Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New lower Azure pricing

azure.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 108 posts

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#91

Post by mark_l_watson »

dragontamer wrote: post #7
shiftpgdn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A0 standard and the A0 basic prices did not change. Both of those instances will be dramatically outperformed by a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet for 1/2 to 1/3rd the price.

Well, so are Amazon's lowest tier nodes. I think its fair to say that AWS and Azure aren't competing against cheap VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean. Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS). https:/…

I will add my thanks for your nocix suggestion. I prefer to do my development on a beefy VPS, most often from OVH, but I think I will try switching to novix for a few months. (I don't like my laptop heating up or running out of capacity, and it is nicer to have a dev setup that I can hit from any laptop (or tablet)). For development, I don't need super high reliability.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#92

Post by kefka »

trevyn wrote: post #81
kefka wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and if you were doing anything with the recently killed (or soon to be) RemoteApp, billing there was a disaster. Absolute horrible disaster. Overbilled to my employer because their websites did not equal to what they quoted us. They also refuse to honor enterprise contract regarding transfer (Internet2 peer). Just horrible terrible bad no good. And their MQTT service (IoT) pricing is a joke. $50/month for 400k m…

Your dialup modem math is wrong: https://www.google.com/webhp?ie=UTF-8#q=(5.2+kilobytes%2Fsec... (13.48 GB)

I can only blame the... uhh..err.. uhmm... The Windows Calculator! Blast it all!

:)

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#93

Post by bdcravens »

bigiain wrote: post #74
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.

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.

Even the worst reserved pricing gets you 30%-40% off of published rates (nothing upfront, just commit to a year)

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#94

Post by dragontamer »

dgemm wrote: post #88
dragontamer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I guess its time to whip out the big guns then. https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B... 1. Eight socket R1 (LGA 2011) supports Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8800 v4/v3 family (up to 24-Core) 2. Up to 24TB in 192 DDR4 DIMM slots That's 192 cores / 384 threads with 24TB of DDR4 RAM ----------- The amount that you can vertically scale with physical servers is far above and beyond what is…

Scaling vertically only buys you time until you are forced to scale horizontally. That and "one huge server" is rarely the best design decision.

> Scaling vertically only buys you time until you are forced to scale horizontally.

Why not both?

> That and "one huge server" is rarely the best design decision.

I never claimed to build only one server. Only that dedicated scales vertically far more than cloud.

There's absolutely nothing stopping me from buying multiple 4TB servers if I wanted to. The reason you go vertical is because Intel's QPI is ~25.6 GB/s (That's big-bytes: so over 200Gbit), far faster than any switch or router on the market. (10-gbit Ethernet, or maybe fiber at 40-gbit if you go really expensive)

You CANNOT scale processes faster than Intel's QPI. Vertical scaling gives you faster communications than even the most expensive switches on the market.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#95

Post by dragontamer »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #91
dragontamer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, so are Amazon's lowest tier nodes. I think its fair to say that AWS and Azure aren't competing against cheap VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean. Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS). https:/…

I will add my thanks for your nocix suggestion. I prefer to do my development on a beefy VPS, most often from OVH, but I think I will try switching to novix for a few months. (I don't like my laptop heating up or running out of capacity, and it is nicer to have a dev setup that I can hit from any laptop (or tablet)). For development, I don't need super high reliability.

Well, development seems more like a VPS job, since you aren't going to be utilizing the CPU too much.

I think high-load web servers (which will be hitting the disk often) or video game servers (especially world-simulations like Minecraft or Factorio) that will benefit from dedicated servers the most.

But give it a shot. I know that the higher-cost VPS are more expensive than those dedicated boxes. I'm also surprised at how cheap dedicated has gotten recently.

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#96

Post by nbevans »

gsam wrote: post #58
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.

"Costlier to maintain" how? "Not built for this use-case" errr? The real answer is licensing cost. If you already own a Windows Server license then you are free to use it and gain 41% price reductions via this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit...

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#97

Post by thr0waway1239 »

nbevans wrote: post #96
gsam wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Costlier to maintain" how? "Not built for this use-case" errr? The real answer is licensing cost. If you already own a Windows Server license then you are free to use it and gain 41% price reductions via this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit...

Interesting: when I combine your comment with the GP's comment, I start wondering about the recurring revenue aspect of Azure.

There seems to be three types of Windows Server licenses you can purchase [1]. Assuming a price differential $50 per month between Linux/Windows as GP states.

I don't know exactly what would be the server license you would purchase if you got the actual license. But after month 20, even after the 41% discount - lets round it out to 50%, you have paid more than a one-time payment for the Essentials server. After month 36, you have paid more than a one-time payment for Standard server. It takes a while to get to the DataCenter server (~20 years), and I honestly don't know enough to figure out which use case matches which license type, but if someone can manage with the Essentials server (touted as being useful for small businesses up to 25 employees), then you are now paying, just based on difference between Linux and Windows, a perpetual excess fee over getting a Windows server after about 1.5 years for Essentials and 3 years for Standard.

Obviously, on the cloud you get a lot of extra features, including not having to pay the cost of server maintenance. But for the traditional customers GP is referring to, that might well be a sunk cost. (E.g. you need your sysadmin anyway because of other internal stuff)

However, this statement from GP might actually make a lot of sense:

> 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.

If, like is usually mentioned here on HN, you probably wouldn't go with Windows for server related stuff anyway if you just started out, this does seem like an excellent golden goose for MS - keep your traditional customers within the Windows ecosystem without really doing a whole lot for them in terms of competitive pricing, and in addition turn your one time revenue generating software (Windows server license) into a recurring revenue generating software.

Having said that, I suppose this also means it is generally easier for AWS and Google to compete on price, because MS cannot allow this pegging (Linux vs Windows comparison) to get too wide because you would get comments like GP's.

Is that a reasonable analysis?

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-serve... DataCenter: $6150 Standard: $882 Essentials: $500

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#98

Post by quicksilver03 »

bigiain wrote: post #74
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.

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.

3yr reserved instances is something that baffled me when I was doing the research for https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com .

What reasons push people to pay upfront and to commit to a solution whose main benefit is elasticity?

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#99

Post by bigiain »

quicksilver03 wrote: post #98
bigiain wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3yr reserved instances is something that baffled me when I was doing the research for https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com . What reasons push people to pay upfront and to commit to a solution whose main benefit is elasticity?

For those sweet sweet discounts?

Because who cares about costs next year or the year after, I'm just on a 6 month contract here!

(Even more cynically, "because it's just like buying servers, but comes on the OpEx budget not the CapEx one, so _my_ KPIs look _awesome!_")

Re: New lower Azure pricing

#100

Post by jbb555 »

I have a few hobby projects stored on github and it's easy to get linux VMs so that when I commit something it gets checked out and built and packaged automatically. It's easy to find a VM for a reasonable monthly price. But it seems to be much harder to find reasonable windows options to do the same there?

I currently make it build on my machine at home, but that't not very scalable or reliable.

I don't really want a full windows machine. I want a decent windows machine for doing builds that only runs for a few hours in total each month and is cheap.

Is there such a thing?

Post reply on HN