Cloud providers should make their smallest instances basically free. Bottom end instances/pricing is the drug through which developers become addicted to a platform.
New lower Azure pricing
31–40 of 108 posts
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#32Slightly 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've not seen this issue. I work for Microsoft and use a Mac for most of my work.
Example screen shots or URLs?
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#33I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?
Reserved instance pricing on AWS absolutely destroys Azure. If you do on-demand on both, they look competitive, but there are ways of bringing AWS down which Azure simply cannot match.
Have you had a chance to look at Google's Preemptible VMs? They're a fixed 70-80% off of list price.
Another point is, Google's VMs are generic CPU/RAM combinations. You don't need "network optimized VMs" or "storage optimized VMs" - you simply get those things on any VM. This makes the "excess instance supply" market much more fluid and simplifies folks' lives.
Happy to discuss further!
(work at GCP)
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#34I 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 Azu…
Did you open a support ticket, there is a category specifically for Billing issues.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#35Slightly 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
Never heard of this before, but apparently Qupzilla is a lightweight browser which uses the cross-platform Qt application framework, and it comes with a builtin ad blocker. Nice; I'm going to check this out soon.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#36Cloud 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.
Yes, but cloud scales in a way dedicated servers simply cannot. I agree that a lot of people use cloud when they shouldn't, but there are a number of cases where it remains very relevant.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#37Cloud providers should make their smallest instances basically free. Bottom end instances/pricing is the drug through which developers become addicted to a platform.
Base AWS and GCE VMs are like $4 a month. Isn't that basically free?
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#38Things like this pricing difference between VM and App Service which run on the same dedicated hardware, not sure why its still 2x the price? http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#39What I don't understand about Azure pricing is how much more expensive a Windows VM is compared to an equivalent Linux machine. A D1v2 costs $54 with Linux and $104 with Windows (per month). This extends to larger instances: Windows costs twice the price of Linux on the same instance. The only difference is the Windows licence, and $50 per month for the smallest machine (and hundreds for bigger instances) seems very unreasonable.
The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#40Cloud 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.
Absolutely true - however, in a true "apples to apples" comparison, if you're only running a single EC2 instance (for example) and it dies you're offline as well - AWS does not "automatically" have a failover setup for you. In this case 2 dedicated instances with a load balancer is going to get you the same setup you'd get on AWS (only likely cheaper and a lot more powerful setup).