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New lower Azure pricing

azure.microsoft.com

21–30 of 108 posts

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#21

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.

While undeniably true, you have to look at the levels of redundancy. With a dedicated server, if the box dies you're offline, if the storage dies you may lose data, etc.

Plus, there's also a premium just for access to the ecosystem/APIs. You are often paying for the theoretical convenience of being able to spawn additional instances programmatically.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#22
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

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…

Precisely.

I highlight a similar pricing breakdown with their IoT / MQTT service and their price inanities as well. As far as I can tell, this insane pricing is for the idea of "Can't go wrong with purchasing Microsoft Services".... when in actuality, you can go very much wrong.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#23
Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#24

Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.

Looks fine in Qupzilla on Linux

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#25

Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.

[deleted]

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#26
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

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…

[Disclosure: I work for Microsoft]

One thing to keep in mind for Azure SQL: you are getting a guaranteed SLA [1], business continuity and full point-in-time backups (up to 30 days) [2] for that price. To compare effectively you would need to price out a comparable Always-On cluster, domain controllers, SAN storage (for replication), and backup solution + storage.

[1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/sql-data... [2]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql...

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#28
post #3

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

Also, there's nobody to contact at Microsoft regarding Azure billing. I was prototyping some app that used App Service, Document DB, and Notification Hub and for a few months they billed at around $10 - $20, all of a sudden it's $1,200 for a month. The app was not launched, I was the only user. There's no way to figure out why other than it's a DocumentDB charge. There's no way I'd put anything in production with Azure.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#29

Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.

I suspect the answer is that they are screen fonts designed with ClearType in mind.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#30

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.

Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud
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