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New lower Azure pricing

azure.microsoft.com

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Re: New lower Azure pricing

#51

Post by rubber_duck »

Someone1234 wrote: post #21
BonoboIO wrote: post #17

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.

Like someone else said, your VM can die as well, the cloud provides some HA services but there are hosted/standalone versions as well. I think the real question is how spiky is your usage, even with renting bare metal you still can't scale dynamically like you can with cloud VM - if you need 5x the capacity to cover spikes you might as well use cloud and all the fancy stuff you get with it.

And you can use both at the same time (dynamically scale up through cloud, bare metal predictable workloads)

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#52

Post by paulddraper »

BonoboIO wrote: post #17

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.

Restaurant prices are ridiculous ... made the comparison between groceries and menu offerings of McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King ... Olive Garden (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times at a restaurant for the same.

---

You're not paying for hardware. You're paying for hardware, expertise, services, and convenience.

On-prem or colocation may be a good choice. But limiting your comparison to raw computing power mischaracterizes the decision.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#53

Post by paulddraper »

awj wrote: post #48
jamroom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "cannot" - just "easier" :)

I do releases by baking a new virtual machine with the code+config built in and booting it. I guess it's possible to do that on real hardware, but calling it simply "harder" borders on disingenuous.

You can deploy virtual machines to real hardware.

That's what kubernetes, etc. are for.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#54

Post by paulddraper »

computerphage wrote: post #46
dragontamer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dedicated scales in a way that cloud cannot: vertically. Want to build a 1TB DDR4 RAM beast with 40 cores? Yeah, you can do that with dedicated.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/

Not what the parent asked for; that's 60 cores (120 threads).

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#55

Post by xiaomai »

vgt wrote: post #33
Someone1234 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's nice, I'm using azure for a windows vm and it's been super frustrating trying to get reasonable performance. (RAM/CPU/etc. is all great but the standard IO is so slow it's basically unusable (i'm maxing out at 10M/s (I think due to iops limitiations).

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#56

Post by dimfeld »

vgt wrote: post #33
Someone1234 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Google's sustained use discounts for standard (non-preemptible) VMs are a huge win as well. No need to predict usage and reserve instance time in advance; the discount is simply applied progressively as you use a particular instance type more during a month.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#57

Post by elchief »

BonoboIO wrote: post #17

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.

It makes sense if you need to spin up several servers really fast. Like, "I can't wait 2 weeks for my Supermicro reseller to ship and build them" fast.

There is likely some optimal schedule where you start w cloud, order DIY replacements, and migrate, and repeat as you scale. Labour-intensive though.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#58

Post by gsam »

Maarten88 wrote: post #39

What 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…

There's also the fact that their Windows infrastructure is probably costlier to maintain. Windows wasn't built for this use-case, and they're desperately trying to catch up. In the meantime, they have this convenient project called Linux on hand.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#59

Post by gsam »

BonoboIO wrote: post #17

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.

You're paying people to maintain your machines. You're eliminating the need for your own sys-admins to keep your servers up to date and patched. For small businesses who have no IT staff for instance, this is exactly what you want.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#60

Post by vlangber »

Mao_Zedang wrote: post #38

Things 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

We had planned to develop a Saas solution based on Azure, but the App Service and sql pricing have forced us to drop it.

We love Azure, and we would like to use it for all our web projects, but it is hard to justify it with the current pricing.

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