New lower Azure pricing • Hacker News Board

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#11

Post by craigvn » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

kefka wrote: post #4

atrudeau wrote: post #3

I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?

Absolutely not. If anything, they are worse at hidden billing than Comcast. Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS. I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've not looked at GCE. But those are my experiences. YMMV

I find the prices pretty straightforward mostly, the portal will give you an estimate of the monthly cost for all your current services. The problem is the data transfer pricing. Say you have a website that has 5000 visits a day, it is really hard to estimate your IN/OUT GB, then do the same for blob storage or other services.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#12

Post by rnnr » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

blahi wrote: post #10

rnnr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, isn't AWS billing per utilization/hour? For small projects this means it is many times cheaper than Azure. Azure is more focused to enterprises than to individual devs.

wat? Azure has minute billing... So does google. AWS is a mess.

Not in Azure SQL

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#13

Post by kefka » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

blahi wrote: post #10

rnnr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, isn't AWS billing per utilization/hour? For small projects this means it is many times cheaper than Azure. Azure is more focused to enterprises than to individual devs.

wat? Azure has minute billing... So does google. AWS is a mess.

Yes, and if you were doing anything with the recently killed (or soon to be) RemoteApp, billing there was a disaster. Absolute horrible disaster. Overbilled to my employer because their websites did not equal to what they quoted us. They also refuse to honor enterprise contract regarding transfer (Internet2 peer). Just horrible terrible bad no good.

And their MQTT service (IoT) pricing is a joke. $50/month for 400k messages a day (!second, typo) with a cap of 4k? Seriously? That's just 4.6 messages a second, WITH a data restriction that MQTT itself doesn't have.

I routinely load pictures with motion to "house/frontdoor/motion/" topic in the form of a jpg. MQTT specifies nothing about said data ~ I could even store a dvd VOB for video in a topic.

And this offering is for a max data of 48GB/month. To put this in perspective, a dialup modem(!) Gets a top speed of 5.2KB/s , which sustained across a 30 day month = 43.2GB

I can (and have!) bought a cheap-shit VPS server and installed Mosquitto on it. I can use MQTT as the spec indicates, including Websockets and storing picture data. And it's more on the price range of $40/year, not $600/yr

source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/iot-hub/

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#14

Post by UK-AL » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

rnnr wrote: post #8

kefka wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. If anything, they are worse at hidden billing than Comcast. Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS. I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've not looked at GCE. But those are my experiences. YMMV

Also, isn't AWS billing per utilization/hour? For small projects this means it is many times cheaper than Azure. Azure is more focused to enterprises than to individual devs.

Azure is per minute

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#15

Post by stemuk » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

For me the compute pricing isn't the main issue. The cutthroat bandwith prices from 9 to 18 cents per GB are the main cost drivers and should be at least mentioned in a blog post about price reduction.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#16

Post by praseodym » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

kefka wrote: post #4

atrudeau wrote: post #3

I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?

Absolutely not. If anything, they are worse at hidden billing than Comcast. Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS. I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've not looked at GCE. But those are my experiences. YMMV

You'd think Microsoft would be the go-to provider for SQL Server workloads, but Azure SQL is terribly expensive for some (many?) workloads. For read-intensive SQL Server workloads you'll be paying upwards of $465/mo (Premium P1 [1]) for something that can be easily handled by a beefy VM for a fraction of the price. Also, the Azure SQL pricing model links performance ('eDTUs') to storage which skews the billing model even further.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-databa...

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#17

Post by BonoboIO » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 8:19 PM UTC

Cloud Pricing is ridiculous ... made the comparison between a dedicated server and cloud offerings of microsoft, google, amazon ... rackspace (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times in the cloud for the same.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#18

Post by valarauca1 » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 8:20 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #7

shiftpgdn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A0 standard and the A0 basic prices did not change. Both of those instances will be dramatically outperformed by a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet for 1/2 to 1/3rd the price.

Well, so are Amazon's lowest tier nodes. I think its fair to say that AWS and Azure aren't competing against cheap VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean. Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS). https:/…

Wow thanks for the Nocix link. I never came across them before. That is dirt cheap.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#19

Post by Someone1234 » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 8:21 PM UTC

blahi wrote: post #9

danielcampos93 wrote: post #2

seems like mostly updating to the newest models and making the entry level sku's much cheaper to attract more people kicking the wheels and lower the bar for dev's wanting to try out Azure. I would love to see they take this to an extreme and either make the A0 or A1 free like AWS.

You have $25/month for free for a year... And $200 free trial. You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.

> You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.

For non-production use only. There's a lot of fine print on the MSDN "free credit."

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#20

Post by Someone1234 » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

atrudeau wrote: post #3

I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?

Reserved instance pricing on AWS absolutely destroys Azure. If you do on-demand on both, they look competitive, but there are ways of bringing AWS down which Azure simply cannot match.