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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 t

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.

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.