
Microsoft Azure in Plain English - handpickednames
https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english
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Swinx43
This and the AWS in Plain English are both awesome. Is there an equivalent for
Google Cloud Platform?

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crb
+1, though GCP is quite good with descriptive naming. I think it would get
"spot on" in many more categories than AWS/Azure in this comparison.

Compare: "Elastic Block Store" vs "Persistent Disk", "Security Group" vs
"Firewall", "Lambda" vs "Cloud Functions"

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obulpathi
Agree 100%. For instances, you have standard, high memory and high CPU and
custom. Super easy to make sense of rather than crawling through webpages to
understand what each type of instance mean. For example: AWS has r, t, m, g, p
instance types. When you look at the whole platform, naming, gotchas etc AWS
creates lot of cognitive overhead for developers. I find Google cloud far
easier to use, partially due to things like these.

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chucknelson
This is cool - one item I think is wrong/misunderstood is Big Data > Data Lake
Store.

It has nothing to do with ETL, it's basically just "HDFS in the cloud" [1] and
a successor to using blob storage/regular old storage accounts for
distributed/Hadoop-ish workloads.

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/data-lake-
store/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/data-lake-store/)

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jsingleton
Re-post from the AWS thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442022)).

That's a good high-level list, although the comparisons don't always match up.
For example, I'd say Traffic Manager is more like Route 53 than ELB (which
only works within a region).

If you're after something a bit more in-depth (but covering less services)
then I wrote a three part series last year. It may be a little out-of-date,
but most of it still applies. Azure now supports MySQL, for example.

1: [https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-
pricing-c...](https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-
confusion-part-1/)

2: [https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-
pricing-c...](https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-
confusion-part-2/)

3: [https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-
pricing-c...](https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-
confusion-part-3/)

Edit: Should that "puts da" be on that page?

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klausjensen
This. This is absolutely brilliant. I have worked with Azure for years, and
mostly love it - but I learned about a few services, that I never knew what
were.

Great work, ExpeditedSSL

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yread
It seems that Azure naming is a lot better than Amazon, perhaps so much so
that this guide is not even needed

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davidmichael
Microsoft themselves publish a comparison document of services with AWS:
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/guidance/guidance-
azu...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/guidance/guidance-azure-for-
aws-professionals-service-map)

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sumitgt
I don't think Service Fabric is like AWS Lambda. Azure Functions is AWS
Lambda.

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ZainRiz
Yeah, Service Fabric is more like micro-services for when you need to be able
to do rolling deployments and automatic roll backs. It's something half-way
between a cloud service and Function/Lamda (plus you need to buy four VMs
minimum)

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ubercow
Service Fabric is more like Microsoft's Mesos or Kubernetes.

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expertentipp
If it only was easy to starting playing around with Azure. Only to activate
the account they require proper, bank issued, credit or debit card. They
explicitly refuse to accept prepaid cards even though they are VISA/MasterCard
(BTW the same problem with Google Compute)... or am I doing something wrong?

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toyg
My problem is not activation but rather that their free tier is too limited in
terms of what services you can use.

Say I need an AD with two users, just to play with some stuff I can build for
customers with "real" AD implementations? No can do, I'm supposed to pay full
whack for AD like I actually _needed_ it to manage a domain. Screw that. I
should get a free tier with, say, up to five users or objects (just enough to
get an object or two for each common type) or some call limit. As it is, I
just let my trial expire and now I won't even think about building anything
around AD unless absolutely forced.

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tstrimple
I'm not sure what's missing from the free tier that you're looking for. It
includes 500k objects. All I use is the free tier for testing against SSO, so
maybe it doesn't cover your use case.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/active-
dir...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/active-directory/)

You get

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youdontknowtho
"Cloud services" should not be named "Azure IaaS" because Azure IaaS is named
Azure IaaS.

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nailer
What's the difference between the two IaaSs?

