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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

#141

Post by pjc50 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #128
pjc50 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK isn't really a "European" country in this regard; it still prefers inefficient private quasi-monopolies to properly functioning state services. The UK "last mile" infrastructure is unbundled so you can get your DSL service through a wide variety of providers - but actual line speed upgrades and faults are still at the mercy of BT incompetence, and everyone has to pay them £15/month for "line rental" even if yo…

"properly functioning state services" You obviously aren't old enough to remember when BT was part of the state owned post office. It wasn't great.

That was a bit of a troll, yes; I'm just about old enough to remember six week lead times for phone lines, slam-door trains, but not quite the three-day week.

My argument is that state services don't have to be awful, as a lot of people seem to think. It depends on local political culture. British culture has American pro-privatisation far more than the German/Nordic tradition of efficient services.

Estonia is doing rather well at state-supported internet.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#142

Post by Nick4589 »

incision wrote: post #72
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…

>"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…

It is not only about features. There are several issues with the Azure platform. You can read more about it in the comments posted here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wats/archive/2013/09/24/windows-azur...

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#143

Post by snorrk »

opendomain wrote: post #93
ripberge wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is all wrong actually.

Can you be more specific? I was trying to be helpful and my comment got down voted to oblivion. I was using Azure today and they still use Silverlight for admin - which mean i can not use it on my Mac. Remote Desktop is the DEFAULT access - they DO support SSH, but the service is not on out of the box.

AFAIK Silverlight is only required admin the legacy share cache service, which has been end-of-lifed (hence the reluctance to spend the effort needed to support it in the web-based portal). They recently announced that they would keep the Silverlight legacy portal around for a bit longer do give people more time to move away from the shared cache service.

I use Azure every day and I haven't needed to touch the Silverlight portal in months.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#144

Post by snorrk »

panarky wrote: post #4

Microsoft created an entirely new instance type to match EC2 prices, ostensibly because EC2 instances don't include load balancing. And the performance of the new "basic" instances will be reduced: Basic instances will have similar performance characteristics to AWS’s equivalent instances while the Standard instances will maintain their favorable performance. Anyone know how "favorable" Azure performance is on their…

Apparently some studies have shown that Azure has "3X better price for performance than Amazon EC2"

http://www.scribd.com/doc/146167581/Cloud-Computing-Performa...

Additional curated information can be found at: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#145

Post by snorrk »

sytelus wrote: post #47

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…

According to the Azure calculator an XS VM costs $0.02/hr, which comes to about $175 a year. That is less than an 2 hours worth of sysadmin cost, excluding the hardware costs.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenar...

If you just have a website that you want to host you can use Azure Websites, which have a free tier (doesn't get much cheaper than that).

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#146

Post by snorrk »

iambateman wrote: post #10

I've used Azure's cloud hosting in production for a half dozen sites and I have to say it's driving me nuts. We tried to flip DNS to Azure and it wouldn't resolve. It took our senior developer two days of talking to Azure support to solve. Ended up being their fault. Today I ported some work using PHP's mail() function, which evidently Azure doesn't support? This is probably our own fault for switching environments b…

I'm guessing that they try to manage how email is sent from their infrastructure in an attempt to curb spam and prevent their IP ranges from being blacklisted and blocked.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#147

Post by darkarmani »

tanzam75 wrote: post #102
nl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As the underdog competing against ESX, Microsoft had to make it easy for businesses to adopt Hyper-V. 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 i…

Awww.

"When this occurs, you loose connectivity..."

"While this type of proactive notification of planned maintenance is not currently provided, we encourage you to provide comments on this topic so we can take the feedback to the product teams."

Wow. They didn't notify at one point?

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#148

Post by michaelt »

Styn wrote: post #130
topbanana wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, that doesn't really seem fair on those of us not going down that route

I think the reasoning is that if you convince an accelerator/incubator to accept you your product has a higher chance of succeeding. This will mean that the chance of you still existing (and starting to pay) after 3 years should be significantly higher.

Many companies have discounts that they can afford to give, but they make it a bit of a hassle to get them, so the bulk of customers keep paying full price but they can also retain the miserly customers at a reduced profit margin.

For example, some food retailers publish discount coupons in newspapers, so the discount is only available to people willing to go through the hassle.

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