One kind of interesting thing about Azure's compute pricing is that stopped VMs are free. You can pause a VM, deallocate it (which removes it from infrastructure like IP addresses / node allocation / etc. and puts it into cold storage), and not pay anything until you restart it. But when you restart it's in its previous configured state. AFAIK the only way to do that with other cloud or VPS providers is to dump a custom image and then boot off the new image. For some uses that's fine, but for other uses having an interface more like pausing/unpausing a VMWare instance, with persistent state rather than fresh provisioning via configuration management tools, is nicer.
Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit
#32All of this causes people to get the wrong idea about AWS. People aren't attracted to AWS because it is cheap, they are attracted to it for other reasons. When I left Softlayer, the retention specialist I talked to told me that AWS didn't give me free bandwidth, but I told him I wasn't worried about bandwidth costs on AWS because these scaled with my revenue and were a small fraction of it.
Out of curiosity, why did you leave Softlayer for EC2? I am looking at hosting for a new venture. Past experience with EC2 pricing and performance has left me feeling a bit burned, so SoftLayer is among the options I am looking at.
Every time I made a request to Softlayer it ended up in disaster.
For instance, I requested an upgrade in the port speed on my machine and somehow the trouble ticket system got screwed up so I couldn't make any more requests.
Later on I added a hard drive and they didn't make a partition table on it and somehow when the machine rebooted the superblock got overwritten and then I couldn't read the file system.
Once I was able to reconstruct the superblock I moved the contents of that hard drive to S3 and didn't look back.
Re: Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit
#33I tried Windows Azure recently - their cloud storage option to be specific. I was shocked to find out that they did not even have a UI for simple operations like uploading to the bucket etc. Yes, I know they're targeting developers, but I just can't be doing big XML REST requests for every thing. I also couldn't close my account without raising a support request. The point being - Microsoft's biggest headache is catc…
There is a blob explorer built into visual studio. There are also third party ones available, and lots of command line tools similar to s3cmd built by open source community.
Re: Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought it had already been established that you were making assumptions not based on evidence? Bezos made a decision to not negotiate with individual customers, and there are pros and cons to that decision.
We did no such thing, but do you have a reference to Bezos saying that? I know Amazon does not negotiate over contract terms, but that's something different than prizes.
Looks like I'm mistaken, confirmed with some of my own research too. Sorry!
Re: Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did no such thing, but do you have a reference to Bezos saying that? I know Amazon does not negotiate over contract terms, but that's something different than prizes.
Looks like I'm mistaken, confirmed with some of my own research too. Sorry!
No problem :)
Re: Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, why did you leave Softlayer for EC2? I am looking at hosting for a new venture. Past experience with EC2 pricing and performance has left me feeling a bit burned, so SoftLayer is among the options I am looking at.
Every time I made a request to Softlayer it ended up in disaster. For instance, I requested an upgrade in the port speed on my machine and somehow the trouble ticket system got screwed up so I couldn't make any more requests. Later on I added a hard drive and they didn't make a partition table on it and somehow when the machine rebooted the superblock got overwritten and then I couldn't read the file system. Once I w…
Thanks for the reply!