous statement.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#86I 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…
Thanks a lot, that is very helpful and great to know! Def. something we will do in the future.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#87This is not as rare as public clouds may lead people to believe. I have had to move workloads around since AWS began (even between public clouds on occasion). In particular, GPU availability has been a continuing problem. Unlike interchangeable x64 / arm64 instances with some adjustments based on the new core and ram count... if no GPU instances are available then I simply cannot run the job. AMD's improved support h…
You want to be in a position where you can spin up in a nearby region and pretend it's local and have things be good enough for a while. Properly building out multi-region is hard, and multi-cloud isn't worth it because it improves how you handle rare events (where half the internet is already down) with ongoing operational toil.
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#88Damn! It's leaky abstractions again
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#89Oof, 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 :)
Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
#90What VM sizes?
Besides what’s already been said, internal capacity differs HUGELY based on VM SKU. If you need GPUs or something it’ll be tough. But a lot of the newer v4/v5 general compute SKUs (D/Da/E/Ea/etc) have plenty of capacity in many regions.
If changing regions sounds like a pain, consider gambling on other VM size availability.
(azure employee)