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Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

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Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#41

Post by ritwikt »

yulaow wrote: post #17
jtchang wrote: post #11

Hate on Microsoft all you want but this is a great thing. If Microsoft feels they want to play in the infrastructure as a service game they need to earn the customer's trust. Price matching is certainly one way to do it. Azure does run linux by the way (a lot of people don't know that). One thing I've been going back and forth about is whether I "trust" Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure more. Both are juggernauts…

Also with Bizspark you can have, if I remember well, like 150E/month to spend on azure for 3 years. Considering that almost any IT startup can access to bizspark, it is a nice thing to at least try it. Also I love the fact they are distributing their sdks for other os (linux and osx) and that they are all opensource on github

+1 to that Bizspark is an awesome program for startups. We are running linux on it w/o any issues [~3 servers come free] Best part - there are no restrictions on what s/w stack you run..

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#43

Post by cmarschner »

hueving wrote: post #27
pjmlp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine a world where consumer broadband had the same level of competition? Sigh...a nerd can dream... Yes, in most European countries. :)

Well that's disappointing then. I wasn't particularly impressed with the service I got at my various hosts' homes in the UK. Is it really the case that the last mile physical infrastructure is considered common there so any provider can use it?

Yes but no only there. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#44

Post by _delirium »

nigelsampson wrote: post #33
bignaj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this just flat out isn't true... I access my Azure instances with SSH just like I did on AWS. No Remote Desktop.

Also the management portal hasn't required Silverlight for at least a year now, it's all HTML5. And if you don't want to use the portal then there's command line tools for both Node and Powershell.

Seems to have been a more general change; the Bing Webmaster Tools portal dropped Silverlight about a year ago as well. Not sure if there was an official announcement or they've just quietly decided to move away from it.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#46

Post by MartinCron »

spo81rty wrote: post #32
opendomain wrote: post #16

I am a Microsoft fan, but they are doing the cloud all wrong. To setup Azure, you have to use silverlight. To access the servers, you use remote desktop. Microsoft office 365 is $100 PER YEAR - much more than I would pay for the full suite (over 4years of average use) If you want to use SQL server, expect to pay $$$ - and integration or reporting services are not included. There is another feature that is actually ni…

They changed the portal a whole back and silverlight is no longer used. I hated it too. New one is very nice.

Please forgive my accidental downvote. I intended an upvote.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#47

Post by sytelus »

I still don't know why people find these "low" prices exciting. A most minimum spec VM in cloud still costs $380 per year. Considering these providers have advantage of scale plus load balancing ability, the cost should be 1/10th of this. I was looking for new host for my site and after I looked at Azure/AWS, I was floored how expensive these things are. Cloud prices had been riding in clouds for quite sometime. It has now came down but it's still way up there. The low margin claims by cloud providers is pure bullshit. The fact is that all of these people could have lowered their prices for quite sometime but they just chugged along until there was competitive pressure. Eventually, someone will become monopolist in this area and they would have free ride and all of these guys are in game to become that monopoly.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#48

Post by Patrick_Devine »

simonmd wrote: post #36

Yeahhh, if Rackspace would just go ahead and follow AWS,Google and Microsoft, that would be grreat...

Does anyone else feel like Rackspace is just getting left behind in the IaaS business? Their prices and services offered is getting out of whack compared to everyone else.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#49

Post by leddt »

davidbanham wrote: post #45

FYI, Azure runs Linux but does so on a Windows host. Whenever Windows needs a security update, it has to be rebooted. This means you need to plan for your Linux VM to go down weekly.

In my experience (running a Windows vm) the forced reboot is more like every two months. Also they have a feature called availability sets where you can load balance two VMs and they guarantee that one of them will always be up.

Edit: Looking back at my email history, it's much less often than that. The interval between the previous two reboots was 6 months. They also gave about two weeks notice when it happened.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#50

Post by outside1234 »

dantiberian wrote: post #21

Steve Martin comes off as oddly defensive when announcing these changes I’ve yet to meet a developer who travels just to hear about pricing updates, so you won’t see us take the stage at Build and use the opening moment to announce a price cut. This isn’t retail; innovation matters. I’ll cover pricing right here, right now. I'm not sure what purpose it serves except for making a stab at Amazon and Google.

I think he makes a valid point, why waste keynote time on prices? I'd much rather hear about the innovation.
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