
Ask HN: Why is Azure so expensive? - tuyguntn
What is the benefit of using Azure comparing to AWS or Google Cloud? It is so expensive
======
nextweek2
Because its aimed at enterprises that have Microsoft OS's and applications.
Those buyers are used to paying a premium and know they don't have to retrain
staff.

You need to consider that the bulk of developers are actually using the
Microsoft platform. For the most part they aren't interested in the free
software community. Linux VMs are not an option for a lot of corporate tasks.

That is of course changing and probably the main driver for Microsoft being
more open.

~~~
shockzzz
Hm. 1000% sure it's a Sales tactic. Price it high and cut "deals" for clients.
Oldest trick in the book.

~~~
genericresponse
They're a lot more cooperative around BigCorp compliance related stuff than
AWS. It doesn't sound like that big a deal, but it really is.

~~~
shockzzz
Oh yeah, that's for sure huge, but BigCorp isn't paying market price per
container. I'm talking about the sales tactics played out against the little
guy.

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thomas11
Azure just recently announced price reductions to be competitive with AWS. The
blog post has some interesting links. [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/blog/helping-azure-custome...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/blog/helping-azure-customers-achieve-more-at-the-best-prices/)

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.

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yulaow
I can just say that Azure and AWS cost more than Google Cloud because Google
Cloud has the worst customer support I ever saw.

~~~
joosters
Nice to hear that Google are consistent with their customer support across all
their products!

~~~
mistermann
I spent about 2 hours on the phone with Chromecast support yesterday for an
intermittent problem I was having. On the bright side, they have a phone
number you can call for support, on the bad side, it seems their strategy is
to keep transferring you to different people, each who makes you go through
the same trouble shooting steps until you just give up out of frustration,
which I did.

~~~
dotnetchris
Customer hung up? PROBLEM SOLVED!

------
tuyguntn
Comparison (not exactly apples-to-apples):

~3-4Gb RAM: Azure (2cores, >100$/month), Google (1core, ~25$), AWS (37$, or
compute optimized 75$)

high memory 13-14Gb: Azure (>246$), Google (~63$), AWS (16Gb, >172$)

...

UPD: Thanks to tyingq, Azure 3-4Gb RAM (2cores, starting from 70$)

~~~
tyingq
Just to illustrate how hard it is to do a simple comparison, you show Azure's
3/4 GB ram offering as being 2 cores and > $100/month.

But, if I go to their pricing page ([https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#Linux)), I see:

A2 - 2 Cores, 3.5GB, 40GB: $70

A2 - 2 Cores, 3.5GB, 135GB: $89

D1 - 1 Core, 3.5GB, 50GB: $104

D2 - 2 Cores, 7GB, 100GB: $115

D2V2 - 2 Cores, 7GB, 100GB: $127

Thus, I'm not sure which one you're referring to. You seem to be referring to
one with 7GB RAM, which seems not to be a very direct comparison.

~~~
Zenst
Had look and I get totaly different pricing (higher mostly), Central US/USD
prices and couple examples:

INSTANCE CORES RAM DISK SIZES PRICE D1 1 3.5 GB 50 GB $0.14/hr (~$104/mo) D2 2
7 GB 100 GB $0.28/hr (~$208/mo)

So D1 same and yet D2 twice the price!

A2 is $134 for same setup.

Note they mention discounts for 12 months prepaid, though not exciting and
talking 5% discount and you have to be spending $6000 to qualify for that over
the 12 month period.

Certainly seems, use of proxies and your location effect what you are quoted
and I'm located near London and used the Opera browser, so who knows.

Certainly indicates that shopping around, even if your hitting the same price
page, is prudent.

~~~
tyingq
You're looking at Windows instances. Click the linux tab.

~~~
Zenst
You are absolutely right, thank you for clearing that up and indeed I get same
prices as you now, accept upon D1 which is (~$57/mo)with D2 - same as you get
~$115/mo . The V2 flavours at $63 and £127 a month (D1 and D2 respectively).

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tyingq
Is Azure more expensive? I can't tell, in any simple way.

Is there a place that offers some simple apples-to-apples comparison for
typical use cases? All three require complex calculators that account for
bandwidth use, ip addresses, etc.

Edit: I do see some tools after searching some, but they are all flawed a bit
because the three providers don't all offer the same thing. Azure's 2 core
machines start with significantly more RAM than Google or AWS, so it's not a
great comparison. The tools don't make that sort of mismatch easy to see.

~~~
qubex
The inability to directly compare signals a deliberate attempt to make the
offer opaque for consumers and thus bias the market towards inefficiency.

