[tialaramex]

I'm not a Microsoft fan (he writes from his Linux desktop) but I was astonished that Azure actually has working "This is how much we can spend, and literally no more" behaviour coming from previously working with AWS where that's either entirely unavailable or black magic known only to experts.

Why does it have that? Because Azure gives away $150/ month Azure credits to students with Visual Studio. If Azure "mistakenly" lets a student spend $5000 it doesn't get to bill their credit card or chase them with debt collectors, those student accounts don't have any money, don't have a credit card, may have no bank account, so long as some institution paid for Visual Studio licenses there may not even be a real human being behind them. So, the only option for Microsoft is to have a water-tight shut off once you spend $150. Added 1TB of SSD to a virtual machine when you meant 1GB? That's gonna burn your $150 real fast. Accidentally picked the turbo-fast Azure SQL instance instead of the toy one you actually needed to demo Power BI? Ditto. But you don't get an enormous bill and then hope they let you off, the credit runs out and everything goes dark instead.

Amazon seems to believe that so few people care about this they don't need to compete. Maybe they're even right. But I, for one, don't want to risk my life savings every time I'm on a screen where a fat-finger costs $5000 per hour, so Azure looks pretty attractive.

[easton]

Oddly, there's certain things in Azure that don't work with the credits feature, like spot instances. I'm not sure why, but it's awesome for not blowing up my bank account because I did something wrong.