Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by Thaxll » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

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…

AWS have the same sort of problems sometimes, try to use 100/1000s of some C5 instances in some regions.

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

#32

Post by fulafel » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #12

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…

Office 365 was derisively referred to as “Office 360” with some good reason years ago. (I use it and the uptime has gotten noticeably better. That it could get noticeably better is the problem.)

I think this was less than a year ago. eg https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/dyu69c/office365_...

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

#33

Post by tw04 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #30

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.

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

Only without all the edge caching devices Netflix has had a decade to deploy.

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

#34

Post by btilly » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

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…

You are judging by what actions you were taking to make things better. Everyone else judges by what results they see.

Based on my experience, Azure is not as good at AWS and Google at actually keeping things up and running when the shit hits the fan. And AWS is not as good as Google. (That said, AWS exposes a lot more to customers than Google does. Google may stay up, but I prefer running software in the AWS cloud.)

That isn't to say that all three aren't doing a lot right. Clearly they all are. And clearly they are all doing a lot right that I don't know how to do. But the fact that they do a lot right doesn't mean that they are equal.

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

#35

Post by all_blue_chucks » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

uji wrote: post #4

A better comparison would be between Azure and GCP, both of them provide office suite (SAAS) to customers. Google recently released its side of the numbers ( https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/how... )

AWS also provides office suite to customers: WorkMail, WorkDocs, Chime messaging, etc.

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

#36

Post by tinyhouse » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

One thing that probably helps AWS is that they have experience preparing for peak usage given Amazon's peak traffic (and others) on some events during the year, such as black Friday, Prime Day, major holidays, etc.

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

#37

Post by rstupek » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

theginger wrote: post #29

smt88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that really the case though? I've never seen any discussion on how GCP is architected and distributed on the google network. Does a GCP server run next to one serving up google.com results?

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

#38

Post by lostmsu » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #34

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…

You are judging by what actions you were taking to make things better. Everyone else judges by what results they see. Based on my experience, Azure is not as good at AWS and Google at actually keeping things up and running when the shit hits the fan. And AWS is not as good as Google. (That said, AWS exposes a lot more to customers than Google does. Google may stay up, but I prefer running software in the AWS cloud.)…

Google? Did not they have a multi-hour outage just a few days ago?

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

#39

Post by tw04 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

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…

100% echo this statement. I have dozens of customers who went to VDI in Azure as their immediate work from home solution. I can't think of a single one that went to AWS. The article makes a bunch of baseless claims to get to an unproven conclusion.

>It’s safe to say that AWS runs a much bigger, if not more critical, chunk of the digital world than Azure.

Based on?? If o365 goes down for any extended period of time, most of the fortune 100 can't do business.

> it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges.

Ya... Microsoft lacks experience running always-on services... they'd only been managing hotmail for a decade before AWS was even in beta. They have no experience running always-on services AT ALL.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]