[ngrilly]

Nothing is forcing companies to sign an Azure contract with Microsoft, and go with AWS or GCP instead. Perhaps they are just doing something right. But I didn't use Azure myself. I'd be curious to know what's good or bad about it compared to GCP and AWS.

[tialaramex]

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.

[voytec]

> 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)

First analogy I thought of were stories about drug dealers giving away free samples to schoolchildren to hook them up before asking for money.

[tialaramex]

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.

[dachryn]

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.

[irusensei]

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.

[InsomniacL]

> 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.

[danjac]

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.

[l-p]

> I'd be curious to know what's good or bad about it compared to GCP and AWS.

Documentation lies, support lies, metrics lie, bugs everywhere, and when something breaks the status page is always all green and support tries to convince you it's your fault anyway. They're only here to prevent you from enforcing the SLA. The distrust is pervasive. I stopped suspecting my code, if something breaks outside of a planned maintenance it is _always_ Azure.

My latest support ticket: Azure App Service internal DNS server broke and there is no way to bypass it short of hardcoding IPs in /etc/hosts. Support told me that if I wanted App Service to work reliably I had to implement their DNS server myself. To rephrase, my PaaS provider told me to spend time and money to implement the very platform I was paying them for, and it just so happened to be absolutely impossible because of an unannounced BC break a few months prior (which is another lengthy and frustrating story).

This morning I had a VM cut out of the network and 10% of my App Service traffic just disappeared. No explanation, no incident report, nothing.

These days I'm working with AWS, and it just works. If something isn't working you know it's your fault and that the answer is in the documentation. I'm not spending days on workarounds, I'm actually implementing as planned. I have no words to describe the relief I'm feeling.

[RajT88]

On the ground, the chatter I've heard from cloud customers and techies who have worked for various cloud companies:

- If you need scale, you pick AWS or Azure (GCP doesn't have the same scale, and is catching up)

- If you are a retailer, you don't pick AWS, because you're a competitor and they'll use whatever nasty (but legal) tricks to eat your lunch money

- Windows stack workloads seem to run better on the AWS virtualization stack

- Linux stack workloads seem to run better on the Azure virtualization stack

- GCP has great integrations/automation/api, AWS is pretty good too

- AWS has great support

- GCP has terrible support

- Azure is somewhere in between the two above in terms of support

It depends what is important to you.

Bonus chatter: Oracle Exadata is an unmatched force to be reckoned with, but OCI as a whole doesn't have their shit together.