Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected? • Hacker News Board

Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#1

Post by janober » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

Last week we at n8n ran into problems getting a new database from Azure. After contacting support, it turns out that we can’t add instances to our k8s cluster either. Azure has told they'll have more capacity in April 2023(!) — but we’ll have to stop accepting new users in ~35 days if we don't get any more. These problems seem only in the German region, but setting up in a new region would be complicated for us.

We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like Microsoft, or that they wouldn’t proactively inform us about this.

Is anyone else experiencing these problems?

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#2

Post by wizwit999 » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#3

Post by api » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

Maybe they are doing this to push people into regions with lower energy costs. Of course Northern Virginia or Canada is going to give you much higher ping times.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#4

Post by andrewstuart » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

Yes it’s weird that you have to ask them for instances which some actual physical person looks at your request, thinks about it and says yes or no to.

Instead of providing you with a list of the resources they do have, you have to play this weird game where you ask for specific instances in specific regions and then within several hours someone emails back to say yes or no.

If it’s no, you have to guess again where you might get the instance you want and email them again and ask.

I envisage going to an old shop, and asking the shopkeep for a compute instance in a region. He hobbles out the back, and after a long delay comes back and says “nope, don’t have no more of them, anything else you might want?”.

It’s surprising this how it works. Not the auto scaling cloud computing used to bring to mind.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#5

Post by sird » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

api wrote: post #3

Maybe they are doing this to push people into regions with lower energy costs. Of course Northern Virginia or Canada is going to give you much higher ping times.

Interesting thought. It would be crazy if turning down business was preferable to just raising prices to reflect increased energy costs. I'm not a cloud expert, but maybe they don't have the infra to price differently in some regions?

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#6

Post by danpalmer » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

api wrote: post #3

Maybe they are doing this to push people into regions with lower energy costs. Of course Northern Virginia or Canada is going to give you much higher ping times.

Why wouldn't they just price higher in those regions? People want/need regions for policy and compliance reasons, not just for ping, particularly with Europe and Germany I'd expect.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#7

Post by 4ndrewl » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

api wrote: post #3

Maybe they are doing this to push people into regions with lower energy costs. Of course Northern Virginia or Canada is going to give you much higher ping times.

And potential data residency issues

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#8

Post by jedberg » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

> but setting up in a new region would be complicated for us.

I've never done K8 on Azure, but my understanding is that Azure is pretty good about coordinating between your own datacenter running windows and Azure. Maybe you can spin up some windows boxes in a cheap datacenter to make it work?

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#9

Post by Moissanite » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

Azure Germany is a separate partition from the rest of Azure - presumably for compliance reasons. This is distinct from AWS, where Frankfurt is just another region, albeit one with high demand.

Re: Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?

#10

Post by xwowsersx » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

Oof, that sucks and I feel for you. That said...

> setting up in a new region would be complicated for us.

Sounds to me like you've got a few weeks to get this working. Deprioritize all other work, get everyone working on this little DevOps/Infra project. You should've been multi-region from the outset, if not multi-cloud.

When using the public cloud, we do tend to take it all for granted and don't even think about the fact that physical hardware is required for our clusters and that, yes, they can run out.

Anyways, however hard getting another region set up may be, it seems you've no choice but to prioritize that work now. May also want to look into other cloud providers as well, depending on how practical or how overkill going multi-cloud may or may not be for your needs.

I wish you luck.