6 ms·

I'm getting approximately the same CPU & storage performance out of Azure's A0 machine w/Debian8, as from AWS t2.micro instance with spinning rust storage and D

by aexaey 11y ago

I'm getting approximately the same CPU & storage performance out of Azure's A0 machine w/Debian8, as from AWS t2.micro instance with spinning rust storage and Debian8 (both are cheapest offer available, and price is quite similar between them). Network on Azure though is a totally wrecked thing: - A0 instance is capped to a miserable 5 megabit/s uplink (downlink is fine); - If you want TCP/UDP ports open, you need to open them one-by-one, going through a 2-page wizard with 8 fields in total to fill in for each port you are opening, and then waiting 15-20 seconds for each "change" to be applied. Good luck opening a 1024-port range for your SIP server; - You can't open ICMP/GRE/IPSEC or any other custom protocol; - There are ton of really weirdly configured network gear between your VM and the Internet - packet drops and private IPs in traceroute, etc... - On a plus side, you can enable so called "direct server return" and you will get incoming packets with your public IP as a destination IP; a really nice feature sorely missing on AWS.

gruez 11y ago
>A0 instance is capped to a miserable 5 megabit/s uplink (downlink is fine); I thought it was 10Mb/s? >If you want TCP/UDP ports open, you need to open them one-by-one, going through a 2-page wizard with 8 fields in total to fill in for each port you are opening, and then waiting 15-20 seconds for each "change" to be applied. Good luck opening a 1024-port range for your SIP server; ...or use the powershell cmdlets and do it in one line
- aexaey 11y ago
  > I thought it was 10Mb/s? Alas... Also, in my experience, throttling is really slow to react, i.e. you get a chunk of data out at 10-20Mb/s, then everything freezes for few seconds until average would drop below 5Mbps, then another speed-up/slow-down cycle. Long-term average is exactly 5Mbps as per their spec-sheet [1]. [1] http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/1/1/411621F0-D0BF-4E44-BAFD-18C7AEA7B6FA/VirtualMachines.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/1/1/411621F0-D0BF-4... [2] https://www.oaklight.us/2014/06/azure-network-speed-quick-tests/ https://www.oaklight.us/2014/06/azure-network-speed-quick-te...
ygra 11y ago
Wouldn't this work for configuring lots of open ports: https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn495300.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn495300.aspx? Never used the cmdlets for Azure and it's been a while that I dealt with it, but that sounds like an issue you'd only do via the web interface if you're insane.
- aexaey 11y ago
  Wouldn't work for me, as the {Get,Add}-Azure* scripts are windows/powershell-only. But then again, existence of CLI tools means there's an API. So, with a bit of luck, we might one day see a portable CLI tool (maybe boto3 [1] ported to azure API... one can dream! :-) Thanks for pointing those out! [1] https://github.com/boto/boto3 https://github.com/boto/boto3
  - weazl 11y ago
    Try their xplat cli [1], it's built on node/npm. I'm on Windows but still prefer this one over the PowerShell one. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-cli https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-cli
  - ppog 11y ago
    There is a cross-platform CLI (based on Node.js), which runs on OS X and Linux as well as Windows - I don't specifically know if it has commands for opening ports though. There's information and links at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/xplat-cli/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/xpl... if you want to check it out.
X-Istence 11y ago
I don't see why private IP's in a trace route is necessarily wrong... Many large providers are numbering their hops with private IP space and routing public space across it because they don't want to waste /30's of public space for each point to point. Yes, /31 is an option, but there were a lot of edge cases or network gear that didn't support it.
- aexaey 11y ago
  Yes, you are absolutely right that IPv4 addresses are scarce. Which bring a related question - what's up with none of AWS/Azure/GCE supporting IPv6?
  - X-Istence 11y ago
    Unfortunately IPv6 in cloud deployments is still very much lacking. OpenStack is one of those where IPv6 has only recently become something that is being built into OpenStack.
mobiplayer 11y ago
Hi aexaey, There are some things wrong on your comment, please let me comment on them: I don't think A0 are capped at all, I don't know where did you get that: user@A0VM:~$ speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Microsoft Corporation (40.113.XX.XX)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by KsFiberNet (Wichita, KS) [45.26 km]: 139.703 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 44.48 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 22.54 Mbit/s I just had to run one single test to get these results. Multi-threading will probably pump this up (let's say a multi-thread iPerf test between two VMs on two different regions, through their public IP addresses). (Funnily enough this VM is in Dublin, hence the latency to Wichita). You can get access to all your TCP/UDP ports by adding an instance-level IP: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-instance-level-public-ip/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/vir... (you can later protect it with NSGs --> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-nsg/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vir... ). What you've seen is when you create endpoints on the load balancer that points to the VMs behind it. Now in Azure Resource Manager, spinning up a VM from the new portal will actually get you an ILPIP and no load balancer by default. About that statement about a ton of weirdly configured network gear: Well, for starters you're doing network virtualization here :) but seriously now, the platform doesn't forward ICMPs to/from Internet, so I'm curious about those private IP addresses on a traceroute (and of course the packet drops). If you're talking about hops between you and the VIP (the load balanced public IP in front of your VM), that's probably your provider, other providers and finally Microsoft's Network. As per the rest of the path, you've said that ICMP doesn't go through, so traceroute it's not going to work (tcptraceroute also needs ICMP to work :)).
- aexaey 11y ago
  ILPIP look promising. I'll try it, thanks! Speed test though... hm... 22Mbit/s is not exactly unrestricted, plus not sure how long is the burst that "speedtest-cli" makes. In my experience A0's uplink is burstable (but unusably slow when recovering from a burst), with long-term average being bang-on 5Mbps. I do of course see exactly one "my" private IP in traceroute, but I'm not talking about that. I meant there are microsoft's private IPs (#12-#15) and dropped packets (#16 and on). And of course, "platform doesn't forward ICMPs" is an annoyance in itself - i can't even ping my own VM. # target IP anonymized, but still have enough granularity to reproduce the traceroute traceroute to xxxxx.cloudapp.net (191.235.128.128), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 0.093 ms 0.117 ms 0.063 ms 2 193.47.232.12 (193.47.232.12) 0.785 ms 0.785 ms 0.776 ms 3 microsoft.mix-it.net (217.29.66.112) 1.219 ms 1.233 ms 1.225 ms 4 xe-0-1-1-0.fra-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.42.12) 8.700 ms 8.902 ms 8.430 ms 5 * * * 6 * * * 7 104.44.9.142 (104.44.9.142) 42.112 ms 39.194 ms 38.987 ms 8 * * * 9 be-6-0.ibr01.dub30.network.microsoft.com (104.44.4.142) 39.738 ms 38.266 ms 38.929 ms 10 * * * 11 ae2-0.db3-96c-3b.ntwk.msn.net (204.152.141.81) 36.986 ms 36.984 ms 36.925 ms 12 25.149.64.247 (25.149.64.247) 36.951 ms 36.775 ms 37.152 ms 13 10.10.132.81 (10.10.132.81) 36.917 ms 37.477 ms 37.287 ms 14 10.60.31.77 (10.60.31.77) 37.317 ms 37.699 ms 37.899 ms 15 10.60.31.69 (10.60.31.69) 37.653 ms 37.326 ms 37.441 ms 16 * * * 17 * * * 18 * * * 19 * * * 20 * * * 21 * * * 22 * * * 23 * * * 24 * * * 25 * * * 26 * * * 27 * * * 28 * * * 29 * * * 30 * * * P.S. #12 - lol!

