14 ms·

New lower Azure pricing

129 points by alexrigler 10y ago

danielcampos93 10y ago
seems like mostly updating to the newest models and making the entry level sku's much cheaper to attract more people kicking the wheels and lower the bar for dev's wanting to try out Azure. I would love to see they take this to an extreme and either make the A0 or A1 free like AWS.
- shiftpgdn 10y ago
  The A0 standard and the A0 basic prices did not change. Both of those instances will be dramatically outperformed by a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet for 1/2 to 1/3rd the price.
  - dragontamer 10y ago
    Well, so are Amazon's lowest tier nodes. I think its fair to say that AWS and Azure aren't competing against cheap VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean. Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS). https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/ https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/ https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml For a certain scale, aiming at dedicated is probably cheaper, especially when you consider how much faster a dedicated SSD box is than a shared VPS. The main benefits of AWS (or Azure) are all of the other features they offer on their platform. But I don't think that they are low-cost anymore, especially in today's world with ~$42/month dedicated SSD Xeon servers.
    - valarauca1 10y ago
      Wow thanks for the Nocix link. I never came across them before. That is dirt cheap.
    - mark_l_watson 10y ago
      I will add my thanks for your nocix suggestion. I prefer to do my development on a beefy VPS, most often from OVH, but I think I will try switching to novix for a few months. (I don't like my laptop heating up or running out of capacity, and it is nicer to have a dev setup that I can hit from any laptop (or tablet)). For development, I don't need super high reliability.
      - dragontamer 10y ago
        Well, development seems more like a VPS job, since you aren't going to be utilizing the CPU too much. I think high-load web servers (which will be hitting the disk often) or video game servers (especially world-simulations like Minecraft or Factorio) that will benefit from dedicated servers the most. But give it a shot. I know that the higher-cost VPS are more expensive than those dedicated boxes. I'm also surprised at how cheap dedicated has gotten recently.
        mark_l_watson 10y ago
        I do have high CPU utilization tasks, like large Haskell builds, Tensoflow, etc. I agree that the cheap physical server costs are surprising, given facility and power costs.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      You might also want to add https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 to your list of cheap dedicated servers. It’s seriously crazy how expensive AWS, Azure, and co are.
- blahi 10y ago
  You have $25/month for free for a year... And $200 free trial. You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    > You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN. For non-production use only. There's a lot of fine print on the MSDN "free credit."
atrudeau 10y ago
I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?
- kefka 10y ago
  Absolutely not. If anything, they are worse at hidden billing than Comcast. Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS. I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've not looked at GCE. But those are my experiences. YMMV
  - jedberg 10y ago
    > just rear Glacier horror stories In Amazon's defense, their pricing is pretty clear and straightforward except for Glacier, which even they admit doesn't follow their pricing model for all the other services. Google's is still the best though -- they automatically give you "bulk discounts" instead of having to buy them in advance like AWS, and their general philosophy is "your cheapest option should be to finish your workload as quickly as possible", as opposed to AWS, where you have to do some acrobatics to fit into their pricing models efficiently.
  - rnnr 10y ago
    Also, isn't AWS billing per utilization/hour? For small projects this means it is many times cheaper than Azure. Azure is more focused to enterprises than to individual devs.
    - blahi 10y ago
      wat? Azure has minute billing... So does google. AWS is a mess.
      - rnnr 10y ago
        Not in Azure SQL
      - 10y ago
stemuk 10y ago
For me the compute pricing isn't the main issue. The cutthroat bandwith prices from 9 to 18 cents per GB are the main cost drivers and should be at least mentioned in a blog post about price reduction.
BonoboIO 10y ago
Cloud Pricing is ridiculous ... made the comparison between a dedicated server and cloud offerings of microsoft, google, amazon ... rackspace (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times in the cloud for the same.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  While undeniably true, you have to look at the levels of redundancy. With a dedicated server, if the box dies you're offline, if the storage dies you may lose data, etc. Plus, there's also a premium just for access to the ecosystem/APIs. You are often paying for the theoretical convenience of being able to spawn additional instances programmatically.
  - jamroom 10y ago
