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$500k of Azure credit for YC startups

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#131

Post by spellboots »

StavrosK wrote: post #129
spellboots wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every provider will have security issues occasionally. Including digital ocean: http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/02/digitalocean-fixes-securit...

Having data scrubbing disabled by default is different than two breaches that exposed customer data in a short while, though.

Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not.

In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.

In contrast, the performance difference is objectively measurable: http://joshtronic.com/2014/06/22/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-...

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#132

Post by antics »

aceperry wrote: post #112
jread wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a multi-region, multi-hour outage on Nov 18. To my knowledge AWS has not experienced a multi-region outage. That said, they are learning from these events and improving stability.

I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net. I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frig…

I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the situation, I hope you will understand why. It makes me think that you have not thought carefully about what you are saying here.

If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#133

Post by funkyy »

pallian wrote: post #82

Just FYI - the $60k/year Azure offer is technically available for any startup just willing to ask nicely (not limited to just incubators). My company, http://trippeo.com just qualified for it last month (we get $5k/mo free hosting).

Hi, great tip. Just fyi - your website is really hard on GPU. I am on Chrome and after keeping it some time in a tab it started to be so brutal on GPU that I had to shut down as my browser was unusable... Maybe possible memory leak? Only active plugin I have is uBlock.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#134

Post by mbesto »

sankethkatta wrote: post #106
mbesto wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, should have clarified. Most early stage startups don't do DevOps or sysadmin well. Imagine the typical YC startup where its just 2-3 developers who are comfortable with the command line, but not comfortable with Chef, Puppet, etc. Having to plan a migration is not fun or productive for a set of developers because it means (1) less time for them to focus on mobile/web development (2) learning to do sysadmin whe…

Azure also has a Heroku-like offering: Azure Websites http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/websites/

Whoa! Didn't know about that! Very cool. No ruby support though :/

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#135

Post by mikermcneil »

vosper wrote: post #50
aioprisan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.

Sure, but in practice if you have any complexity in your stack then it's going to be a PITA to from Azure to AWS (or vice-versa). If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc... I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming…

Looks like Azure has a PaaS now though-- I mean it's no heroku, but as far as I can tell it's working.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#136

Post by icelancer »

pallian wrote: post #88
bravo22 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great tip! How do you ask "nicely"? Is there a rep you contact or contact just general billing/support?

I just emailed a developer evangelist at Microsoft - tons of them around and more than willing to help startups, especially new ones with under $1M in funding.

Is there a list for these? I have seriously had problems trying to redeem any offers from Microsoft / Bizspark. I run a sports science startup and would love to look into this.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#137

Post by icelancer »

empressplay wrote: post #114

In case anyone here missed this, Microsoft gives a bunch of free stuff (including an MSDN subscription) to any new startup through their BizSpark program: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark

I have had no end of problems getting signed up for this for my startup. It was a month of back and forth arguing then I eventually gave up and paid $200/month on Digital Ocean and stuck with Linux. Very frustrating. Anyone to talk to there that can help outside of generic customer support?

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#138

Post by vyrotek »

Azure has been great for our start-up (http://iactionable.com). We've been with them for over 4 years. There have been ups and downs but we're fans of C#/.NET and it was a great fit for our team. We store and crunch a lot of real-time data with ServiceBus Queues and SQL Server. It has scaled well so far. We also went through the BizSpark program which REALLY helped jump start things.

We were invited up to Redmond in the past to meet with teams from various Azure services and participate in private previews of some cool features. They're really working hard to make a great platform.

Satya, please don't have them mess things up with the next portal release! The whole sideways scrolling gives me a headache.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#139

Post by woah »

antics wrote: post #132
aceperry wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net. I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frig…

I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the situation, I hope you will understand why. I…

I'd like to hear these stories as well.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#140

Post by nbevans »

mikermcneil wrote: post #135
vosper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in practice if you have any complexity in your stack then it's going to be a PITA to from Azure to AWS (or vice-versa). If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc... I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming…

Looks like Azure has a PaaS now though-- I mean it's no heroku, but as far as I can tell it's working.

Azure was always PaaS... they added IaaS much later.
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