101–110 of 149 posts
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Azure's pricing is great for side projects and small startups. Everything I have done so far has been free.
Do they have a free tier like Amazon?
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Yes, Azure VMs run on top of Hyper-V. Which means that the physical machine must reboot after every Hyper-V update. However, each physical machine also runs an Azure Host Agent, which runs on top of Windows Server Core. While the use of Server Core helps cut down on reboots, it doesn't eliminate them. But then, why doesn't Hyper-V just stay up while it reboots the VM containing the Host Agent? Because the virtual dis…
Interesting. That's a pretty serious disadvantage over VMWare. But I guess the limited attack area of Windows Server Core means many people can avoid applying patches much of the time.
By hooking up Hyper-V to the Windows management OS, they get to leverage Windows device drivers. And this, in turn, ensures broader hardware compatibility.
Of course, this goal became unnecessary for Azure, where Microsoft controls the hardware. But Hyper-V had already been designed that way.
Certainly, Server Core is pretty stripped-down. The Russinovich blog says they reboot about once a month, but the Azure support blog says they reboot every 2-3 months.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wats/archive/2013/09/24/windows-azur...
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…
>"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." Interestingly, the folks I deal with some folks who run some large-scale Microsoft services for a living want nothing to do with Azure in its current state and use AWS instead. Apparently, Azure lacks some pretty basic functionality like the…
I know some places can move IPs around at will, but it seems like the wrong layer in the stack to do it. Aren't IPs something you want to assign based on your network topology? If you need an arbitrary identifier that can move between machines, what's wrong with DNS? (And how are you not re-inventing DNS?) (and the names are more memorable)
If you do have the capability to do this, does it not tie you to that provider? Presumably the IPs would be allocated to the provider, so switching to a new provider would necessitate a new IP, whereas DNS addresses can point anywhere.
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding (I've never tried these shenanigans with IPs), so please correct me if I am.
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.
I haven't noticed any serious downtime on Azure for this reason. Probably 1 reboot in the last few months, with plenty of notice (and a fairly specific timespan).
Very nice! I think Azure's biggest hurdle so far is the association with Microsoft and people assuming "well it must be expensive" only to be proven right when they sign up. That being said, some parts of Azure are pretty cheap and for small site it's affordable as it is now. You can get 10 free websites and a couple decent sized databases for around $40 a month which gives you better service and scalability than you…
The biggest unexpected fee I found in my comparison shopping was the $39 / month fee to support IP address SSL on Azure Websites.
It's actually worse than it just being $39/month, because you can't use the free or shared tiers, which is even more annoying.
Azure peeps: please change this! It makes it very hard to justify using Azure websites when you could just get your own VM and install an SSL cert on that with no restrictions for lot less.
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>"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." Interestingly, the folks I deal with some folks who run some large-scale Microsoft services for a living want nothing to do with Azure in its current state and use AWS instead. Apparently, Azure lacks some pretty basic functionality like the…
Out of curiosity, why would you need to bind an arbitrary IP to a VM? What's wrong with the one it's presumably got? I know some places can move IPs around at will, but it seems like the wrong layer in the stack to do it. Aren't IPs something you want to assign based on your network topology? If you need an arbitrary identifier that can move between machines, what's wrong with DNS? (And how are you not re-inventing D…
One of the worst offenders, ironically, is Microsoft's own Windows XP which is notorious for having a minimum TTL of 10 minutes, forcing people away from DNS as a means of failover.
Yet another example of competition working out well for the consumer. Innovation, price drops, etc. Can you imagine a world where consumer broadband had the same level of competition? Sigh...a nerd can dream...
Also we have right now large fiber to the home deployments.
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> 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?
I'm a cheapskate and I get 12Mbit down and 1.5Mbits up with no traffic management and no limits and free phone services for £8/month.
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.
It's monthly, however even that isn't really acceptable. So far I've been too lazy to figure out if one can setup the live migration stuff to act as workaround for this...not sure. It's definitely something they should at least address / give an official workaround for, or preferably just transparently handle it.
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.
I'm not sure what you are saying is completely correct. However in the cloud you should design for that, everything will eventually fail and your service should manage. ie. avoid stateful VMs, provide sufficient redundancy etc. Design for failure. This is not just about Azure, it's a common cloud design practice.
In practice, though, I often found myself getting annoyed that I had that enforced on me. On AWS or most other providers I've used, if you have a workload that isn't particularly mission critical you can get away with just expecting the machine to always stay up. It'll probably only go down once a year or so. Obviously not the best way to design a system, but a handy tradeoff to be able to make in order to save a little cash or complexity.