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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

#161

Post by pkallberg »

mbesto wrote: post #15

Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services. Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) th…

That's a great idea! I work at Cloud 66 (http://www.cloud66.com) and we let you build your own Heroku on Azure and benefit from this $500k and Heroku-like simplicity. You can also migrate between cloud providers (including Azure and the ones mentioned) if needed.

We think this is a great way for startups to use the tons of cloud credits they get, instead of letting them go to waste or spending precious time on setting up infrastructure.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#162

Post by olifante »

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/

Actually Microsoft has not one but two Platform-as-a-Service offerings:

- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)

- Azure Websites (PaaS light)

Unfortunately, when I last looked at it two months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.

First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).

Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.

If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#163

Post by VSpike »

hudo wrote: post #97
hinicholas wrote: post #61

I'm not sure how Azure intends to compete in this space. I've used Amazon, Rackspace, Google Cloud, Azure, and a bunch more. Professionally, for simplicity I'd choose Rackspace or Google. For Scalability and price I'd choose Amazon. For personal projects I love Digital Ocean. I dislike Azure's control panel and VM setup, and find their VMs slow. I'd only really consider them if I planned to implement a project that r…

I compared mid-size VM on Azure and AWS, and I got almost 50% better hdd and cpu perf on azure. And with Win Server, I run ASP.NET and PHP and Node, it works nice. Db (pg) is on linux.

I recently had to compare AWS and Azure for my company. I limited my comparison to AWS c3 and c4 class instances versus mid-range A and D class instances.

I did some of my own quick benchmarks here http://browser.primatelabs.com/user/82525

For comparison, on-demand prices are (Linux / Windows):-

* AWS c3.xlarge - $0.239 / $0.376

* AWS c4.xlarge - $0.264 / $0.430

* Azure Standard A3 - $0.24 / $0.324

* Azure Standard D3 - $0.46 / $0.732

I also did some quick disk benchmarks https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B096UguGrNHAfmZjM1VQ...

My tests are very limited I realise, but it looks to me like the AWS boxes represent better value for the money there, even in the on-demand range. Azure used to offer 6-month and 12-month plans but they removed those. Now you need an enterprise agreement to get anything other than published rates, and you need a big spend to qualify for that AFAICT. AWS reserved instances therefore make their instance rates even more competitive, if those make sense for you.

I sent all this to the company trying to push Azure to us hoping they would have better data to refute my simple benchmarks, but they didn't really have any coherent response beyond talking about the "other advantages" of Azure.

I also looked at:-

* https://cloudharmony.com/reports/editions/state-of-the-cloud...

* http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/microsofts-unwanted-win-cloud-...

Beyond that I looked at the excellent data at https://cloudharmony.com/cloudscores (great site by the way). Their service is not live yet, so I scraped the data into Google Sheets and compared it there. AWS seems to beat Azure on most cases.

You can see my sheet here:- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19jltGybjXN3-PnKXAwQX...

(Data entirely owned by Cloud Harmony). Sorry, I can't find a way to let viewers change the filter on the data.

As far as "other advantages go":-

* If you use Win Server 2012 + HyperV in house then there's a good reason to use Azure because of tight integration.

* If you're using SQL Server it's potentially a good fit too. (MySQL on Azure is recommended via a DB as a service they offer from a 3rd party which seems very pricey).

* If you're starting out and are using Visual Studio tooling then the tight integration with Azure Websites, Web Roles and Worker Roles would be pretty nice since the build/test/deploy process would be pretty slick. Re-engineering an existing system to fit the PaaS could be hard, depending on your architecture (it would be for us).

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#164

Post by klausjensen »

icelancer wrote: post #137
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?

I signed up two companies recently, and it was literally a matter of filling out the form (Not saying you did not have a bad experience, just offering mine. :)

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#165

Post by Galanwe »

drawkbox wrote: post #60
sz4kerto wrote: post #5

This reminds me of the old joke: Nietzsche: God is dead. God (couple of years later): Nietzsche is dead. pg: Microsoft is dead. http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html Microsoft (couple of years later): Here's some gift* for your startups. :) (*: please don't start explaining that it is not a gift, etc. -- I know. :) )

The old Microsoft (Ballmer era) is dead though. Microsoft in the last 1-2 years is like a new scrappy competitor who lost market share on hubris. They are now willing to work how developers like to work not forcing them into the corral. Azure is the new OS at Microsoft, lock in higher up the stack but actually not as lock-in as before. Microsoft went back to developer focus over biz/marketing focus and it is working…

Can you give explanations on what actually makes you think that way?

=> As a Microsoft employee, i totally disagree. I would even go as far as guessing that you either are talking about something you don't know, or are just one of those evangelists that are paid to write such comments everywhere on the web.

Microsoft is a desperately consumer/business-oriented company, with no interest in technology whatsoever. If you don't get that, then you haven't been paying attention

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#167

Post by mattmanser »

fsniper wrote: post #77
mbesto wrote: post #15

Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services. Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) th…

I'm not very keen on office365. Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :) And the shameless plug: Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If an…

As someone who just helped migrate a client to exchange online, do not get it. It's shockingly awful.

They have two separate admin interfaces, neither of which you can do everything in so you have to break out powershell to finish off the job. The client had to lean heavily on me to help, something other clients have never had to do with gmail.

I like a lot of MS products, but from my brief exposure, exchange is a complete mess of WTFs. And annoyingly, googling doesn't often bring up pertinent answers and their help is pathetic.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#168

Post by guardian5x »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #118

If Microsoft truly wants to transform they need to launch an intensive secret project. Let's call it "Project Redmond". The goal of the project would be to develop "Quantum", the next Microsoft OS. Quantum aligns MS with Linux by effectively building Windows on top of Linux as well as all the tools necessary to, as automatically as possible, migrate existing Windows code into Quantum. With a move like this Microsoft…

You describe Embrace, Extend, ... I don't think Microsoft has to stop doing Windows. Its fine to just be open to everything out there as well.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#169

Post by StavrosK »

spellboots wrote: post #131
StavrosK wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dete…

I do have some third-hand insider information that implies that Linode's management/billing/etc systems are old and buggy, which colors my judgement.

Regardless, I don't see how you can judge someone who's had at least two breaches more competent than someone who had zero. In all probability, DO didn't have any breaches precisely because they are more competent.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#170

Post by Gurkenmaster »

funkyy wrote: post #133
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.

I can browse the site with a cucumber (no dedicated gpu) with firefox and I had no problems.
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