

Microsoft aims at Amazon with Azure virtual Windows (and Linux) IaaS - jdp23
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/microsoft-aims-at-amazon-with-azure-virtual-windows-and-linux-iaas/

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sahaskatta
My start-up actually choose to use Azure after we got their BizSpark Plus
offer which provides $60k to cover computing costs.

Just about every start-up I knew was using AWS or RackSpace. I was a bit
concerned to go with them at first, but it was clear after investigating
further that we wouldn't be locked-in. We're using Ubuntu VMs which are
essentially identical to the ones we would have been using on AWS or
RackSpace. Our app is fairly portable enough that we could switch if we had to
do so.

There have been a few occasional hiccups, but we've been happy with them so
far.

~~~
londoncalling
What were the "hiccups"? That can't be good?

P.S. what's your start-up do?

~~~
jjcm
Disclaimer: I work for MS.

The hiccups I've had have been DNS routing issues early on. It seems to have
been solved, but for a while I was experiencing periodic enormous increases in
latency (I think at one point the delay was 26 seconds). From what I heard
they were specific to their linux VPSs (which is what I'm using), but those
were solved around three or four months ago. I haven't had any issues since.

As far as the VPS goes, overall it's decent. I do a lot of my development over
ssh so small latency blips are almost always immediately noticeable. Linode
seems to still be more consistent, but just barely.

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dubcanada
Azure is pretty nice, but just a warning for those. If you trial it for the 90
days. If any any time during that trial you go over your allocated "specs"
your VM will be deleted. This does not mean your data is gone, it's just
stored as a "disk image" and you can create a new one. But there has been
times where the "disk image" became corrupted or something and people lost
everything they did during their trial.

Just a note that if you plan on using it, I'd suggest signing up for Pay as
you go (you get the trial stuff, but if you go over it doesn't delete your VM,
it just charges you).

Another thing that is annoying, on AWS if you turn off your VM it doesn't
charge you for cycles. On Azure you need to delete your VM, turing it off
still charges you the exact same amount as if you had it on. Something I found
really weird.

Overall though Azure control panel is amazing, and the system is very nicely
built. Even with the troubles I had (as stated above) I still recommend it to
people.

~~~
webwanderings
Any idea what happens if you do not renew and/or do not delete your free trial
account at the end of free trial? Mine is going to run out soon. I signed up
only to play around (have no serious need). I have deleted my VMs.

~~~
facorreia
They eventually will delete your data. You'll receive plenty warnings by email
and you can open a support ticket for assistance at any time.

~~~
jbigelow76
They don't "eventually" delete your data, the second the trial is over they
delete the instance completely (but it still shows up in your control panel).
Trying to switch to a paid subscription won't restore it and their support
team can't help either.

I got burned by this, I let a trial lapse with a VM that I would have
preferred not been nuked, it's totally my fault but from a customer
service/goodwill perspective you'd think they would just disable access for a
period of time to give you the chance to re-up.

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neya
Wow, their dashboard looks pretty neat!

[http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/image_thumb_65504243.pn...](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/image_thumb_65504243.png)

[http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/image_thumb_7486AB10.pn...](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/image_thumb_7486AB10.png)

~~~
jaz
It is neat, and usually works pretty well... but occasionally I've run into
issues where the dashboard 'freezes' for no apparent reason. Looking at the
console revealed a backend service threw a 500 error, and because there was no
error handling in the front end, the dashboard appeared to freeze. A little
bit frustrating to hit this every so often.

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vyrotek
As usual, there's a good write up on these changes from Scott Gu as well.[1]
As someone who has been using Azure for 3+ years now, I'm pretty excited about
the direction Microsoft is going with Azure.

But for crying out loud can Microsoft please officially release Azure
Websites? It's been in 'preview' for so long. I would really like to use it in
production and have SSL support. :)

[1] [http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/16/windows-
az...](http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/16/windows-azure-
general-availability-of-infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas.aspx)

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outside1234
I've been running a Rails app on Azure IaaS on Ubuntu with a MySQL instance
for 6 months and it has been totally solid.

In particular, I don't have hard numbers but the underlying filesystem feels
much more performant than EBS on AWS - and it is nice that the storage
underlying the filesystem is automatically georeplicated for you.

