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by iamleppert 85 days ago
Azure is easily the most expensive, least reliable and worst cloud available. It's borderline scam. An example today, I provisioned high IOPS SSDs (supposedly) and what is actually connected to the instance? A spinning hard drive! I didn't even know they were still made, but I guess Azure uses them and scams their users into thinking you're getting an SSD for $700/mo when its really an old hard drive.

I would warn anyone far and wide to avoid Azure at all costs, especially if you are a startup. And especially if you are doing any kind of AI because the only GPUs they have available are ancient and also crazy over-priced.

If I cared more, I'd try to migrate away from Azure. But I don't, and that's probably Azure's business model at this point.
2 comments
otterley 85 days ago
I’d love to see proof of your claim that they provisioned a hard disk when you requested an SSD, or, at the very least, tests that showed that the IOPS you requested were not delivered. Can you show us the receipts?
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stackskipton 85 days ago
Azure using SRE, I call BS. You don’t see underlying storage, it’s mounted as either SCSI or NVMe device as one HD. It’s obviously backed by massive fleet of drives just like EBS.
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iamleppert 83 days ago
I was wrong about it being a spinning disk, ROTA=1 is just how Linux reports Azure virtual disks. But the underlying frustration stands: my home NVMe does the same copy in a fraction of the time because it can do 500K+ IOPS with no virtualization overhead. Azure caps this "Premium SSD" at 7,500 IOPS, so a small-file-heavy copy crawls at 85 MB/s despite 250 MB/s provisioned throughput. You're paying SSD prices for artificially throttled performance — the hardware may be SSD, but the performance is just awful. Paying $900/month for the highest level Premium SSD, attached to a large instance, and it's significantly slower than a $200 SSD from 5 years ago.
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stackskipton 83 days ago
Sure the downside of virtualization is all disk calls are over the network which is way slower then local NVMe call. Upside is hardware failures are quickly handled.
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