    Absolutely true - however, in a true "apples to apples" comparison, if you're only running a single EC2 instance (for example) and it dies you're offline as well - AWS does not "automatically" have a failover setup for you. In this case 2 dedicated instances with a load balancer is going to get you the same setup you'd get on AWS (only likely cheaper and a lot more powerful setup).
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - rubber_duck 10y ago
    Like someone else said, your VM can die as well, the cloud provides some HA services but there are hosted/standalone versions as well. I think the real question is how spiky is your usage, even with renting bare metal you still can't scale dynamically like you can with cloud VM - if you need 5x the capacity to cover spikes you might as well use cloud and all the fancy stuff you get with it. And you can use both at the same time (dynamically scale up through cloud, bare metal predictable workloads)
- ju-st 10y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud
oneplane 10y ago
Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.
- j_koreth 10y ago
  Looks fine in Qupzilla on Linux
  - voidz 10y ago
    Never heard of this before, but apparently Qupzilla is a lightweight browser which uses the cross-platform Qt application framework, and it comes with a builtin ad blocker. Nice; I'm going to check this out soon.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jahewson 10y ago
  I suspect the answer is that they are screen fonts designed with ClearType in mind.
- jmspring 10y ago
  I've not seen this issue. I work for Microsoft and use a Mac for most of my work. Example screen shots or URLs?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hoodoof 10y ago
Cloud providers should make their smallest instances basically free. Bottom end instances/pricing is the drug through which developers become addicted to a platform.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Base AWS and GCE VMs are like $4 a month. Isn't that basically free?
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    AWS also has a free tier for many services (EC2 included) for the first 12 months of usage. They're well familiar with the "first hit's free" business model...
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    And then there's Azure at €11 point something. The local web hosting company does better specs for half the price, and the lowest one (only slightly lower specs than Azure's) is €3 a month.
Mao_Zedang 10y ago
Things like this pricing difference between VM and App Service which run on the same dedicated hardware, not sure why its still 2x the price? http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png
- vlangber 10y ago
  We had planned to develop a Saas solution based on Azure, but the App Service and sql pricing have forced us to drop it. We love Azure, and we would like to use it for all our web projects, but it is hard to justify it with the current pricing.
  - greggyb 10y ago
    Talk to a Microsoft rep. There are several categories of Microsoft customers. One category is enterprises using Microsoft products internally. Another is software/SaaS companies using Microsoft products to develop or deliver a product. The prices you see are for that first group. The prices for the second group tend to be _heavily_ discounted. Shoot me a message (email in profile) if you have questions. I do not get heavily involved in licensing discussions, but can try to answer more questions if you have them. If you want to build a SaaS on Azure, though, you are the customer Microsoft wants - take advantage of that.
- nomid 10y ago
  with App Service you're basically paying for a managed server (patched etc.) and a host of capabilities that VMs don't have out of the box (autoscaling, monitoring etc.)
Maarten88 10y ago
What I don't understand about Azure pricing is how much more expensive a Windows VM is compared to an equivalent Linux machine. A D1v2 costs $54 with Linux and $104 with Windows (per month). This extends to larger instances: Windows costs twice the price of Linux on the same instance. The only difference is the Windows licence, and $50 per month for the smallest machine (and hundreds for bigger instances) seems very unreasonable. The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high.
- gsam 10y ago
  There's also the fact that their Windows infrastructure is probably costlier to maintain. Windows wasn't built for this use-case, and they're desperately trying to catch up. In the meantime, they have this convenient project called Linux on hand.
  - besselheim 10y ago
    How do you mean? All current Windows versions and Linux distributions have built in support for running under Hyper-V, which the Azure hypervisor is based upon.
  - nbevans 10y ago
    "Costlier to maintain" how? "Not built for this use-case" errr? The real answer is licensing cost. If you already own a Windows Server license then you are free to use it and gain 41% price reductions via this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit...
    - thr0waway1239 10y ago