~~~
hueving
I believe the term you're looking for is 'product differentiation'.

~~~
qubex
Yes — it's a business technique whose purpose is the reduction of competitive
pressure.

------
sargun
I wont talk to the benefits of using Azure versus AWS versus Google Cloud, but
Azure's sales model is a bit different.

If you're looking at Azure, and on HN, my guess is you're probably a startup,
in which case you want to look into Microsoft Bizspark
([https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark](https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark)).
This drastically changes Azure prices. If you're a larger company, Azure is
all about enterprise sales, and bundling. If you buy multiple Azure services
along with Windows, and O365, the Azure part is dirt cheap.

~~~
devsquid
Embrace, extend and extinguish

~~~
joneholland
This isn't reddit. You can't post out of context EEE FUD here.

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OrionSeven
For our use case (fairly standard windows setup, sql server, about 8 VM's in
total) Azure was less expensive, more so after we setup and saw true costs. We
run our dev and test environments there and were able to get faster hardware &
more storage for less as well (about 10% less for about 20% more). But again,
that's a pure windows setup, comparing other components gets tricky because of
different pricing models.

------
cldellow
We recently explored putting about 25 of our VMs in Azure.

For our workloads, Azure is a worse deal. Broadly, we found that compared to
EC2 instance types, you paid a slight premium of 20% or so to get 2x the RAM
and 100s of gigs of ephemeral SSD storage (vs little or no SSD storage), while
taking a perhaps 30% hit in CPU performance.

It's not terrible, and depending on your workload, might be better than EC2.
I'm personally very partial to Amazon's spot instances and t2 family types,
neither of which Azure offers.

Even so, compute only represents ~25% of our AWS bill. For enterprises who
have significant Windows/AD investment, Azure might be a no brainer from an
ops cost point of view.

~~~
devsquid
Every time I go VM shopping, it's always going to cost around 30-50% more to
run on Azure. Thats a pretty significant increase IMO, especially for
companies where Cloud Servers account for around half of our expenses.

------
forgottenacc56
Setting aside the cost which I thought similar for Linux.....

If you are running Linux , azure works really well. Give it a try if you can
set aside your bias.

------
forgottenacc56
This post should be flagged.

The OP needs to quantify the statement about azure being expensive or else it
will just sound like anti-Microsoft fud.

------
nassirkhan
Firstly, the hyperscale providers size their VMs differently, so it is
generally not an apples to apples comparison. The best way to compare cloud
environment is to consider 3 year cost of ownership, and try to price in
various components/elements you might use such as big data stores, VLANs,
autoscaling, tiered storage etc.

It is my opinion that the variance in pricing over the long run is no more (or
will be no more) than 5% for these hyperscale providers over the long run. So
your decision should be based on the type of applications you are trying to
build in the cloud. If you are a microsoft "house", then it might make more
sense to consider AZURE since they make it easier to port diretory services
and licenses to their cloud. Likewise if you are a google house.

Obviously AWS has a lead in the market with regards to tools and
functinalities as they were early to the cloud game, but MS and google are
catching up fast. My personal choice of IaaS is google cloud because their
interface is very easy to understand, but frm a customer support perspective,
AWS and AMAZON are far better. Also, AWS and google frequently provide free
credits for a period of time so it would make sense to try those out to see
what works best.

~~~
dotnetchris
> Obviously AWS has a lead in the market with regards to tools and
> functinalities as they were early to the cloud game

I really disagree with this statement. Having used both AWS and Azure, Azure
is leaps and bounds ahead with the tools they provide. It's possible AWS made
efforts to catch up, it's been several years since I ported everything from
AWS to Azure.

------
TheSwordsman
This is a good question. I don't know of one.

There are some issues I've seen while trying to run systems there. Some of the
network configuration there is very strange, and I've seen some crazy
performance issues. Their API is very painful to use as well. Lastly, they run
an agent on your node that can gain someone root access (worse than Linode's
ability for someone to do that). Finally, their control panel has a basically
unlimited session lifetime. I don't think I've had to log in once within the
past 60 days.

I've found that systems running in Azure reliably perform worse than AWS.
Systems in Azure with about the same CPU and RAM have worse performance by
anywhere from 2x to 10x. I'm using this based on seeing things like GC run
times in both Go and the JVM. The systems report 0.00% CPU steal, no idea
where the bottleneck is.

Their network also leaves some to be desired. One of the biggest pain points
is that they drop ICMP Echo / Echo Reply on the edge of the network. So doing
network troubleshooting across the WAN is challenging. Another issue is that
they seem to often either drop or de-prioritize UDP packets within their
Fresno location. This causes some issues with software that uses UDP for
communication. With that are the weird, and confusing, mix-match between
NetworkSecurityGroups and Endpoints, with only one of them being configurable
in the UI.

The last thing is their API and the SDK (at least Ruby). Their API is an XML
behemoth with incorrect documentation (e.g., the example URL using a wrong
path in the docs), and severe performance problems. There are times where the
API takes over a minute to respond to a request, sometimes taking longer to
respond with an HTTP 500. Their Ruby SDK, at least, isn't so much as an SDK as
a library that's meant to be consumed via IRB.

Lastly, the nodes all run an agent called WALinuxAgent. This allows Azure to
take action on your node without your approval. It can also do things like add
new users to your node, and give then full sudo access. This is also done
without a reboot, so you have no indicator that someone just took this action
on your system. Scary!

I've also seen this agent get weird responses from the endpoints it talks to
causing it to think it should reprovision your node. It proceeds to then
rewrite your SSH host keys, vomit an exception, and then exit. It's brilliant.

Trying to get help from support is impossible. I've had issues with the
quality of the responses given, but also issues with them just never
responding to open issues. AWS's support team should be commended in
comparison.