by aexaey 11y ago

gruez 11y ago

>A0 instance is capped to a miserable 5 megabit/s uplink (downlink is fine); I thought it was 10Mb/s? >If you want TCP/UDP ports open, you need to open them one-by-one, going through a 2-page wizard with 8 fields in total to fill in for each port you are opening, and then waiting 15-20 seconds for each "change" to be applied. Good luck opening a 1024-port range for your SIP server; ...or use the powershell cmdlets and do it in one line

aexaey 11y ago
> I thought it was 10Mb/s? Alas... Also, in my experience, throttling is really slow to react, i.e. you get a chunk of data out at 10-20Mb/s, then everything freezes for few seconds until average would drop below 5Mbps, then another speed-up/slow-down cycle. Long-term average is exactly 5Mbps as per their spec-sheet [1]. [1] http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/1/1/411621F0-D0BF-4E44-BAFD-18C7AEA7B6FA/VirtualMachines.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/1/1/411621F0-D0BF-4... [2] https://www.oaklight.us/2014/06/azure-network-speed-quick-tests/ https://www.oaklight.us/2014/06/azure-network-speed-quick-te...

ygra 11y ago

Wouldn't this work for configuring lots of open ports: https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn495300.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn495300.aspx? Never used the cmdlets for Azure and it's been a while that I dealt with it, but that sounds like an issue you'd only do via the web interface if you're insane.

aexaey 11y ago
Wouldn't work for me, as the {Get,Add}-Azure* scripts are windows/powershell-only. But then again, existence of CLI tools means there's an API. So, with a bit of luck, we might one day see a portable CLI tool (maybe boto3 [1] ported to azure API... one can dream! :-) Thanks for pointing those out! [1] https://github.com/boto/boto3 https://github.com/boto/boto3
- weazl 11y ago
  Try their xplat cli [1], it's built on node/npm. I'm on Windows but still prefer this one over the PowerShell one. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-cli https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-cli
- ppog 11y ago
  There is a cross-platform CLI (based on Node.js), which runs on OS X and Linux as well as Windows - I don't specifically know if it has commands for opening ports though. There's information and links at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/xplat-cli/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/xpl... if you want to check it out.

