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Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

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Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#251

Post by bane »

thecatspaw wrote: post #219
bane wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had started tentatively using teams before all this. Now it's a critical part of our day-to-day functioning and you know what? It's not bad, not bad at all. It's pretty well thought out, reliable, integrated with Outlook and Sharepoint. Even the few people who complained that they wouldn't use it because there wasn't a phone number to call for telecons were overcome when we told them to just install the app and jo…

I still absolutely loathe teams. There is no way to get it to show you have unread messages (the red dot of slack). Notifications do not work reliably. When I am in a Teams channel I miss notifications from the Chat channels, and vice versa. For me Teams has been a major downgrade from Slack

You totally get a dot (or a @) in either teams or chat to tell you have something unread.

Unread teams groups are bold and same with chats that have new messages.

Calls likewise get a dot and so on.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#252

Post by PeterStuer »

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Wow. First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what. But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in p…

Price hiking is the least good option of all the possible prioritization rules I can imagine. Regardless of what we need most in a crisis, let's just dole it out to who has money? Really?

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#253

Post by hannasanarion »

prussian wrote: post #249
hannasanarion wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will still be able to hoard things. The difference is that only the rich will hoard, because everybody else never got the chance. The normal market logic that high prices encourage extra production doesn't apply during an emergency, when the demand is panic-induced and momentary, and supply changes won't take effect until after the emergency is over. The actual solution that makes sure everyone gets what they…

How is rationing working? supply is still not enough and rationing on that basis still doesn't prevent the "rich" from effectively paying straw purchasers to buy the goods they want to hoard. Hell, it doesn't even prevent people from repeatedly making visits to collect whatever is on the shelves. I'm not convinced the US government, let alone any western government, has the plan, manpower or infrastructure in place t…

What do you mean? Rationing is working fine in the stores that are implementing it, the problem is that so many stores aren't. My local grocery is rationing paper products, milk, chicken, and eggs, and they're always available if you visit before noon.

There is no supply problem for consumer products. The shortages you see at grocery stores are exclusively because of panic-buying and hoarding, the shelves are stocked right back up to full overnight.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#254

Post by klodolph »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #135
p1necone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep - if there's N capacity to provide a necessary necessary good/service, but M > N need, raising the price doesn't seem like a great solution to manage it in a crisis situation. To some extent non necessary uses would decrease, but you also end up with more wealthy people who want it more getting it, and more generally there won't be any distinction between want and need .

> if there's N capacity to provide a necessary necessary good/service, but M > N need, raising the price doesn't seem like a great solution to manage it in a crisis situation Within a crisis, yes. But this also did-incentivises overprovisioning, i.e. building slack into the system.

Not speaking in general terms, but just for cloud services—it’s just bananas expensive to overprovision at a cloud provider.

The more profitable (and ecological) way to run a cloud provider is to provision only for the capacity that you need, and then pack your machines with low-priority tasks with lower guarantees where you can simply start load-shedding in a crisis.

There are thousands of businesses that will look at EC2 spot pricing and simply not schedule their jobs above a certain price point, and I’m sure all the cloud providers have internal workloads running at lower priority (e.g. transcoding YouTube meme compilations) that will run at reduced capacity. Personally I think the whole thing is kind of elegant, even if there are a lot of rough edges in practice.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#255

Post by rsync »

ineedasername wrote: post #137

How much excess capacity would a cloud provider typically have (as in %) to accommodate normal peak loads and still have a comfortable margin? Or maybe that's not something providers reveal, so let me as the sys-admins of this thread: For on-premise resources, what is your % margin of excess capacity reserved?

"How much excess capacity would a cloud provider typically have (as in %) to accommodate normal peak loads and still have a comfortable margin?"

We (rsync.net) run a sort-of just-in-time deployment model wherein as our storage arrays approach 80% capacity, we completely remove-and-replace the oldest storage array at a location[1].

