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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

#71
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

>The software giant counted 32 million daily active users of Teams last week on March 11th, but this jumped by 12 million to 44 million daily active users yesterday.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/19/21186452/microsoft-teams-...

Zoom does not release numbers but they have seen an increase say in usage but if we look at estimated numbers:

>Zoom had 12.92 million monthly active users, up 21% since the end of 2019, Chrane and Isaacs wrote, citing data from privately held Apptopia.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/26/zoom-has-added-more-users-so...

Microsoft seems to have had an increase that similar to Zoom's whole user base in a week (and I don't know how much was added before that).

I think people in tech circles underestimate how many large non-tech companies just followed Microsoft into the cloud and started to use Office 365. And I assume a lot don't use it that much, maybe for a meeting here and there and a few (or way too many) channels but suddenly everyone in the company is on it.

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

#72
post #18
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...

This is really interesting, I always assumed it was exactly the same infrastructure but segregated off into customer instances. If anybody has more info here that would be really neat.

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

#73
post #38
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?

Google employee here (my own statements, not the company's, blah blah blah).

The incident last week was due to hardware failure and completely unrelated to Capacity or COVID. https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20002

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

#74
post #60

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 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 que…

Yeah, this seems to be heavily service dependent.

EC 2 and ELB increases are relatively easy to come by, but for some services like Media Services things has to get reviewed by the service team which can take a while.

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

#75
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and have 6% representation in the Senate...

That's what the house is for. The senate is there so the larger states don't trample over, say, Idaho. Majority rules does NOT work for the USA. You have to think of us as the EU with member votes for each country (country being state). This nation is not supposed to be about the federal government, it all went to shit around 9/11 and has continued to do so.

> it all went to shit around 9/11

Not really. You could argue that it's been like this for a while. Depending on what you want to judge, there's

- Johnson's Great Society (Medicaid and Medicare, urban renewal, War on Poverty)

- Eisenhower (Interstates, the first nationwide public transportation network)

- FDR (The New Deal, Social Security)

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 the…

[deleted]

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

#79
post #69

> 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.

Please don't attack other users. It leads to worse discussion, not better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#80
post #52

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…

This seems wrong to me. Isn’t almost a third of the worlds traffic going through AWS? Think about all the video conferencing calls, streaming videos, and gaming happening now. ISP’s were almost crumbling in Europe last week. AWS is almost certainly experiencing more traffic the azure
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