      Interesting: when I combine your comment with the GP's comment, I start wondering about the recurring revenue aspect of Azure. There seems to be three types of Windows Server licenses you can purchase [1]. Assuming a price differential $50 per month between Linux/Windows as GP states. I don't know exactly what would be the server license you would purchase if you got the actual license. But after month 20, even after the 41% discount - lets round it out to 50%, you have paid more than a one-time payment for the Essentials server. After month 36, you have paid more than a one-time payment for Standard server. It takes a while to get to the DataCenter server (~20 years), and I honestly don't know enough to figure out which use case matches which license type, but if someone can manage with the Essentials server (touted as being useful for small businesses up to 25 employees), then you are now paying, just based on difference between Linux and Windows, a perpetual excess fee over getting a Windows server after about 1.5 years for Essentials and 3 years for Standard. Obviously, on the cloud you get a lot of extra features, including not having to pay the cost of server maintenance. But for the traditional customers GP is referring to, that might well be a sunk cost. (E.g. you need your sysadmin anyway because of other internal stuff) However, this statement from GP might actually make a lot of sense: > The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high. If, like is usually mentioned here on HN, you probably wouldn't go with Windows for server related stuff anyway if you just started out, this does seem like an excellent golden goose for MS - keep your traditional customers within the Windows ecosystem without really doing a whole lot for them in terms of competitive pricing, and in addition turn your one time revenue generating software (Windows server license) into a recurring revenue generating software. Having said that, I suppose this also means it is generally easier for AWS and Google to compete on price, because MS cannot allow this pegging (Linux vs Windows comparison) to get too wide because you would get comments like GP's. Is that a reasonable analysis? [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-server-pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-serve... DataCenter: $6150 Standard: $882 Essentials: $500
perfectfire 10y ago
Their calculator still seems to have the old prices in case you're like me and don't remember how much it used to cost, but want to see how much you are saving: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?servic...
greenmountin 10y ago
Does anyone know about Azure auto-scaling? It says "most [VM's] include load-balancing and auto-scaling free of charge", is that true and is it any more friendly to hobbyists than the other two? It was very disappointing to see the auto-scaling services for GCP and AWS basically require a $20/mo load balancer right off the bat. I have an app that is quietly puttering away on a single Digital Ocean droplet, but could at any moment, uh, make it big and I want to be ready. But I can't really stomach the $20 just to turn on auto-scaling somewhere.
- bigiain 10y ago
  To be fair - Amazon (and Google/Azure/whoever) aren't really targeting the sort of user who wants autoscaling for under $20/month... They've got different fish to fry. There's kind of this uncanny valley of businesses who think their website/app-backend is kinda important, but keep asking about $5 or $20/month hosting when you've recommended ~$100/month for a load balanced redundant AWS setup. If you aren't prepared to pay for a load balancer, at least two ec2 instances, and a multi-region RDS instance - I don't really want to get your 2am Saturday morning phone calls asking why your site/app is down. Advice: investigate your devops tool of choice (I like Ansible) and work out how to script the spin up of infrastructure at Digital Ocean - you'll need to invest some time to learn and get it working, but you should be able to set up a single command line script to provision additional droplets and add them behind an (automatically updated via Ansible/APIs) dns round robin set of "Floating IP" addresses (or Elastic IP addresses in AWS terminology) and use Heartbeat on each droplet to monitor the others and re-update the Floating IPs as needed. That's kind poorman's HA. For extra credit, you could work out how to automate provisioning of some HAProxy Droplets sitting in front of your app server droplets. Managing a shared database is left as an exercise to the reader who prefers not to pay for RDS ;-)
- lostcolony 10y ago
  Did you look into just using DNS load balancing with AWS and GCP? I don't have any experience in that, but Loggly used it in lieu of an ELB in AWS. https://www.loggly.com/blog/why-aws-route-53-over-elastic-load-balancing/ https://www.loggly.com/blog/why-aws-route-53-over-elastic-lo... So as long as you have a domain somewhere...
tshtf 10y ago
As kyledrake so eloquently said before: "The bandwidth is the soda." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129 AWS and Azure overcharge on bandwidth about 10 to 20 times the prevailing rate. Something to keep in mind for high bandwidth applications.
NamPNQ 10y ago
Don't use Azure. Alway have a network problem.
ruffrey 10y ago
does anyone know of a no-frills side-by-side cost comparison of top cloud services, for say, a micro instance?
jbb555 10y ago
I have a few hobby projects stored on github and it's easy to get linux VMs so that when I commit something it gets checked out and built and packaged automatically. It's easy to find a VM for a reasonable monthly price. But it seems to be much harder to find reasonable windows options to do the same there? I currently make it build on my machine at home, but that't not very scalable or reliable. I don't really want a full windows machine. I want a decent windows machine for doing builds that only runs for a few hours in total each month and is cheap. Is there such a thing?

