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

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

#61

Post by kazen44 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

moooo99 wrote: post #49

scarface74 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS even admits that only 5% of enterprise IT spend is in the cloud.

I think its safe to say that more consumer services are using AWS than Azure, things like Spotify, Netflix, Snapchat, etc. But when it comes to large enterprises, I'd bet that Azure is first place by a significant margin. Given that these enterprises power a significant chunk of the worlds supply chains, manufacturing processes and so on, I'd say that the piece of the digital world that Azure offers is way more criti…

Also, don't understimate the amount of old, unsupported or ancient hardware that is still churning along in factories and supply companies keeping the supply chain running.

It's terrifying how much of the world is held together by (literal sometimes) duct tape.

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

#62

Post by txcwpalpha » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:19 PM UTC

cc81 wrote: post #52

outworlder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Isn't Zoom on AWS? So are Slack and Chime (the little known AWS competitor to Teams). As are parts of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and of course Prime Video.

I don't know the exact numbers but I'm pretty sure the rise in popularity of Zoom is just as high, if not possibly higher, than Teams. Entire universities of 50k+ students started using Zoom for online classes, not to mention all of the companies that have started using it. Then you have all of the people staying at home using the streaming services, etc... my guess is that AWS has seen a huge spike in traffic just as big, if not bigger than Azure saw.

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

#63

Post by kekskeks » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:33 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.)…

I used all 3 aws providers and AWS is the most reliable, but hard to configure. Azure is much easier to use and require the least expertise. I don't see any reason to use google cloud, because it has couple of outages last year and even their UI is quite buggy. I noticed that every time someone post something negative about google here, their employees cowardly try to downvote such posts... So I will expect the same here.

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

#64

Post by nicoburns » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

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…

Also, most of europe.

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

#65

Post by gigel82 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

Where exactly are the "cracks" of which the author speaks? There are some links in the article pointing to generic MSDN help articles but I'm not seeing this claim substantiated by data (reports of downtime for example).

No one is saying online services and cloud providers aren't affected by the surge in traffic but I'm not seeing where the cracks are, so I'm calling the title BS (or clickbait at best).

Hate on M$ all you want, the worlds' enterprises run on their software (and on their cloud).

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

#66

Post by naringas » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

Seems to me like microsoft probably: underestimated their customer's potential demand and/or oversold their cloud capacity.

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

#67

Post by godtoldmetodoit » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:39 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…

I don't disagree with anything you are saying here, but I was heavily taken back by the statement the author made as it felt right out of the early 2000's, ignoring the last 20 years of Microsoft's shift to services and the cloud.

Azure clearly prioritized massively increasing their geographic footprint without the availability zones that AWS almost always deploys when they enter a new region, and I have no doubt they run leaner with less compute available then AWS.

When I was on the telemetry team about 3 years ago, we were in the early days of transitioning from the internal only "physical cloud" that the Bing team had created years before into Azure, and it was full of pain for a service our size at that time.

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

#68

Post by DangitBobby » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

saberience wrote: post #48

smt88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, this is why GCP is fairly crap when comparing to AWS. Google doesn't actually use GCP for building anything so they have less incentive to actually make it better, that or it means they don't understand the issues with it. At least with AWS you know that Amazon dog-foods the hell out of it and have a major incentive to improve it.

In what way is GCP crap?

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

#69

Post by nrki » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:55 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…

> I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry

How did your team live with yourselves? Dedicated to scaling a backend to ensure Windows could adequately spy on users.

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

#70

Post by dkhenry » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

I have had a Service Down Ticket open with Azure now for four days with out as much as a call back from them. Just today I finally got the automated email saying they acknowledge my issue. My system is totally dead in the water on Azure.

On the other hand amazon just called me to make sure everything was ok. Their system has been a rock.