| HN Mirror

I've got a reply from Google Compute before after complaining about how bad Azure was saying they'd has similar problems but solved the latency between servers and databases. It basically just sounds like the Azure guys have severely mucked up their infrastructure.

We have a test page that runs 100 "SELECT 1" SQL queries ON THE SAME CONNECTION between an Azure website and an Azure database and it takes a whopping 250ms to complete at best. That's literally all it does. And their infrastructure is so bad that it'll vary from 250ms to 600ms in the space of 20 seconds in peak periods. That's damning, cloud infrastructures are there to part you from your cash, nothing more.

It's ridiculously bad, in my opinion no professional should EVER recommend Azure. My client is enamoured with telling people the system runs on Azure, with its "secure" network, nothing I've told him makes a difference, but he'd have a much better service if he moved it off Azure.

Because we develop with the entity framework it's quite easy to muck up and forget an include or two and then suddenly the queries spawn a hundred or two hundred basic SELECT queries to populate a `Order.OrderItem` or something as trivial. On a standard dedicated server setup or even your worst 5 year-old crappy dev laptop that's a ms or 2 extra, but on Azure it's performance death.

There are advantages to using Azure, I admit, the easy deploy from github for example, but that's more because setting up deploying from a repo to IIS is such a bad workflow at the moment and the IIS management too. They don't want to make it easy. With other clients I've setup moderately complicated deployment scripts, and once the initial work is done, it's much better than Azure, you run a bat, boom, deploy much faster than Azure manages. 10-20 seconds without even pre-compiling the pages, Azure will take 5 or 10 minutes to finally get round to doing it and woe betide you doing it at peak times as it will use up your memory allocation and simply hang for 20 minutes while you frantically try and restart it while the azure management portal has a massive spaz (yes, we unfortunately deployed a serious bug, fixed it, tried to re-deploy while under heavy load, cue website down for a ridiculous amount of time while their management portal threw a ton of weird and inscrutable errors before we finally managed to restart it).