
Microsoft Drops Prices for Some Azure Instances by Up to 17% - boulos
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/microsoft-drops-prices-for-some-azure-instances-by-up-to-17
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wstrange
Competition in the cloud space is a beautiful thing. I really hope we don't
end up with Amazon being a monopoly provider.

Now if they could all lower network egress pricing I'd be really happy.

~~~
jedberg
I doubt that will happen. Very few people list that as their deal breaker, and
it's their entire business model. If egress were cheap you could easily load
balance between providers.

~~~
bedhead
Mainframes: IBM - natural monopolist

PC's: Microsoft/Intel - natural monopolists

Mobile: Apple - natural monopolist

Cloud: Amazon - .... (take a guess where this is going)

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frik
Mobile: Google Android 70+% (Apple iOS is only 20% worldwide)

Cloud: Amazon, then Digital Ocean is the second, than long nothing, ...(?)...,
Azure, ...

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pjmlp
Who is using Digital Ocean in Europe?!

It is all about AWS and Azure over here.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Since they have a data center in Frankfurt we use it for some stuff. But on
the edge for Hetzner vServers.

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kevindeasis
Now I want more competitors for platforms like Heroku just so that they can
put their prices down. Heroku is great, but it is crazy expensive.
Furthermore, I don't see any signs of Heroku lowering their price at all.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Is Heroku really that expensive? I use their new $7/month instances and I have
no complaints with performance and features. $50/month for a managed Postgres
database is a bit expensive but other cloud storage options like Cloudant (use
the service in same AWS region as Heroku) can be very reasonable.

~~~
criley2
Heroku is expensive when considering you can use similar tools on a vps for a
fraction of the cost (or get a whole lot more for your money).

And yeah, when you charge $20 for SSL, you're expensive.

~~~
cheez
When you have to spend even 10 hours a year maintaining that vps, I think most
PaaS pay for themselves.

~~~
criley2
I'm sorry but at $20/mo for basic SSL, you can easily spend $40/mo on Heroku
for ONE app, almost $500/yr!

A private VPS with enough resources for 4 of those same apps would be 2-4X
cheaper.

If your time is so valuable that you can waste money like that,
congratulations, but many of us find halving a price and learning marketable
skills in the process to be valuable.

~~~
cheez
It's $20/month for basic SSL for custom domains. You can still have SSL at
[https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com](https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com).

If your app is so important that SSL is necessary, that's worth $500/year. Or
your app isn't that important and the point is moot.

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tuyguntn
Am I only one who is experiencing terrible speed of Azure CDN?

[http://imgur.com/2pAzabn](http://imgur.com/2pAzabn)

[http://imgur.com/xiymJUt](http://imgur.com/xiymJUt)

~~~
shanselman
That's the Azure.com website's CDN, but I can check on that.

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thisisdallas
There are a lot of great services Azure offers and I would absolutely love to
throw my money at Microsoft...but not all of it. I find it crazy that their
SLA on VMs only applies if you have two VMs. Essentially, you are having to
pay double just to maybe get 99.95% connectivity.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/support/legal/sla/virtual-...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/support/legal/sla/virtual-machines/v1_0/)

~~~
spo81rty
Any type of high availability requires multiple servers

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peteretep
I don't have a use-case for Azure, but very happy MS are in the space.

~~~
vmarsy
Like you I don't have any valid use case right now, but I'm interested in
Service Fabric[1] though. It looks like Amazon Lambda, it screams vendor lock-
in but much less than Lambda, as it seems easier to code and import dlls

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/service-
fabric/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/service-fabric/)

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matt_wulfeck
Things are really going to pick up when interconnections between clouds
becomes faster and easier. AWS's switch to VPC is actually moving this along
nicely.

Many people actually want to be in two clouds for redundancy.

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tszming
Dear Azure team: you will be more awesome if you offer Linux VM running
natively on Linux Host, more developers will come.

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ygra
What difference does the host make? You're not interacting directly with it
anyway, as far as I know.

~~~
tszming
If your Windows host need Windows update, then all the Linux guests would need
to be rebooted (but seems they've managed to reduce the number of reboot
significantly since last year). But regarding the performance and security,
most people using Linux still prefer a Linux VM host.

~~~
windowsworkstoo
Wow, not really. If perf is fine who cares about the hypervisor. Regarding
reboots, if they are using hyper-v they are probably on top ofServer Core
which minimises patch surface and thus reboots.

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xufi
I guess this is the new field in what they want to try to venture more into. I
think the CEO was the former cloud head so no doubt its apart of his strategy

~~~
melted
Azure is like 8 years old at this point, so it's by no means a new field for
them. It's just that before there was no Google forcing everyone to cut their
crazy fat margins.

