For a development team, here's an example of something good about Azure: Microsoft gives us dev accounts with monthly Azure credits (e.g. $100) and you cannot spend more when those credits run out because there is no credit card etc. behind that account to charge the excess.
Azure just like other cloud services (I've used AWS but as I understand it GCP is the same) doesn't believe in timely billing. You can and will receive charges against an account for services that were turned off yesterday, the day before, even last week, as gradually billing catches up to reality. This means that there is no way to actually cap a budget. If you decide "Once this costs $100 I'm turning it off" you are not capping your expense at $100, after you turn it off charges keep arriving, I've seen a week later and I wouldn't be surprised if it can be longer. Should they do that? Well, even if they shouldn't, good luck making them stop.
But with the "free" Azure credits that have no money behind them, when it drops dead Microsoft eats all the residual charges that will be discovered days or weeks later, because there is no other party for them to bill.
I work for a University, I suspect that if you paid full price for these services it makes no economic sense, a $100 Azure credit that cost $100 is a bad deal, but the University gets an enormous discount, for obvious reasons, and if the other cloud vendors don't want to offer actual billing it does feel like they deserve the consequences.
Sure, it's obvious why they do this. Unlike drug dealers (who don't actually give school kids free crack, that makes no economic sense) it does make sense for Microsoft to ensure every kid who knows how to do rudimentary word processing knows Word, etc.
Nobody is under any illusion that Microsoft just really likes universities for some reason. But on the other hand, we did need lots of this stuff and it's very cheap, budgets are tight and it's not as though hand-rolling even more stuff would be cheaper - we do hand roll some things where it makes sense.
For example, periodically senior people say "Why do we spend $$$$ on a supercomputer? Surely we could rent one from the cloud?" and we (well, not me, different group same department) go OK, we will cost that for you. And they get Azure, Google, etc. to quote them for what they need a supercomputer to do, and then they present this, "The Cloud providers can do that for $$$$$". Ah, that's more money. No thanks, we will continue to run our own supercomputer.
It's not even close. Cloud supercomputer is great if you need the supercomputer for six weeks to do a special project and then you're done with it, the Cloud provider saves you a lot of money. But the University needs supercomputers all the time, so the numbers do not work.
GCP gives me an invoice every first of the month, automatically.
It also offers budget caps, but indeed, those are more a warning and not a hard shutdown. That's annoying. Same at microsoft by the way, except indeed that developer credit as a failsafe.
Google gives 100k free credits to universities and startups by the way (and even to individual departmens if you are a big university). You just have to apply and let them bring in trainers and you have to actually use a percentage, otherwise they take it away the next year.
Whats the deal with the MSDOS era limitations for keyvault and storage account names. FFS it has to be unique AND within 3-24 characters consisting of lowercase letters, numbers and dashes. Storage accounts can’t use the dash. Hello? I thought current century DNS names were limited to 60 characters.
It sounds to me some legacy Windows 2000 spaghettini fettuccini is powering some parts of azure.
> I work for a University, I suspect that if you paid full price for these services it makes no economic sense, a $100 Azure credit that cost $100 is a bad deal
For Cloud to make economic sense, you need to treat it very differently from traditional infrastructure. For example, simply shutting down our Dev environment outside of business hours saves means we're not paying for the compute the majority of the time.
This is why I absolutely avoid using Azure, AWS or GCP for my own side projects. On the company account, sure, it's your money. But I'm not going to risk my savings because I misconfigured a lambda or something.
Azure just like other cloud services (I've used AWS but as I understand it GCP is the same) doesn't believe in timely billing. You can and will receive charges against an account for services that were turned off yesterday, the day before, even last week, as gradually billing catches up to reality. This means that there is no way to actually cap a budget. If you decide "Once this costs $100 I'm turning it off" you are not capping your expense at $100, after you turn it off charges keep arriving, I've seen a week later and I wouldn't be surprised if it can be longer. Should they do that? Well, even if they shouldn't, good luck making them stop.
But with the "free" Azure credits that have no money behind them, when it drops dead Microsoft eats all the residual charges that will be discovered days or weeks later, because there is no other party for them to bill.
I work for a University, I suspect that if you paid full price for these services it makes no economic sense, a $100 Azure credit that cost $100 is a bad deal, but the University gets an enormous discount, for obvious reasons, and if the other cloud vendors don't want to offer actual billing it does feel like they deserve the consequences.