
Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit - avsaro
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/amazon-cuts-cloud-storage-prices-microsoft-immediately-follows-suit/
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karterk
I tried Windows Azure recently - their cloud storage option to be specific. I
was shocked to find out that they did not even have a UI for simple operations
like uploading to the bucket etc. Yes, I know they're targeting developers,
but I just can't be doing big XML REST requests for every thing. I also
couldn't close my account without raising a support request.

The point being - Microsoft's biggest headache is catching up with AWS on the
tooling and documentation. They seem to be going all out in competing with
every vertical that AWS has, but that might not be the best approach as they
might endup spreading themselves too thin.

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outside1234
It cuts both ways. AWS's console in general is much less usable than Azure's
and Azure's Website interface (PaaS for apps) puts Elastic Beanstalk to
absolute shame.

PS. Check out AzCopy for uploading blobs to storage from the command line.

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taspeotis
I wish Microsoft would hurry up and open their Australian regions [1]. The
government department we work with "does not support the storage of
information ... outside Australia [2]".

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/12/microsofts_australia...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/12/microsofts_australian_azure_data_centre_close_to_completion/)

[2]
[http://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/policy_o...](http://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/policy_on_the_use_of_cloud_hosted_solutions_for_ccms_software_providers.pdf)
(page 3)

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PaulHoule
All of this causes people to get the wrong idea about AWS.

People aren't attracted to AWS because it is cheap, they are attracted to it
for other reasons. When I left Softlayer, the retention specialist I talked to
told me that AWS didn't give me free bandwidth, but I told him I wasn't
worried about bandwidth costs on AWS because these scaled with my revenue and
were a small fraction of it.

~~~
pfitzsimmons
Out of curiosity, why did you leave Softlayer for EC2? I am looking at hosting
for a new venture. Past experience with EC2 pricing and performance has left
me feeling a bit burned, so SoftLayer is among the options I am looking at.

~~~
PaulHoule
Every time I made a request to Softlayer it ended up in disaster.

For instance, I requested an upgrade in the port speed on my machine and
somehow the trouble ticket system got screwed up so I couldn't make any more
requests.

Later on I added a hard drive and they didn't make a partition table on it and
somehow when the machine rebooted the superblock got overwritten and then I
couldn't read the file system.

Once I was able to reconstruct the superblock I moved the contents of that
hard drive to S3 and didn't look back.

~~~
pfitzsimmons
Thanks for the reply!

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_delirium
One kind of interesting thing about Azure's compute pricing is that stopped
VMs are free. You can pause a VM, deallocate it (which removes it from
infrastructure like IP addresses / node allocation / etc. and puts it into
cold storage), and not pay anything until you restart it. But when you restart
it's in its previous configured state. AFAIK the only way to do that with
other cloud or VPS providers is to dump a custom image and then boot off the
new image. For some uses that's fine, but for other uses having an interface
more like pausing/unpausing a VMWare instance, with persistent state rather
than fresh provisioning via configuration management tools, is nicer.

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Renaud
I kind of like Azure and its management portal that makes it easy to setup and
manage all their services, but I find the costs to be too high. An Extra small
VM (1GHz CPU, 768MB RAM) runs at US$15/month without considering the
additional cost of data transfer, storage transactions and storage cost.
Compare that to DigitalOcean with their US$5/month for their equivalent
offering.

What draws me to Azure is the fact that MS have datacenters where I live.

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jordee_luh_forj
Does anyone know if Microsoft's Blob Storage can be used for static web site
hosting like Amazon's S3 can be? I'm talking about the full experience that S3
offers. That includes selecting the index page filename, and the DNS support
so that naked domains (like example.com) can be used directly instead of
having to use a CNAME (like for www.example.com) and some redirection service
for the naked domain. Azure's support for this was not very good at all the
last time I looked and the information available about it today is outdated by
several years or isn't encouraging.

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spo81rty
I don't know the answer to that but they have a low cost website option called
Azure Websites that would probably work and be much better than dealing with
blobs.

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pinaceae
"Your margin is my opportunity" \- Jeff Bezos

Such is life when competing against anything Amazon. Price is feature of their
product, just like UI, etc. If they find a way to make it cheaper - they will.

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frankienwafili
Looks like amazon might be afraid that Dropbox has plans to potentially build
their own server infrastructure.

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tinco
Dropbox does not pay the amounts advertised on Amazon's website, you can be
sure of that :)

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angrybits
is that based on a hunch or is there a source for that? (or similar precedent)

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tinco
It's not so much a hunch as it is common sense. When you subscribe to a
service for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per month, then
you can be certain that if you call them for a discount, they will pick up,
and do business with you.

~~~
tl
Considering that Everpix didn't "think of that" [1], I wouldn't assume that
it's "common sense".

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7040332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7040332)

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UK-AL
I love this sort commoditization and competition.

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mrkickling
I have a plugin for chrome that replaces the word "cloud" with "butt", this
article was extremely confusing.