The 80% number is related to performance penalties that become extant when you fill up zpools too full. In the old days, that is the threshold beyond which we would see significant performance degradation. ZFS behaves better now and you can avoid a fair amount of that degradation by having read and write cache devices (L2ARC and SLOG) but we still hang onto that 80% number ...

When we do such a replacement, we are often replacing a 2-3 year old storage array with a brand new one, which means that the drive capacity of the refreshed system is about double what it was before - so we have a relative glut of space for a time. This allows us to onboard larger (50-100 TB) clients with no lead-time.

FWIW, we have seen a relative increase in signups since lockdowns began. My current theory is that a lot of people are sitting at home with a lot of free time and thinking about risks ... and some of them think about backups.

[1] Denver, San Diego, Fremont, Zurich, and Hong Kong.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#256

Post by Vrondi »

xnyan wrote: post #250
AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best was IRC and mumble. It's been downhill since then.

I like IRC and use it. I have zero understanding why anyone on HN thinks IRC is a viable chat option outside uber-nerds. Show me a training plan (outline is fine), case study or blog or anything outlining how to train my 50 non-technical coworkers in the use of IRC. They need image support and audio chat and all the other modern chat features users demand. Keep in mind there are a lot of chat options and users will w…

I mean, Discord is basically re-skinned IRC, and tons of "normal" people who have never heard of IRC use it every day.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#257

Post by Vrondi »

gundmc wrote: post #2

Why would Microsoft be disproportionately affected by this? Are we expecting similar decrees from AWS and GCP? Or was Microsoft operating with less runway before this began?

A lot of companies and educational institutions already had Teams licenses through their Office 365 contracts, but weren't really using Teams. Now they're using it, a lot, because "it's already paid for". Simple as that.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#258

Post by techntoke »

discordance wrote: post #170
techntoke wrote: post #33

Leave it up to Microsoft to find out ways to profit more during a pandemic, rather than open sourcing their software and platform to be used anywhere and everywhere. People forgot what hosting is like without these massively overpriced cloud services that nickel and dime for every feature. Want encryption which basically costs nothing? Oh, you'll pay an extra $0.10 per hour on top of your $.08GB of outbound traffic.…

I don't get how they are profiteering out of this. The prices haven't changed from before the pandemic. What's happening now is unprecedented. Without public cloud providers, most businesses would not be able to run this giant work-from-home experiment. If they were hosted on-prem then they couldn't scale either.

Why couldn't they scale on-prem? Setting up Kubernetes on a bunch of servers for distributed workloads isn't that difficult these days.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#259

Post by bmurphy1976 »

leesalminen wrote: post #99
ma2rten wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that Amazon and Google are more prepared to handle surges because they run some of the largest web properties. This like every day is Black Friday for Amazon. It's rough, but not something they have never dealt with before.

GCP and GSuite had outages this week listed on their status pages. AWS has been rock solid for us in the 3 regions we operate in.

We've anecdotally seen a huge increase in spot market flakiness, but basic functionality and reserved instances have been solid.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#260

Post by alasdair_ »

ip26 wrote: post #245
alasdair_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more like actively claiming “contains zero trans fats!” On the packaging when in fact the product is full of them.

Which they do. Your tortillas with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil? Yeah, it's less than 0.5g per serving so they get to say 0g.

>Your tortillas with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil? Yeah, it's less than 0.5g per serving so they get to say 0g.

Personal favorite: Tic Tacs are 94.5% sugar yet Tic Tacs can be marketed as a "sugar free" food.

"The Nutrition Facts for Tic Tac® mints state that there are 0 grams of sugar per serving. Does this mean that they are sugar free?

Tic Tac® mints do contain sugar as listed in the ingredient statement. However, since the amount of sugar per serving (1 mint) is less than 0.5 grams, FDA labeling requirements permit the Nutrition Facts to state that there are 0 grams of sugar per serving."

https://www.tictac.com/us/en/faq

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