
New lower Azure pricing - alexrigler
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-lower-azure-pricing/
======
tshtf
As kyledrake so eloquently said before: "The bandwidth is the soda."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129)

AWS and Azure overcharge on bandwidth about 10 to 20 times the prevailing
rate. Something to keep in mind for high bandwidth applications.

------
Maarten88
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 unreasonable.

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.

~~~
gsam
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.

~~~
nbevans
"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...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit/)

~~~
thr0waway1239
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...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-server-
pricing) DataCenter: $6150 Standard: $882 Essentials: $500

------
BonoboIO
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.

~~~
Scirra_Tom
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 can be a good
option, but moving onto the cloud at a later date can be a big burden.

~~~
imaginenore
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.

~~~
Scirra_Tom
Yep, which is why we have Rackspace actively managing our cloud setup

------
stemuk
For me the compute pricing isn't the main issue. The cutthroat bandwith prices
from 9 to 18 cents per GB are the main cost drivers and should be at least
mentioned in a blog post about price reduction.

------
greenmountin
Does 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 at any
moment, uh, make it big and I want to be ready. But I can't really stomach the
$20 just to turn on auto-scaling somewhere.

~~~
bigiain
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 ;-)

------
oneplane
Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in
a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on
macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are
blurred and just a PITA to read.

~~~
j_koreth
Looks fine in Qupzilla on Linux

~~~
voidz
Never heard of this before, but apparently Qupzilla is a lightweight browser
which uses the cross-platform Qt application framework, and it comes with a
builtin ad blocker. Nice; I'm going to check this out soon.

------
perfectfire
Their calculator still seems to have the old prices in case you're like me and
don't remember how much it used to cost, but want to see how much you are
saving: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/pricing/calculator/?servic...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines)

------
atrudeau
I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?

~~~
kefka
Absolutely not. If anything, they are worse at hidden billing than Comcast.

Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror
stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS.

I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've
not looked at GCE.

But those are my experiences. YMMV

~~~
praseodym
You'd think Microsoft would be the go-to provider for SQL Server workloads,
but Azure SQL is terribly expensive for some (many?) workloads. For read-
intensive SQL Server workloads you'll be paying upwards of $465/mo (Premium P1
[1]) for something that can be easily handled by a beefy VM for a fraction of
the price. Also, the Azure SQL pricing model links performance ('eDTUs') to
storage which skews the billing model even further.

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-
databa...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-database/)

~~~
maglite77
[Disclosure: I work for Microsoft]

One thing to keep in mind for Azure SQL: you are getting a guaranteed SLA [1],
business continuity and full point-in-time backups (up to 30 days) [2] for
that price. To compare effectively you would need to price out a comparable
Always-On cluster, domain controllers, SAN storage (for replication), and
backup solution + storage.

[1]: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/sql-
data...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/sql-
database/v1_1/) [2]: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/documentation/articles/sql...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/documentation/articles/sql-database-business-continuity/)

------
danielcampos93
seems like mostly updating to the newest models and making the entry level
sku's much cheaper to attract more people kicking the wheels and lower the bar
for dev's wanting to try out Azure. I would love to see they take this to an
extreme and either make the A0 or A1 free like AWS.

~~~
shiftpgdn
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.

~~~
dragontamer
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://www.nocix.net/dedicated/](https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/)

[https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml](https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml)

For a certain scale, aiming at dedicated is probably cheaper, especially when
you consider how much faster a dedicated SSD box is than a shared VPS.

The main benefits of AWS (or Azure) are all of the other features they offer
on their platform. But I don't think that they are low-cost anymore,
especially in today's world with ~$42/month dedicated SSD Xeon servers.

~~~
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
dragontamer
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.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I do have high CPU utilization tasks, like large Haskell builds, Tensoflow,
etc. I agree that the cheap physical server costs are surprising, given
facility and power costs.

------
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?

------
hoodoof
Cloud providers should make their smallest instances basically free. Bottom
end instances/pricing is the drug through which developers become addicted to
a platform.

~~~
brianwawok
Base AWS and GCE VMs are like $4 a month. Isn't that basically free?

~~~
sokoloff
AWS also has a free tier for many services (EC2 included) for the first 12
months of usage. They're well familiar with the "first hit's free" business
model...

------
Mao_Zedang
Things like this pricing difference between VM and App Service which run on
the same dedicated hardware, not sure why its still 2x the price?
[http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png](http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png)

~~~
vlangber
We had planned to develop a Saas solution based on Azure, but the App Service
and sql pricing have forced us to drop it.

We love Azure, and we would like to use it for all our web projects, but it is
hard to justify it with the current pricing.

~~~
greggyb
Talk to a Microsoft rep. There are several categories of Microsoft customers.
One category is enterprises using Microsoft products internally. Another is
software/SaaS companies using Microsoft products to develop or deliver a
product. The prices you see are for that first group. The prices for the
second group tend to be _heavily_ discounted.

Shoot me a message (email in profile) if you have questions. I do not get
heavily involved in licensing discussions, but can try to answer more
questions if you have them. If you want to build a SaaS on Azure, though, you
are the customer Microsoft wants - take advantage of that.

------
NamPNQ
Don't use Azure. Alway have a network problem.

------
ruffrey
does anyone know of a no-frills side-by-side cost comparison of top cloud
services, for say, a micro instance?

