Don't use Azure. Alway have a network problem.
New lower Azure pricing
71–80 of 108 posts
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#72What 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.
How do you mean? All current Windows versions and Linux distributions have built in support for running under Hyper-V, which the Azure hypervisor is based upon.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#73Earlier 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.
I basically do that for my Xen VMs with NixOps in the "no provisioner" mode. Would be exactly the same for bare metal, plus I get dev VMs that match the prod environment for free.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#74Cloud 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.
Keep in mind you get up to 75% discount at AWS for 3yr term upfront payments for reserved instances... (In reality, anything I use only seems to get a ~60% discount for that)
But nobody uses AWS 'cause it's "cheapest". That's completely missing the point.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud
Actually the guy I just replaced did, but that's because he didn't know what he was doing.
An ex-gig of mine lost their major customer, the new agency moved them to AWS (and poached a few staff, which is how I heard this story). The hosting(inc bandwidth) costs jumped to _nine times_ the previous arrangement, and the website performance dropped.
So far as I know, the guy who masterminded that has not been fired...
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#76What 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…
It'll be price segmentation. Perhaps Windows VMs can't be scheduled so tightly together by a hypervisor, but it'll mainly be about charging what the market is prepared to pay.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're moving to AWS for our next release, managed by Rackspace. Had the same philosophy as you for years, and have saved a lot of money with DIY (maybe in the tens of thousands). Turns out server admin is not my skillset, and it's caused problems, headaches and risks in the past. I consider the additional cost going forwards in effect as our next hire and an important one. For small startups looking to save money DIY…
You still need a server admin, cloud or not. It's not like there's a magic button in the cloud that replaces an admin.
Yep, which is why we have Rackspace actively managing our cloud setup
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#78Does anyone know about Azure auto-scaling? It says "most [VM's] include load-balancing and auto-scaling free of charge", is that true and is it any more friendly to hobbyists than the other two? It was very disappointing to see the auto-scaling services for GCP and AWS basically require a $20/mo load balancer right off the bat. I have an app that is quietly puttering away on a single Digital Ocean droplet, but could…
To be fair - Amazon (and Google/Azure/whoever) aren't really targeting the sort of user who wants autoscaling for under $20/month... They've got different fish to fry.
There's kind of this uncanny valley of businesses who think their website/app-backend is kinda important, but keep asking about $5 or $20/month hosting when you've recommended ~$100/month for a load balanced redundant AWS setup. If you aren't prepared to pay for a load balancer, at least two ec2 instances, and a multi-region RDS instance - I don't really want to get your 2am Saturday morning phone calls asking why your site/app is down.
Advice: investigate your devops tool of choice (I like Ansible) and work out how to script the spin up of infrastructure at Digital Ocean - you'll need to invest some time to learn and get it working, but you should be able to set up a single command line script to provision additional droplets and add them behind an (automatically updated via Ansible/APIs) dns round robin set of "Floating IP" addresses (or Elastic IP addresses in AWS terminology) and use Heartbeat on each droplet to monitor the others and re-update the Floating IPs as needed. That's kind poorman's HA. For extra credit, you could work out how to automate provisioning of some HAProxy Droplets sitting in front of your app server droplets. Managing a shared database is left as an exercise to the reader who prefers not to pay for RDS ;-)
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#79Cloud 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?
And then there's Azure at €11 point something. The local web hosting company does better specs for half the price, and the lowest one (only slightly lower specs than Azure's) is €3 a month.
Re: New lower Azure pricing
#80does anyone know of a no-frills side-by-side cost comparison of top cloud services, for say, a micro instance?