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itaysk
Short answer - Cloud Services is the old stuff. Virtual Machines is the new
stuff. Never use cloud services for new projects. I wouldn't event include it
in the article

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dmarlow
Sure it's old, but Cloud Services and VMs are two different things and there's
only a little overlap (in the sense that VMs creates availability groups and
can load balance endpoints). Cloud Services offers machine provisioning via a
packaged file that contains the code to run, configuration and other important
bits.

Any reason you recommend it to not be used for new projects? (yes, I
understand it's ASM and not ARM and shows up as "classic" in the new portal,
but you can still get quite a lot out of it that you can't easily get with VMs
or App Services).

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itaysk
The reason I don't recommend it is that it clearly has not future. It is not
deprecated or killed, but it is kind of frozen. Will continue to be supported
but no new investment there. it missed the train, and this train is going
places, so you really want to be on it.

Yes, Cloud Services and VMs are two different things, however, Azure's IaaS
was built on top of this concept up until when they migrated to ARM and VMs.
The way it used to be, was that Cloud Services was Microsoft's PaaS, and when
they introduced IaaS (Yes Azure had PaaS first), they built it on top of cloud
services. So essentially IaaS built on top of PaaS. Most people would expect
it to work the other way around, and so that's exactly what they did with the
new stuff - They invested heavily in re-doing the entire IaaS stack, and then
built PaaS components on top of it. Regarding ARM, VMs, the new stuff- We call
it 'new' to differentiate from the 'classic' stuff, but it shouldn't be
considered as such. It is old enough, stable enough and it the recommended way
to do stuff on Azure.

If you are doing just IaaS - there's no question there. Use the ARM model.
Cloud Services did have nice features mostly for programming model, and code
deploy, but there are ways to do that with ARM as well. There is not a single
direct replacement to Cloud Services, and it makes the transition harder. this
is because the new model has different architecture and layering of the stack.
If you are looking for these features, I recommend looking at a PaaS framework
in the new stack like Service Fabric.

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viach
I love how the slogan on the main page written "Bam! ..." It takes attention
and you actually read further. Nice small trick.

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andysinclair
Very good overview. One point that I disagree with, Cloud Services:"Run stuff
but worry a fair amount about configuration and patching." We run a bunch of
cloud services and MS are responsible for patching, I would describe it more
as PaaS that IaaS.

We built this in our product to help visualise how the services fit
together:[https://my.sharpcloud.com/html/#/story/f7522de0-98ff-4d02-8e...](https://my.sharpcloud.com/html/#/story/f7522de0-98ff-4d02-8e9c-8655f661fd53)

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spydum
Im somewhat confused on that as well: cloud services is not the EC2
equivalent. VM is.

Also, if you run VMs, you most definitely are on the hook for patching.

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m0d0nne11
Very useful, as is the one for AWS. Yay! though if these things are being
touted as "plain English" they should probably steer rigorously clear of
smart-ass insider references (no matter how full of cheer the writer may be
feeling at the moment) because that's probably how these titles and terms came
to be so opaque in the first place. But, again: yay!

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itaysk
There are so many fundamental mistakes here that I don't even know where to
start.. Nice idea though. (I am a cloud solution architect with Microsoft)

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jbigelow76
How about a couple of the most egregious so we can judge, do you have issues
with their explanations of the core services or maybe just the more niche
stuff like the Media Services?

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itaysk
core ones. See above my comment

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k__
so service fabric is API Gateway and Lambda in one product?

Sounds good and removes a bunch of complexity, I guess.

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serbrech
No, I found that a bit wrong. it's more like Mesos+Marathon, or Kubernetes.
It's a cluster management solution that manages your services or processes and
their rolling deployments. can run on-prem on your linux or windows machines,
or managed on azure with a portal. You can host any executable (or
containers). And it does reverse proxy for you too.

~~~
abdulapopoola
Exactly! I found their description a bit inaccurate too. I am yet to see a
true service offering on other platforms like service fabric. [Disclaimer: I
work at MSFT]

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kevingibbon
Azure in REAL plain English: Microsoft AWS

