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Azure looks like the only major one you missed. I've used both AWS and Azure a lot. The best one will obviously depend on your use case but if you avoid lock in

Azure looks like the only major one you missed. I've used both AWS and Azure a lot. The best one will obviously depend on your use case but if you avoid lock in it shouldn't matter too much. I may write more on this if people are interested. AWS comparison: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ They have more regions than AWS (30 vs 13): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ The naming is a bit funny though: https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion/ https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion/ Someone here thought this was due to using UN regions.

pdelgallego 10y ago
I would love to read more about AWS vs Azure, how services compare, and strategies on how to avoid lock in. Any recommendation?
- mmcconnell1618 10y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft so I won't get into comparisons with AWS. I wanted to point out a couple of facts that might be interesting to Hacker News readers: * 35% of virtual machines in Azure run Linux * Microsoft announced that PowerShell, Service Fabric and SQL Server will be available for Linux * Redis Cache, Hadoop and other open source packages are available as Platform as a Service offerings in addition to you installing and managing on your own machines.
- jnsaff2 10y ago
  I have previously built a auto-scaling/healing Mesos cluster on AWS for a retail company (scaling heavily during peak and sometimes during promotions) and doing the same on Azure for a much bigger retail organisation at the moment. So this is my in the trenches comparison: - AWS documentation is excellent, Azure docs are weird and inconsistent and for some bits nonexistent. - Azure API's are inconsistent and weird, but once you figure out they work relatively well. But the lack of documentation compounds confusion. - Azure has a lot of very weird limitations that don't make any sense: -- Default Centos images are 30GB osDisk and you can't resize them, you have to create your own images if you do want to. -- You can have SSD's in 128/512/1024GB sizes and you pay for them in full, Spinning disks are billed per actual usage. -- You have to store your osDisk image in the same storage account as your machine you are running (so you have to pay for your image the full SSD monthly price) -- You have a VMSS (=Auto Scaling Group) and have a Load Balancer in front of it, your microservice connections fail if the load balancer routes the connection back to the same VM ... you now have to have another VMSS just for load balancing/service discovery. - Their services labelled Beta are really more like Alpha quality. - On the plus side, their ARM templates are richer and nicer to use than CloudFormation, however the lack of documentation for them kills all the advantages. - When you jump all the hoops and get past the issues, the things work relatively well.
  - zamalek 10y ago
    Agree completely, two additions: Azure's interface is years ahead of AWS. Most importantly: there's a single entry-point for everything. Just this month I was evaluating some stuff on AWS. I was certain that I had cleared everything that I was using up - I hadn't. Luckily it was merely a $17 lesson. The nomenclature used is also quite understandable, unlike AWS which has branded everything down to the NIC.
  - jsingleton 10y ago
    It's kind of a moving target. When we first tested Azure it was awful and we went with AWS, but it's got a lot better recently. The new UI is nice but I think a bit rushed. It was pushed before all the features were ported from the old one and there are still things that are easier to do from the old UI (firewall rules for example). The embedded VS Code is really nice though. I think this rushing applies to all of Azure. It feels like a very MVP approach and AWS is more polished. Agree with you about Beta services, don't use Previews for anything serious.
- jsingleton 10y ago
  OK, I'll write a blog post about this, but it effectively boils down to use something standard that you can run yourself or on another provider. For example on AWS, using RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) or ElastiCache (memcached, redis) is fairly low lock in. You can run all of these yourself or use another cloud. Azure offers a similar hosted redis service for instance. However, something like Lambda or DynamoDB can't be run elsewhere. Similarly, on Azure if you use their Machine Learning PaaS system then you are pretty locked in. Yet you could easily move a website to appharbor or elastic beanstalk. Or just run your own server (VPS, IaaS, EC2 etc.)
  - jsingleton 10y ago
    1/3: https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-confusion-part-1/ https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...
davedx 10y ago
More regions than AWS, yet they still managed to have a multi-region outage last month due to some DNS issue. Having multiple regions is worthless if one problem can take them all down at once.
byefruit 10y ago
Unfortunately my experiences with Azure so far have been pretty awful. We have a large amount of free Azure credit and yet our experiences at actually trying to use the platform have been met with frustration. When we tried about six months back, there were two different administration webapps that both offered different subsets of functionality. The IaaS offering seemed to still be tied very much in to the PaaS offers. After a few hours of frustration I managed to spin up 8 instances where only 6 had connectivity with each other. I gave up the other 2 instances for lost. When I finally got Spark running on the remaining 6 instances, local disk IO turned out to be a joke. I gave up at that point. Anyone have more recent experiences?
- jsingleton 10y ago
  I run quite a lot of apps on Azure but normally just stick to their PaaS offerings as I don't usually want to bother administering the server at the OS level. When I do IaaS level stuff and want to connect directly to instances I've used AWS. It's massively oversimplifying, but I think Azure is stronger for PaaS and AWS is better for IaaS if you want to do more yourself. The dual admin web app thing is a massive pain but once everything is set up you don't have to go near it often. If you use CI then you'll normally just git push. My blog (https://unop.uk/ https://unop.uk/) is running on Azure and although I've had a few problems they seem to be node/ghost related. If you want to run WordPress then AWS is probably better as they support MySQL natively. Shameless plug: I cover some of this in my book. For example, in the final chapter I highlight a couple of the advanced features such as Azure ML and HDInsight. https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/Application%20Development/9781785881893/10 https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/Application%20Development...
- jdc0589 10y ago
  Azure is paying the penalty for being late to the game. They are making the exact same mistakes AWS made with the whole service fragmentation with the introduction of VPCs, except with azure its fragmentation of ARM vs Classic. fragmented UIs, fragmented documentation, fragmented CLIs (literally, the powershell and the xplatform cli have totally different sets of commands). They are slowly making progress. Disk IO isn't horrible, you just have to over-provision premium storage when it really matters (just like you do in AWS with GP2 volumes). That said, their concept of storage accounts for housing volumes/disks is absolutely horrible. Luckily I hear mumblings of change there.

