How do HN commenters rank Azure amongst the three? I like the UI/portals quite a bit, but haven't explored any of the 3 major cloud providers in great detail.
Serious question: have you had to _use_ the Azure portal for anything?
Like much enterprise software, the new side-scrolling mess which hides necessary information has the distinct smell of something that was built to sell on golf courses to clueless middle and upper management, and not for people who actually need to do the work. The load times are horrible because of the number of HTTP requests and the weight of their payloads, making it practically unusable on, say, plane wifi or tethering outside of LTE service.
Practically this might not be the worst thing ever, because it might encourage people to describe their infrastructure as code instead of a pointy-clicky mess, but sadly this still appears to be outside the Microsoft-blessed way to do things - so most never will.
No, not for anything serious. I get some free credits every month for being a student, so I've used it minimally for configuring a few things for hobbyist projects, but I have never used it in production ready environments. Thank you for your perspective!
I'm an ex-Microsoftie so I tried everything to like Azure. They even gave my company like $600 / mo free through BizSpark.
Absolute shit experience, the worst I've had with a major platform. We went back to paying $250 / mo to DigitalOcean, despite being a bootstrapped startup with no money that hasn't paid ourselves in 18 months. That's how bad it was.
Azure is shit. The portal is insane. It's as if the Windows 8 UI people took over. It's slow and buggy. They actually call series of navigation steps a "journey", reflecting how difficult it is.
Their SSD story was late and pathetic. At first, they started offering SSD ... as temp volumes. Zero real-world use cases (except as a SQL 2014 "Buffer Pool"). Like, why would you even announce such a weak offering?
Then they added full SSD ("Premium Storage"). You need special instances to use SSD, it's not just a bit you flip on your storage options. AND, you need to pick 1 of 3 sizes. If you need something between, round up. Need more performance? They suggest you software RAID things together. It's laughable.
Everything is SLOW. Machines take forever to start up. Windows boxes often enough get stuck, requiring resizing (change to larger, change back to orig size) to get them unstuck.
The networking is dumb. "Cloud Service" = 1 public IP, then each VM gets NAT'd. This is a holdover from when Azure thought they could PaaS their way to fame. Oh, I tested restoring an Elasticsearch backup that was stored on Azure blob storage. Restoring to a GCE instance went about 10x faster.
Pricing is very high. On some instances, GCE was 10x cheaper, though the average was like 2-3x and that was including Azure's "enterprise" discount.
Azure is squarely aimed at old MS-style customers that want "cloud" and don't really know more than that. "Ooh Hadoop... in the Cloud!" That kind of thing. They know they can make a killing by just migrating on-prem customers to their own thing. And they're probably right. Why would an enterprise with a big AD deployment decide to take a risk by not going with Microsoft?
Oh and did I mention the portal will cause depression and frustration? Cause it will. It's beyond comprehension how anyone thought it was a good idea. Oh, and there's 2 of them. The old one is not-as-bad and last I checked, was still needed for things they didn't include in the New Tablet Edition Portal.
You literally could not pay me to use Azure over GCE: I was looking at something that might get BizSpark Plus, with $$$$ in free Azure credits, and it wouldn't be worth it.
Edit: Oh another awesome part. Global Namespace! Everything you create is scoped globally, so if you're naming things like mysite-web-1, better hope no one else decides on that prefix too. But hey, maybe it's 2016 and we're supposed to use guids for names and container managers so this doesn't matter. Just another poor decision decision.
I know I accurately summarize many of my coworker's opinions when I say: Fuck Azure.
Disclaimer: I used to be a huge MS fanboy, and I still really dislike Google as a company. If I sound bitter and biased, it's because I've dealt with Azure for ops for around 2 years and they've earned it. I've less exp with GCE but it's been so, so, refreshing. Like a cool minty breeze.
I need Windows cloud hosting for SpreadServe, as it's an MS Excel centric server product. I opened an Azure account as I wanted to try Server 2016 Containers. I left two Windows 2016 hosts running, but doing nothing, and attracted a monthly bill of 150GBP! On AWS I've got a heavily tasked Server 2008 t1-micro instance that costs ~20USD per month. So I'm sticking with AWS for pricing reasons. I didn't realize Google was doing Windows hosts, so maybe I'll try it out.
Use it everyday, we host basically everything there. Have played decently with Amazon and my preference certainly is with Azure, but I'm quite biased (.NET developer).
The ease of certain things (the integration with Visual Studio for example) simply surpasses anything I've played with for Amazon. I use the portals less though, and mostly rely on the tools provided in Visual Studio (explorers, deployment managers etc).
Like much enterprise software, the new side-scrolling mess which hides necessary information has the distinct smell of something that was built to sell on golf courses to clueless middle and upper management, and not for people who actually need to do the work. The load times are horrible because of the number of HTTP requests and the weight of their payloads, making it practically unusable on, say, plane wifi or tethering outside of LTE service.
Practically this might not be the worst thing ever, because it might encourage people to describe their infrastructure as code instead of a pointy-clicky mess, but sadly this still appears to be outside the Microsoft-blessed way to do things - so most never will.