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Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

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Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#21

Post by thoraway1010 »

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #8

> Since Microsoft’s other businesses are either hardware or office software, with the exception of maybe XBox’s gaming, it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges. Uh, as a former Microsoft equivalent of a SRE this is a utterly ridiculous statement. I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry - we definitely…

I think they have the experience, but the success has not always been great. I used to have a hotmail account -> not impressed with how microsoft managed that vs things like gmail (downtime etc).

Same thing during the early Office 365 days. These systems were rough.

Zoom and AWS seem to be handling scaling pretty well - I'm a bit confused though as to how much extra capacity it would make sense for AWS to be carrying or maybe they aren't being asked to scale the way microsoft is which is my guess.

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#22

Post by outworlder »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #19
godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #8

> Since Microsoft’s other businesses are either hardware or office software, with the exception of maybe XBox’s gaming, it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges. Uh, as a former Microsoft equivalent of a SRE this is a utterly ridiculous statement. I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry - we definitely…

>> we definitely knew how to prepare for traffic surges and keep our services "always on" Okay, but as a heavy customer of AWS for 10 years and Azure & GCP for 6 years... there's some very valid criticism of the capacity planning and elasticity. I hit capacity, provisioning and scaling issues all the time in Azure regions. And many times the cause is not obvious because most services seem to be unaware that the resou…

> there's some very valid criticism of the capacity planning and elasticity.

Indeed. Getting quota increases is also a much slower and involved process, compared to AWS or GCP.

> and fail with seemingly unrelated errors and partial failure.

Oh, don't get me started! If managers were forced to work with the Azure API, they would not choose it as the provider. The unclear error responses are the most aggravating part.

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#23

Post by purple-again »

Eh. A legion of non remote, non technology, companies were forced to quickly thrust themselves into the web. Want to bet how many of those companies were already running as a Microsoft shop? Nearly 100%.

I would love to see details on the total requests placed on AWS and Azure during the time frame of COVID. My instinct tells me that Azure got hammered driven by those microsoft shops scrambling to get into the cloud while AWS had only a small increase, driven by technology companies (a small portion of companies) where the devs have final say and prefer AWS.

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#25

Post by acwan93 »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #13
rjbwork wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's how the Senate works.

More specifically: every state has 2 US Senators, whereas Representatives in the US House of Representatives are allocated to states based upon population.

Historical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#26

Post by outworlder »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #21
godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #8

> Since Microsoft’s other businesses are either hardware or office software, with the exception of maybe XBox’s gaming, it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges. Uh, as a former Microsoft equivalent of a SRE this is a utterly ridiculous statement. I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry - we definitely…

I think they have the experience, but the success has not always been great. I used to have a hotmail account -> not impressed with how microsoft managed that vs things like gmail (downtime etc). Same thing during the early Office 365 days. These systems were rough. Zoom and AWS seem to be handling scaling pretty well - I'm a bit confused though as to how much extra capacity it would make sense for AWS to be carrying…

> I'm a bit confused though as to how much extra capacity it would make sense for AWS to be carrying or maybe they aren't being asked to scale the way microsoft is which is my guess.

AWS has a crapton of capacity. So much so that they were the first ones to come up with the 'spot' instance concept. We could easily get hundreds of spot instances most days, even in a popular region like US-West 2. Those were relatively big ones too, with a minimum 16 VCPUs and 64GB – but given the spot pricing, we would request even bigger ones if they were available. Even when they were terminated, usually we would get a replacement instance in a few minutes. Even faster if the fleet request was flexible and didn't need a particular instance type.

AWS will also honor pretty large quota increases without batting an eye, while Azure (and sometimes even GCP) would send similar numbers "for review" and take their sweet time.

I can only remember a couple of times, years ago, where requests for normal, on-demand instances failed to get satisfied, in a particular availability zone. But the other zones would be fine.

Most Azure regions do not even _have_ availability zones, so that's out.

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#27

Post by kerng »

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #8

> Since Microsoft’s other businesses are either hardware or office software, with the exception of maybe XBox’s gaming, it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges. Uh, as a former Microsoft equivalent of a SRE this is a utterly ridiculous statement. I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry - we definitely…

Agreed, Microsoft has been running cloud services for long time, even before the cloud got its name. Things like Windows Update, Xbox Live, MSN, Hotmail... some of them have been around for 20+ years.

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#28

Post by outworlder »

purple-again wrote: post #23

Eh. A legion of non remote, non technology, companies were forced to quickly thrust themselves into the web. Want to bet how many of those companies were already running as a Microsoft shop? Nearly 100%. I would love to see details on the total requests placed on AWS and Azure during the time frame of COVID. My instinct tells me that Azure got hammered driven by those microsoft shops scrambling to get into the cloud…

> where the devs have final say

Highlighting the important part.

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#29

Post by theginger »

smt88 wrote: post #18
Havoc wrote: post #14

Doesn't seem like a particularly balanced article. Plus some downright bizarre statements. GCP is "not big enough to be stress tested on the same level."??? Even smaller operations are subject to stress proportionately and I'm using a hell of a lot of google hangouts conferences...

Do major Google services even run on GCP? My understanding was that they don't...

It is more that GCP runs on google's infrastructure, i think you can think of GCP as customer friendly layer on what they are using internally.

Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud

#30

Post by NicoJuicy »

luhn wrote: post #2

> One misleading headline that’s been pushed out by Microsoft and unfortunately picked up by various tech media outlets, is the “775% increase” in Azure cloud service usage in geographical areas that are most committed to some form of social distancing or shelter-in-place policy. It's way worse than that. The original statement: > We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced…

This "single feature" is video-conference and is used by almost every Office 365 business customer. In chat propositions, it's Slacks biggest competitor.

There is no feature bigger in bandwidth than this one.

I believe the numbers are similar in Europe.

By reference, I think it's similar as having a Netflix business appear from nowhere.

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