129 points by alexrigler 10y ago

seems like mostly updating to the newest models and making the entry level sku's much cheaper to attract more people kicking the wheels and lower the bar for dev's wanting to try out Azure. I would love to see they take this to an extreme and either make the A0 or A1 free like AWS.

shiftpgdn 10y ago
The A0 standard and the A0 basic prices did not change. Both of those instances will be dramatically outperformed by a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet for 1/2 to 1/3rd the price.
- dragontamer 10y ago
  Well, so are Amazon's lowest tier nodes. I think its fair to say that AWS and Azure aren't competing against cheap VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean. Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS). https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/ https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/ https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml For a certain scale, aiming at dedicated is probably cheaper, especially when you consider how much faster a dedicated SSD box is than a shared VPS. The main benefits of AWS (or Azure) are all of the other features they offer on their platform. But I don't think that they are low-cost anymore, especially in today's world with ~$42/month dedicated SSD Xeon servers.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    Wow thanks for the Nocix link. I never came across them before. That is dirt cheap.
  - mark_l_watson 10y ago
    I will add my thanks for your nocix suggestion. I prefer to do my development on a beefy VPS, most often from OVH, but I think I will try switching to novix for a few months. (I don't like my laptop heating up or running out of capacity, and it is nicer to have a dev setup that I can hit from any laptop (or tablet)). For development, I don't need super high reliability.
    - dragontamer 10y ago
      Well, development seems more like a VPS job, since you aren't going to be utilizing the CPU too much. I think high-load web servers (which will be hitting the disk often) or video game servers (especially world-simulations like Minecraft or Factorio) that will benefit from dedicated servers the most. But give it a shot. I know that the higher-cost VPS are more expensive than those dedicated boxes. I'm also surprised at how cheap dedicated has gotten recently.
      - mark_l_watson 10y ago
        I do have high CPU utilization tasks, like large Haskell builds, Tensoflow, etc. I agree that the cheap physical server costs are surprising, given facility and power costs.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    You might also want to add https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 to your list of cheap dedicated servers. It’s seriously crazy how expensive AWS, Azure, and co are.
blahi 10y ago
You have $25/month for free for a year... And $200 free trial. You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  > You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN. For non-production use only. There's a lot of fine print on the MSDN "free credit."

atrudeau 10y ago

I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?

kefka 10y ago
Absolutely not. If anything, they are worse at hidden billing than Comcast. Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS. I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've not looked at GCE. But those are my experiences. YMMV
- jedberg 10y ago
  > just rear Glacier horror stories In Amazon's defense, their pricing is pretty clear and straightforward except for Glacier, which even they admit doesn't follow their pricing model for all the other services. Google's is still the best though -- they automatically give you "bulk discounts" instead of having to buy them in advance like AWS, and their general philosophy is "your cheapest option should be to finish your workload as quickly as possible", as opposed to AWS, where you have to do some acrobatics to fit into their pricing models efficiently.
- rnnr 10y ago
  Also, isn't AWS billing per utilization/hour? For small projects this means it is many times cheaper than Azure. Azure is more focused to enterprises than to individual devs.
  - blahi 10y ago
    wat? Azure has minute billing... So does google. AWS is a mess.
    - rnnr 10y ago
      Not in Azure SQL
    - 10y ago

stemuk 10y ago

For me the compute pricing isn't the main issue. The cutthroat bandwith prices from 9 to 18 cents per GB are the main cost drivers and should be at least mentioned in a blog post about price reduction.

BonoboIO 10y ago

Cloud Pricing is ridiculous ... made the comparison between a dedicated server and cloud offerings of microsoft, google, amazon ... rackspace (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times in the cloud for the same.