pdelgallego 10y ago

I would love to read more about AWS vs Azure, how services compare, and strategies on how to avoid lock in. Any recommendation?

mmcconnell1618 10y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft so I won't get into comparisons with AWS. I wanted to point out a couple of facts that might be interesting to Hacker News readers: * 35% of virtual machines in Azure run Linux * Microsoft announced that PowerShell, Service Fabric and SQL Server will be available for Linux * Redis Cache, Hadoop and other open source packages are available as Platform as a Service offerings in addition to you installing and managing on your own machines.
jnsaff2 10y ago
I have previously built a auto-scaling/healing Mesos cluster on AWS for a retail company (scaling heavily during peak and sometimes during promotions) and doing the same on Azure for a much bigger retail organisation at the moment. So this is my in the trenches comparison: - AWS documentation is excellent, Azure docs are weird and inconsistent and for some bits nonexistent. - Azure API's are inconsistent and weird, but once you figure out they work relatively well. But the lack of documentation compounds confusion. - Azure has a lot of very weird limitations that don't make any sense: -- Default Centos images are 30GB osDisk and you can't resize them, you have to create your own images if you do want to. -- You can have SSD's in 128/512/1024GB sizes and you pay for them in full, Spinning disks are billed per actual usage. -- You have to store your osDisk image in the same storage account as your machine you are running (so you have to pay for your image the full SSD monthly price) -- You have a VMSS (=Auto Scaling Group) and have a Load Balancer in front of it, your microservice connections fail if the load balancer routes the connection back to the same VM ... you now have to have another VMSS just for load balancing/service discovery. - Their services labelled Beta are really more like Alpha quality. - On the plus side, their ARM templates are richer and nicer to use than CloudFormation, however the lack of documentation for them kills all the advantages. - When you jump all the hoops and get past the issues, the things work relatively well.
- zamalek 10y ago
  Agree completely, two additions: Azure's interface is years ahead of AWS. Most importantly: there's a single entry-point for everything. Just this month I was evaluating some stuff on AWS. I was certain that I had cleared everything that I was using up - I hadn't. Luckily it was merely a $17 lesson. The nomenclature used is also quite understandable, unlike AWS which has branded everything down to the NIC.
- jsingleton 10y ago
  It's kind of a moving target. When we first tested Azure it was awful and we went with AWS, but it's got a lot better recently. The new UI is nice but I think a bit rushed. It was pushed before all the features were ported from the old one and there are still things that are easier to do from the old UI (firewall rules for example). The embedded VS Code is really nice though. I think this rushing applies to all of Azure. It feels like a very MVP approach and AWS is more polished. Agree with you about Beta services, don't use Previews for anything serious.
jsingleton 10y ago
OK, I'll write a blog post about this, but it effectively boils down to use something standard that you can run yourself or on another provider. For example on AWS, using RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) or ElastiCache (memcached, redis) is fairly low lock in. You can run all of these yourself or use another cloud. Azure offers a similar hosted redis service for instance. However, something like Lambda or DynamoDB can't be run elsewhere. Similarly, on Azure if you use their Machine Learning PaaS system then you are pretty locked in. Yet you could easily move a website to appharbor or elastic beanstalk. Or just run your own server (VPS, IaaS, EC2 etc.)
- jsingleton 10y ago
  1/3: https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-confusion-part-1/ https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...

davedx 10y ago

More regions than AWS, yet they still managed to have a multi-region outage last month due to some DNS issue. Having multiple regions is worthless if one problem can take them all down at once.

byefruit 10y ago

Unfortunately my experiences with Azure so far have been pretty awful. We have a large amount of free Azure credit and yet our experiences at actually trying to use the platform have been met with frustration. When we tried about six months back, there were two different administration webapps that both offered different subsets of functionality. The IaaS offering seemed to still be tied very much in to the PaaS offers. After a few hours of frustration I managed to spin up 8 instances where only 6 had connectivity with each other. I gave up the other 2 instances for lost. When I finally got Spark running on the remaining 6 instances, local disk IO turned out to be a joke. I gave up at that point. Anyone have more recent experiences?

jsingleton 10y ago
I run quite a lot of apps on Azure but normally just stick to their PaaS offerings as I don't usually want to bother administering the server at the OS level. When I do IaaS level stuff and want to connect directly to instances I've used AWS. It's massively oversimplifying, but I think Azure is stronger for PaaS and AWS is better for IaaS if you want to do more yourself. The dual admin web app thing is a massive pain but once everything is set up you don't have to go near it often. If you use CI then you'll normally just git push. My blog (https://unop.uk/ https://unop.uk/) is running on Azure and although I've had a few problems they seem to be node/ghost related. If you want to run WordPress then AWS is probably better as they support MySQL natively. Shameless plug: I cover some of this in my book. For example, in the final chapter I highlight a couple of the advanced features such as Azure ML and HDInsight. https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/Application%20Development/9781785881893/10 https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/Application%20Development...
jdc0589 10y ago
Azure is paying the penalty for being late to the game. They are making the exact same mistakes AWS made with the whole service fragmentation with the introduction of VPCs, except with azure its fragmentation of ARM vs Classic. fragmented UIs, fragmented documentation, fragmented CLIs (literally, the powershell and the xplatform cli have totally different sets of commands). They are slowly making progress. Disk IO isn't horrible, you just have to over-provision premium storage when it really matters (just like you do in AWS with GP2 volumes). That said, their concept of storage accounts for housing volumes/disks is absolutely horrible. Luckily I hear mumblings of change there.