~~~
cesarb
> One of the biggest pain points is that they drop ICMP on the edge of the
> network. So doing network troubleshooting across the WAN is challenging.

Do they drop all ICMP, or just ICMP Echo Request/Response? Because if they
drop all ICMP, including "Fragmentation needed but Don't Fragment set", it
will cause problems.

~~~
TheSwordsman
Echo/Echo Reply only I believe; not done an exhaustive test to confirm all
that are dropped. I've clarified in my post that I was referring to E/ER.
Thanks for calling that out.

------
polskibus
As far as I understand Microsoft licensing, in normal VPS + Windows solution
you would have to pay Windows Server CALs for each user connecting to your web
app on that server (even if you dont use windows authentication).

In Azure, MS frees you from that CAL charge.

I would be grateful if someone could confirm or reject this licensing issue -
I heard it once from a MS employee but perhaps he misunderstood the thing
about VPS somehow?

~~~
wrs
As of Windows 2012, you don't need CALs for a "web workload" (basically,
Internet web pages and POP3 email) on the standard edition. Before that, there
was a special edition for "web workloads" that was limited in other ways.

~~~
polskibus
Well, I spoke to MS licensing person from Warsaw 3 months ago and she was sure
about the need for an external connector license if you don't want to pay CALs
(costs around 100 CALs if I remember correctly). What is your source of
information if I may ask? Or maybe you can point me towards a publicly
available document?

~~~
wrs
You do need an external connector license for the servers that aren't running
"web workloads" (serving pages), e.g., a database or mid-tier application
server.

See question 5 at [http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume-
licensing/archive/2014/03/...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume-
licensing/archive/2014/03/10/licensing-how-to-when-do-i-need-a-client-access-
license-cal.aspx)

That blog post is also a great demonstration of the hilariously complicated MS
licensing regime. Hilarious if you don't have to deal with it, that is.

~~~
polskibus
Thanks a lot for the link!

It seems that if I have a web app and database on the same server then
user<->web app does not require CAL even if database is involved in handling
that web app work load! That's good news for my use case. It really shows how
twisted MS licensing is if MS licensing staff does not understand MS licensing
)

I am not sure however, whether this changes if authentication is involved - is
it still a publicly available web solution or not?

I really hope ASP.NET will become rock solid soon on Linux so one can avoid MS
licensing twists altogether,

------
outside1234
What is more expensive? The pricing seems on par with Amazon.

------
craigvn
Is it even relevant? You need to work out how much your hosting costs as a
percentage of your overall expenses. In my business it is less than 5% running
on Azure. I could convert to AWS and save a bit and it might be 4%, hardly
worth the effort. If you have hosting costing > 10% then you have bigger
issue, not enough revenue, or terribly inefficient software.

~~~
iofj
It's not just that. If you did things yourself on dedicated hosting (which
would save you 70-80% of your bill) you'd have more options. You'd have much
more bandwidth, much more cpu, much more disk for the same price.

Of course it'd be more work. But if you think you can transform more
bandwidth, faster calculations or more user storage into more customers, you
definitely want to get off cloud.

~~~
dotnetchris
And then when one of those customized servers dies...

------
dotnetchris
Because it's not. Azure and AWS are largely comparable. The only reason to
select your cloud provider between Azure and AWS is the feature set you care
most about.

If you are a .NET shop, Azure absolutely dominates AWS for what it provides.

------
yuhong
This reminds me of this article: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/12/ballme...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/12/ballmer-microsofts-cloud-revenue-numbers-are-bullshit/)

------
TYPE_FASTER
Microsoft partners get benefits like unlimited Azure support incidents at some
partnership levels. They also get consulting hours.

------
hkmurakami
My guess is that they are selling to existing MS stack install bases hat are
much more price agnostic.

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pshyco
So expensive? Can you please provide some data / your usage to back you
statement?

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aclatuts
Azure/Google is definitely more expensive but that is probably because they
don't treat their employees like crap.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243)

~~~
wstrange
In any cost comparison I have done, Google comes out ahead of AWS, followed by
Azure.

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hayksaakian
if you need windows VMs it's alright

~~~
johansch
Well duh.