Someone1234 10y ago
While undeniably true, you have to look at the levels of redundancy. With a dedicated server, if the box dies you're offline, if the storage dies you may lose data, etc. Plus, there's also a premium just for access to the ecosystem/APIs. You are often paying for the theoretical convenience of being able to spawn additional instances programmatically.
- jamroom 10y ago
  Absolutely true - however, in a true "apples to apples" comparison, if you're only running a single EC2 instance (for example) and it dies you're offline as well - AWS does not "automatically" have a failover setup for you. In this case 2 dedicated instances with a load balancer is going to get you the same setup you'd get on AWS (only likely cheaper and a lot more powerful setup).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  Like someone else said, your VM can die as well, the cloud provides some HA services but there are hosted/standalone versions as well. I think the real question is how spiky is your usage, even with renting bare metal you still can't scale dynamically like you can with cloud VM - if you need 5x the capacity to cover spikes you might as well use cloud and all the fancy stuff you get with it. And you can use both at the same time (dynamically scale up through cloud, bare metal predictable workloads)
ju-st 10y ago
Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud

oneplane 10y ago

Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.

j_koreth 10y ago
Looks fine in Qupzilla on Linux
- voidz 10y ago
  Never heard of this before, but apparently Qupzilla is a lightweight browser which uses the cross-platform Qt application framework, and it comes with a builtin ad blocker. Nice; I'm going to check this out soon.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jahewson 10y ago
I suspect the answer is that they are screen fonts designed with ClearType in mind.
jmspring 10y ago
I've not seen this issue. I work for Microsoft and use a Mac for most of my work. Example screen shots or URLs?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hoodoof 10y ago

Cloud providers should make their smallest instances basically free. Bottom end instances/pricing is the drug through which developers become addicted to a platform.

brianwawok 10y ago
Base AWS and GCE VMs are like $4 a month. Isn't that basically free?
- sokoloff 10y ago
  AWS also has a free tier for many services (EC2 included) for the first 12 months of usage. They're well familiar with the "first hit's free" business model...
- lucb1e 10y ago
  And then there's Azure at €11 point something. The local web hosting company does better specs for half the price, and the lowest one (only slightly lower specs than Azure's) is €3 a month.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago

Things like this pricing difference between VM and App Service which run on the same dedicated hardware, not sure why its still 2x the price? http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png

vlangber 10y ago
We had planned to develop a Saas solution based on Azure, but the App Service and sql pricing have forced us to drop it. We love Azure, and we would like to use it for all our web projects, but it is hard to justify it with the current pricing.
- greggyb 10y ago
  Talk to a Microsoft rep. There are several categories of Microsoft customers. One category is enterprises using Microsoft products internally. Another is software/SaaS companies using Microsoft products to develop or deliver a product. The prices you see are for that first group. The prices for the second group tend to be _heavily_ discounted. Shoot me a message (email in profile) if you have questions. I do not get heavily involved in licensing discussions, but can try to answer more questions if you have them. If you want to build a SaaS on Azure, though, you are the customer Microsoft wants - take advantage of that.
nomid 10y ago
with App Service you're basically paying for a managed server (patched etc.) and a host of capabilities that VMs don't have out of the box (autoscaling, monitoring etc.)

Maarten88 10y ago

What I don't understand about Azure pricing is how much more expensive a Windows VM is compared to an equivalent Linux machine. A D1v2 costs $54 with Linux and $104 with Windows (per month). This extends to larger instances: Windows costs twice the price of Linux on the same instance. The only difference is the Windows licence, and $50 per month for the smallest machine (and hundreds for bigger instances) seems very unreasonable. The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high.

gsam 10y ago
There's also the fact that their Windows infrastructure is probably costlier to maintain. Windows wasn't built for this use-case, and they're desperately trying to catch up. In the meantime, they have this convenient project called Linux on hand.
- besselheim 10y ago
  How do you mean? All current Windows versions and Linux distributions have built in support for running under Hyper-V, which the Azure hypervisor is based upon.
- nbevans 10y ago
  "Costlier to maintain" how? "Not built for this use-case" errr? The real answer is licensing cost. If you already own a Windows Server license then you are free to use it and gain 41% price reductions via this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit...
  - thr0waway1239 10y ago
    Interesting: when I combine your comment with the GP's comment, I start wondering about the recurring revenue aspect of Azure. There seems to be three types of Windows Server licenses you can purchase [1]. Assuming a price differential $50 per month between Linux/Windows as GP states. I don't know exactly what would be the server license you would purchase if you got the actual license. But after month 20, even after the 41% discount - lets round it out to 50%, you have paid more than a one-time payment for the Essentials server. After month 36, you have paid more than a one-time payment for Standard server. It takes a while to get to the DataCenter server (~20 years), and I honestly don't know enough to figure out which use case matches which license type, but if someone can manage with the Essentials server (touted as being useful for small businesses up to 25 employees), then you are now paying, just based on difference between Linux and Windows, a perpetual excess fee over getting a Windows server after about 1.5 years for Essentials and 3 years for Standard. Obviously, on the cloud you get a lot of extra features, including not having to pay the cost of server maintenance. But for the traditional customers GP is referring to, that might well be a sunk cost. (E.g. you need your sysadmin anyway because of other internal stuff) However, this statement from GP might actually make a lot of sense: > The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high. If, like is usually mentioned here on HN, you probably wouldn't go with Windows for server related stuff anyway if you just started out, this does seem like an excellent golden goose for MS - keep your traditional customers within the Windows ecosystem without really doing a whole lot for them in terms of competitive pricing, and in addition turn your one time revenue generating software (Windows server license) into a recurring revenue generating software. Having said that, I suppose this also means it is generally easier for AWS and Google to compete on price, because MS cannot allow this pegging (Linux vs Windows comparison) to get too wide because you would get comments like GP's. Is that a reasonable analysis? [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-server-pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-serve... DataCenter: $6150 Standard: $882 Essentials: $500

