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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

#51

Post by btilly »

lostmsu wrote: post #38
btilly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They did.

But which has had more outages in the last 5 years?

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

#52

Post by cc81 »

outworlder wrote: post #26
thoraway1010 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AWS is bigger but I doubt they have seen the same type of change in traffic as I don't think they have the same traffic patterns that would be affected by something like this.

Teams was used before but suddenly in my company you had 100k office workers working from home and all meetings converted to Teams meetings, a lot with video streaming. People also seem to react by booking even more meetings now when the casual talk was gone (instead of chatting casually).

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

#53

Post by SkyPuncher »

samspenc wrote: post #3

> limited to places where shelter-in-place is in full force, which at least in the United States, is only a small part of the country with densely populated urban areas: New York, California, New Jersey, Michigan, etc. Ummm, it is NOT a "small part" of the country that is under "shelter-in-place". By geographic area, maybe, but California, New York and New Jersey alone include some of the largest cities by population…

Lots of other states have "Safer at Home" orders right now too.

They're effectively the same thing.

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

#54

Post by cc81 »

reallydontask wrote: post #43
all_blue_chucks wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are they even in the same league as O365 and G-suite, usage wise? Only asking because I'd never heard of these services before

Are G-suite even in the same league as O365? I have no numbers and might be incredibly biased by location but I feel that all the "boring" office companies in Europe has moved towards Office 365 as a natural step.

That is of course not true and I'm sure there are plenty of G-suite companies but for the large ones it seems very common that they have just followed Microsoft into the cloud.

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

#55

Post by cc81 »

outworlder wrote: post #28
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.

If devs are the ones generating revenue for the company. Not all companies are software companies.

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

#56

Post by mastry »

tw04 wrote: post #39
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, m…

I have seen the same. One of our clients stood up 25,000 Azure VMs (Win 10) in a single day. No problems so far.

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

#57

Post by posnet »

btilly wrote: post #51
lostmsu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They did. But which has had more outages in the last 5 years?

The biggest problem with GCP outages is that they've had multiple network issues that affected multiple north American regions at the same time.

So maybe there are less of them on a per service basis compared the AWS, but when they do happen they are far more serious.

The only AWS has had that came close was the us-east-1 s3 outage. But even that didn't break networking to running instances.

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

#58

Post by tw04 »

mastry wrote: post #56
tw04 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, m…

I have seen the same. One of our clients stood up 25,000 Azure VMs (Win 10) in a single day. No problems so far.

> No problems so far.

Wait until they get the bill :) I will say, it's amazing how quickly they find budget for that back-burnered VDI project after the first month of billing.

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

#59

Post by Havoc »

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...

I don't think at that scale it's realistic to think of one "running on" the other - for either google or MS.

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

#60

Post by Dunedan »

outworlder wrote: post #26
thoraway1010 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 have so many bad experiences with limit increases on AWS.

I just went through one trying to get concurrent AWS Lambda executions increased from the default 1.000 in a region to 10.000. I had to open a support case, fill out an optional questionnaire (which turned out to be not optional at all), the support engineer had to forward the questionnaire to the AWS Lambda service team and they came back a few days later with: oh, you can have 5.000 concurrent executions.

Even worse a few years ago (not sure if that's still the case) we tried to get an increase of the sum of storage available as EBS-volumes. That took quite a bit back and forth with AWS and in the end we learned that they do reserve such EBS-storage for a customer no matter if the customer uses it or not. And mind: We didn't request something like guaranteed available EBS-storage, but instead just the ability to request more storage.

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