X-Istence 11y ago

I don't see why private IP's in a trace route is necessarily wrong... Many large providers are numbering their hops with private IP space and routing public space across it because they don't want to waste /30's of public space for each point to point. Yes, /31 is an option, but there were a lot of edge cases or network gear that didn't support it.

aexaey 11y ago
Yes, you are absolutely right that IPv4 addresses are scarce. Which bring a related question - what's up with none of AWS/Azure/GCE supporting IPv6?
- X-Istence 11y ago
  Unfortunately IPv6 in cloud deployments is still very much lacking. OpenStack is one of those where IPv6 has only recently become something that is being built into OpenStack.

mobiplayer 11y ago

Hi aexaey, There are some things wrong on your comment, please let me comment on them: I don't think A0 are capped at all, I don't know where did you get that: user@A0VM:~$ speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Microsoft Corporation (40.113.XX.XX)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by KsFiberNet (Wichita, KS) [45.26 km]: 139.703 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 44.48 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 22.54 Mbit/s I just had to run one single test to get these results. Multi-threading will probably pump this up (let's say a multi-thread iPerf test between two VMs on two different regions, through their public IP addresses). (Funnily enough this VM is in Dublin, hence the latency to Wichita). You can get access to all your TCP/UDP ports by adding an instance-level IP: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-instance-level-public-ip/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/vir... (you can later protect it with NSGs --> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-nsg/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vir... ). What you've seen is when you create endpoints on the load balancer that points to the VMs behind it. Now in Azure Resource Manager, spinning up a VM from the new portal will actually get you an ILPIP and no load balancer by default. About that statement about a ton of weirdly configured network gear: Well, for starters you're doing network virtualization here :) but seriously now, the platform doesn't forward ICMPs to/from Internet, so I'm curious about those private IP addresses on a traceroute (and of course the packet drops). If you're talking about hops between you and the VIP (the load balanced public IP in front of your VM), that's probably your provider, other providers and finally Microsoft's Network. As per the rest of the path, you've said that ICMP doesn't go through, so traceroute it's not going to work (tcptraceroute also needs ICMP to work :)).

aexaey 11y ago
ILPIP look promising. I'll try it, thanks! Speed test though... hm... 22Mbit/s is not exactly unrestricted, plus not sure how long is the burst that "speedtest-cli" makes. In my experience A0's uplink is burstable (but unusably slow when recovering from a burst), with long-term average being bang-on 5Mbps. I do of course see exactly one "my" private IP in traceroute, but I'm not talking about that. I meant there are microsoft's private IPs (#12-#15) and dropped packets (#16 and on). And of course, "platform doesn't forward ICMPs" is an annoyance in itself - i can't even ping my own VM. # target IP anonymized, but still have enough granularity to reproduce the traceroute traceroute to xxxxx.cloudapp.net (191.235.128.128), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 0.093 ms 0.117 ms 0.063 ms 2 193.47.232.12 (193.47.232.12) 0.785 ms 0.785 ms 0.776 ms 3 microsoft.mix-it.net (217.29.66.112) 1.219 ms 1.233 ms 1.225 ms 4 xe-0-1-1-0.fra-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.42.12) 8.700 ms 8.902 ms 8.430 ms 5 * * * 6 * * * 7 104.44.9.142 (104.44.9.142) 42.112 ms 39.194 ms 38.987 ms 8 * * * 9 be-6-0.ibr01.dub30.network.microsoft.com (104.44.4.142) 39.738 ms 38.266 ms 38.929 ms 10 * * * 11 ae2-0.db3-96c-3b.ntwk.msn.net (204.152.141.81) 36.986 ms 36.984 ms 36.925 ms 12 25.149.64.247 (25.149.64.247) 36.951 ms 36.775 ms 37.152 ms 13 10.10.132.81 (10.10.132.81) 36.917 ms 37.477 ms 37.287 ms 14 10.60.31.77 (10.60.31.77) 37.317 ms 37.699 ms 37.899 ms 15 10.60.31.69 (10.60.31.69) 37.653 ms 37.326 ms 37.441 ms 16 * * * 17 * * * 18 * * * 19 * * * 20 * * * 21 * * * 22 * * * 23 * * * 24 * * * 25 * * * 26 * * * 27 * * * 28 * * * 29 * * * 30 * * * P.S. #12 - lol!