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shaydoc
I am finding Azure really great,the platform itself has good integration with
publishing from both github and tfs.... The setup with .net solutions is tight
obviously.

I am using SQL azure, blob storage for files, persistent queues for background
processing, tables for diagnostics, MVC 4 webapi restful services and a custom
built single page app hosted as web role with automatic scale out cloud
services, plus worker roles handling background queue processing, so all in
all, scalability as a service, hard to beat... I couldn't imagine doing this
without Azure with such a small team. Yes I work mainly with the Microsoft
stack and this kinda ties me a little for now, but that shouldn't be an issue
if the business succeeds as it has economies of scale.

Price reductions are always welcome..

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6cxs2hd6
Interesting that they're supporting OpenSUSE, CentOS, Ubuntu. Quick glance,
the pricing seems competitive with Amazon EC2.

~~~
facorreia
Indeed. I've got a couple Ubuntu VMs on Azure running XWiki and TeamCity (Java
apps) and it's quite smooth. I like the virtual disk management (dynamically
increasing block blobs on Azure storage).

Also, you could easily take advantage of IaaS for VMs combined with PaaS-like
services, for instance for relational databases, reporting, identity
management, service bus, media encoding and streaming, etc.

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webwanderings
They also offer setting up of simple website/blogs for free, as in totally
free (there must be some limitation, I have not investigated further).

~~~
Avalaxy
Yes, Azure Websites has a free version. The only downsides are that you have
limited storage and bandwidth, and that you can't use a custom domain name for
you website (so your URL will always be xxxx.azurewebsites.net). You can
upgrade to a shared hosting version of Azure Websites, that costs
€5~€10/month.

I think it's really awesome stuff, I'm using the free azure website for a
couple of tools that I created.

~~~
webwanderings
Makes sense. I think as a least minimum, for people in IT, Azure wouldn't be a
bad place to host online resume.

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ericcholis
This is one space that I don't mind Microsoft trying to wedge themselves into.
Seems like they are building a great platform that will be competitive in
price and features with the other providers.

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Aloisius
Anyone have any benchmarks comparing Azure to Rackspace and AWS? Especially
their storage over EBS?

~~~
Avalaxy
Yes sir, Azure actually won these benchmarks in 2013. See the full benchmarks
here;
[http://www6.nasuni.com/rs/nasuni/images/2013_Nasuni_CSP_Repo...](http://www6.nasuni.com/rs/nasuni/images/2013_Nasuni_CSP_Report.pdf)

or the summarized infographic here: <http://visual.ly/state-cloud-
storage-2013>

~~~
Aloisius
Interesting. Now I'd like to see a CPU benchmark, but I imagine that would be
influenced heavily by who else is on your machine.

~~~
wmf
There have been a ton of cloud CPU benchmarks, e.g.
<http://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks> If the cloud is implemented properly
there should be minimal interference from neighbors, but it would be an
interesting thing to check.

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asb
For me, it's only really going to get interesting when one of the Amazon
competitors launches a spot market. To my (non-expert) knowledge, EC2's spot
market is still the only one.

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defied
Too bad they still charge more for Windows instances than Amazon EC2 does.

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JOnAgain
I don't trust them not because they let their certs expire earlier this year
causing an extended outage, it's that they didn't have a robust process for
managing and preventing such an issue.

~~~
facorreia
"As a part of the normal operation of the Secret Store, scanning occurs on a
weekly basis for the certificates being managed. Alerts of pending expirations
are sent to the teams managing the service starting 180 days in advance. From
that point on, the Secret Store sends notifications to the team that owns the
certificate. The team then refreshes a certificate when notified, includes the
updated certificate in a new build of the service that is scheduled for
deployment, and updates the certificate in the Secret Store’s database. This
process regularly happens hundreds of times per month across the many services
on Windows Azure."

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/03/01/deta...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/03/01/details-
of-the-february-22nd-2013-windows-azure-storage-disruption.aspx)

IMO they had a rather extensive process in place. That process had a flaw,
though, in which a specific kind of human error (forgetting to set up a flag)
was not double-checked.

As disruptive as that was, it's growing pains and overall they've had few
issues for a service that is scaling up and out so quickly.

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reiichiroh
Just don't forget to renew the certificates.

