51–60 of 98 posts
Is the idea of your startup or the technology you use to build your idea? BizSpark is a program like no other. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx Leave preconceptions in the past and start building your idea!
You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…
I'm an Apache committer, and because of that Microsoft gives me a free MSDN subscription (which includes Azure credits). I use Azure to run assorted Ubuntu machines. They run well, the interface is nice and I have no complaints. I also have a few EC2 VMs (and some DigitalCloud VMs and some Rackspace VMs and in the past have had HP Cloud VMs and Linode VMs). Amazon is good, too. But I signed up for EC2 before the free…
you can also evaluate where lock in is acceptable for you/your project... the important thing is knowing it I guess :)
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I'm an Apache committer, and because of that Microsoft gives me a free MSDN subscription (which includes Azure credits). I use Azure to run assorted Ubuntu machines. They run well, the interface is nice and I have no complaints. I also have a few EC2 VMs (and some DigitalCloud VMs and some Rackspace VMs and in the past have had HP Cloud VMs and Linode VMs). Amazon is good, too. But I signed up for EC2 before the free…
absolutely nothing, if there is no lock-in (using asp.net for example). and you can get locked in as if you use some of their services. you can also evaluate where lock in is acceptable for you/your project... the important thing is knowing it I guess :)
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I signed up for the Azure trial program a while back, and I found the interface quite nice. About a week later I received a call from the Azure sales team asking if I would like to provision another MS SQL server -- I guess they looked into my billings. Anyways, I told the sales rep no thank you, and how I normally use linux machines for my startup. I asked if there were any promos for someone in my position, and the…
Look into the usage breakdown.
And if you click "Download usage details", you get a csv of daily per-service usage data.
You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…
Can you tell me which of the ~1000 VM images they provide as listed in the below site are proprietary? All? None? Some?
http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index
Also, Azure charges you less for Linux VMs compared Windows VMs with the same hardware specs. A medium instance costs 12cents/hour with Linux and 18c/hr with Windows Server. That's 50% higher! If anything, it looks like they're trying to lock you into Linux. I don't have any beef with Amazon, but it looks like you haven't really looked at Azure before making such sweeping assertions with zero details, except some handwaving which makes it sad that this is the top comment on this story.
You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…
> proprietary anti-open-source bait. Can you tell me which of the ~1000 VM images they provide as listed in the below site are proprietary? All? None? Some? http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index Also, Azure charges you less for Linux VMs compared Windows VMs with the same hardware specs. A medium instance costs 12cents/hour with Linux and 18c/hr with Windows Server. That's 50% higher! If anything, it looks like th…
Is the idea of your startup or the technology you use to build your idea? BizSpark is a program like no other. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx Leave preconceptions in the past and start building your idea!
Who cares about long term vendor independence? Just get your 'free' hosting and tools from Microsoft NOW! You can always sell off your kidneys to pay for the cost of the service or the cost of switching three years down the line.
Bizspark is especially beneficial if you were going to use the MS stack anyway or you have experience of it.
However, I think you can get more out of Azure by using its PaaS services. It is also possible to run a Python/django app in an Azure Website Service. The cost is the same, but management and security if the OS is taken care of for you. Upgrades and patches happen automatically. You can setup automated build, test and deployment from Git. You can setup background and maintenance jobs without having to manage cron. You can setup auto scaling of VM's. It saves a lot of work.
Of course, this risk of this is lock-in. But the technologies underlying Azure are almost all open. If you're carefull what you use, you can always take your code and run it on a VM in AWS if you want. Of course, you would have to setup/build your own scaling and maintenance processes, using (also proprietary) AWS services.
Like Microsoft, Amazon is likewise trying to get you to use proprietary cloud services. If you use S3, Beanstalk, Redshift, Search, you get locked in to AWS the same way Microsoft will lock you when you use SQL Azure, Azure Table Storage or Service Bus. You just need to be be very careful with any dependencies you take on into your startup.
That said, I have also had a very good experience with BizSpark. Not only do they give you lot of free stuff, but I they can also connect you with interesting partners internationally, and help your business in unexpected ways.
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and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires Are you sure about this ? Any more details (assigned to company/individual, etc. ) ?
It's explicitly in the terms -- you get to keep the licenses for the software you've downloaded. Presumably they stay with the company which had the bizspark account.
You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…