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

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

#11

Post by janober »

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.

I do honestly not think there is any bad intent behind it. I am just surprised that this is happening at all (esp. not with a resolution time of multiple months). They must have known for a long time that this would happen, so I would have expected an early heads-up!

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

#12

Post by Scoundreller »

sird wrote: post #5
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?

That’s the problem with charging average costs (assuming they do that) but the new user costs are at the margin which can be muuuuch higher.

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

#14

Post by autophagian »

wizwit999 wrote: post #2

Quoted post unavailable.

Clowns are much more solid than clouds, which are famously density-light. Given their traditional proximity to solid ground, too, clowns are a much better choice of foundational substrate than a cloud to build on.

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

#15

Post by [deleted] »

xwowsersx wrote: post #10

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 t…

[deleted]

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

#17

Post by whalesalad »

> 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.

Yikes, this is totally the first thing you need to come to expect when working with MSFT.

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

#18

Post by toomuchtodo »

jedberg wrote: post #8

> 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?

Hetzner has a German presence I believe, and would work for running k8 on bare metal for n8n to burst to temporarily for running their orchestration and/or workflow runners. Might even be cheaper in the long run versus a cloud provider. Just gotta wire up the helm charts, containers, and whatever message bus is pushing their messages around. Can write to blob storage from anywhere if that’s a component of the app.

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

#19

Post by Terretta »

Moissanite wrote: post #9

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.

> AWS .. Frankfurt is just another region

Unlike GCP and Azure, all AWS regions are (were) partitioned by design. This "blast radius" is (was) fantastic for resilience, security, and data sovereignty. It is (was) incredibly easy to be compliant in AWS, not to mention the ruggedness benefits.

AWS customers with more money than cloud engineers kept clamoring for cross-region capabilities ("Like GCP has!"), and in last couple years AWS has been adding some.

Cloud customers should be careful what they wish for. If you count on it in the data center, and you don't see it in a well-architected cloud service provider, perhaps it's a legacy pattern best left on the datacenter floor. In this case, at some point hard partitioning could become tough to prove to audit and impossible to count on for resilience.

UPDATE TO ADD: See my123's link below, first published 2022-11-16, super helpful even if familiar with their approach.

PDF: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/whitepapers/latest/aws-faul...

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

#20

Post by janober »

xwowsersx wrote: post #10

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 t…

Thanks a lot! You are totally right, it is for sure something we will find a solution for. But honestly, do I not want to. As a startup, you have very few resources and deliberately place some exact bets. Deprioritizing everything to work on something for a long time that was not prioritized, just to then end up again where you were before (a working cloud solution) is the last thing any startup should be forced to do. Anyway, it seems like we do not have much choice here.
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