perfectfire 10y ago

Their calculator still seems to have the old prices in case you're like me and don't remember how much it used to cost, but want to see how much you are saving: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?servic...

greenmountin 10y ago

Does anyone know about Azure auto-scaling? It says "most [VM's] include load-balancing and auto-scaling free of charge", is that true and is it any more friendly to hobbyists than the other two? It was very disappointing to see the auto-scaling services for GCP and AWS basically require a $20/mo load balancer right off the bat. I have an app that is quietly puttering away on a single Digital Ocean droplet, but could at any moment, uh, make it big and I want to be ready. But I can't really stomach the $20 just to turn on auto-scaling somewhere.

bigiain 10y ago
To be fair - Amazon (and Google/Azure/whoever) aren't really targeting the sort of user who wants autoscaling for under $20/month... They've got different fish to fry. There's kind of this uncanny valley of businesses who think their website/app-backend is kinda important, but keep asking about $5 or $20/month hosting when you've recommended ~$100/month for a load balanced redundant AWS setup. If you aren't prepared to pay for a load balancer, at least two ec2 instances, and a multi-region RDS instance - I don't really want to get your 2am Saturday morning phone calls asking why your site/app is down. Advice: investigate your devops tool of choice (I like Ansible) and work out how to script the spin up of infrastructure at Digital Ocean - you'll need to invest some time to learn and get it working, but you should be able to set up a single command line script to provision additional droplets and add them behind an (automatically updated via Ansible/APIs) dns round robin set of "Floating IP" addresses (or Elastic IP addresses in AWS terminology) and use Heartbeat on each droplet to monitor the others and re-update the Floating IPs as needed. That's kind poorman's HA. For extra credit, you could work out how to automate provisioning of some HAProxy Droplets sitting in front of your app server droplets. Managing a shared database is left as an exercise to the reader who prefers not to pay for RDS ;-)
lostcolony 10y ago
Did you look into just using DNS load balancing with AWS and GCP? I don't have any experience in that, but Loggly used it in lieu of an ELB in AWS. https://www.loggly.com/blog/why-aws-route-53-over-elastic-load-balancing/ https://www.loggly.com/blog/why-aws-route-53-over-elastic-lo... So as long as you have a domain somewhere...

tshtf 10y ago

As kyledrake so eloquently said before: "The bandwidth is the soda." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129 AWS and Azure overcharge on bandwidth about 10 to 20 times the prevailing rate. Something to keep in mind for high bandwidth applications.

NamPNQ 10y ago

Don't use Azure. Alway have a network problem.

ruffrey 10y ago

does anyone know of a no-frills side-by-side cost comparison of top cloud services, for say, a micro instance?

jbb555 10y ago

I have a few hobby projects stored on github and it's easy to get linux VMs so that when I commit something it gets checked out and built and packaged automatically. It's easy to find a VM for a reasonable monthly price. But it seems to be much harder to find reasonable windows options to do the same there? I currently make it build on my machine at home, but that't not very scalable or reliable. I don't really want a full windows machine. I want a decent windows machine for doing builds that only runs for a few hours in total each month and is cheap. Is there such a thing?