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I know multiple customers with significant free Azure credit that prefer to pay for Google Cloud or AWS over using Azure for anything critical. The management

I know multiple customers with significant free Azure credit that prefer to pay for Google Cloud or AWS over using Azure for anything critical. The management system is a mess - the new portal is nutty and slow. The old one lacks key features and operations are still slow. I can't understate how frustrating and time consuming this is. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but whatever. Using GCP is a blast of fresh air - light, fast, straightforward. VMs are way overpriced and have poor performance. Windows boxes not-so-infrequently get stuck during reboot, and we were told to resize them to get them going again. "Premium" storage aka SSDs have a terrible design. The temp disk system is nonsensical. It just goes on and on. It's obvious Azure is a great play for MS. They need to convert their enterprise customers that were spending tons on MS before to spending tons on MS online. And I'm sure they'll do fine there (recent earnings confirm?).

mattmanser 10y ago
I had an apparent MS employee reply to one of my comments complaining about azure's portal saying the engineers know the interface is awful but can't do anything about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773022 I'd assumed it was a design by programmer fail, especially because of the terrible modular design, but it doesn't look like it. I was wondering, poor performance wise, a client of mine is consistently seeing a 3-5ms lag between the SQL boxes and the website on azure. This seems incredibly high to me, but my experience is generally with SQL server on the same box or on the local network. I've never had a problem like this before, but this site can generate hundreds of queries per request because of legacy code. That basically adds 500ms to a request just going up and down to SQL. Am I being crazy for thinking a 5ms latency on stuff that's supposed to be in the same data centre is incredibly bad? We're also getting random "The wait operation timed out" on DB connections between azure SQL dbs and Azure websites, basically a complete DB hang that I've never seen on a dedicated server setup, the client upgraded to premium, they're getting them even more. That means random users are getting complete failures every now and again. Unbelievable. I honestly can't understand why anyone would pay for azure, in my experience the performance is an order of magnitude worse than dedicated servers that are half the price. The only good thing about it is easy deployment, which is something that's a complete PITA on dedicated servers until you've spent a bunch of time setting it up.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  I can understand the comment "UI by designers", it looks pretty when you first logon, but then you try and use it then it feels slow, and quite an effort to get around.
  - RyanZAG 10y ago
    I think there are actually three types of UI designs. 1) "UI by programmers". Very low use of graphics and animations. Everything looks very standardized. Usually has advanced options panels that let you tweak small parts of the algorithm. Gives a high level of control as there is little abstraction between the functional and presentation layers. 2) "UI by designers". Use of graphics and animations where necessary to make the UI more understandable, such as animations to show the result of user actions. Code is usually abstracted away and the interface is set up with the user in mind. Steps to perform common actions are very quick with the minimal amount of user input. 3) "UI by artists". Excessive use of graphics and animations. Animations that serve no functional purpose. High use of art with large images used for theme rather than function. Often no real link between what you expect buttons to do and what they really do. Steps to perform common actions are usually convoluted with multiple menus. Some even use hidden menus that must be invoked through arcane gestures in an effort to make screenshots look more appealing. I think the UI being described here is actually the "UI by artists" rather than a well designed UI by a designer and not an artist.
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      I agree, although on first glance the UI of azure's portal seems to be a 1 type UI.
      - UK-AL 10y ago
        I think a programmer UI would be fast, with a lot shortcuts and easy get around ONCE you know it. But awful for non technical people.
- boulos 10y ago
reacharavindh 10y ago
If one has free credit for cloud resources, why can't they use the free money to just spin up some resources for non-critical work? Say log processing, run public tests etc.... I know I would if I were running a company and MS comes up to me with this.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  What if the hassle simply does not outweigh the cost of the flaky VMs? There are several reasons the hassles might not be worthwhile even if the free VM is 100% reliable. Most other VM hosts offer mostly Linux solutions and Linux skill is not always transferable to windows. If your organization has those skills then the wasted time cost might than a familiar VM would have cost.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    You can run linux on azure.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  I've chatted with people who've gone through Microsoft Accelerator, and that's exactly what they're doing.
  - azuretoss12 10y ago
    Yep. Also I can confirm that for at least some accounting, MS treats the free credits as revenue. They will give discounts and consideration based on your spend even when the spend is just credit another dept gave out. Clients have told me of very happy calls from MS reps when their projected spend for the year exceeded 50K even though it was nearly 100% credits.
- bad_user 10y ago
  If you're going to do log processing, it means you've got data to process. And I haven't worked with AWS since 3 years ago, but in general external bandwidth is expensive, which is why you want to keep everything in the same data center where bandwidth is free and where you have no latency.

mattmanser 10y ago

I had an apparent MS employee reply to one of my comments complaining about azure's portal saying the engineers know the interface is awful but can't do anything about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773022 I'd assumed it was a design by programmer fail, especially because of the terrible modular design, but it doesn't look like it. I was wondering, poor performance wise, a client of mine is consistently seeing a 3-5ms lag between the SQL boxes and the website on azure. This seems incredibly high to me, but my experience is generally with SQL server on the same box or on the local network. I've never had a problem like this before, but this site can generate hundreds of queries per request because of legacy code. That basically adds 500ms to a request just going up and down to SQL. Am I being crazy for thinking a 5ms latency on stuff that's supposed to be in the same data centre is incredibly bad? We're also getting random "The wait operation timed out" on DB connections between azure SQL dbs and Azure websites, basically a complete DB hang that I've never seen on a dedicated server setup, the client upgraded to premium, they're getting them even more. That means random users are getting complete failures every now and again. Unbelievable. I honestly can't understand why anyone would pay for azure, in my experience the performance is an order of magnitude worse than dedicated servers that are half the price. The only good thing about it is easy deployment, which is something that's a complete PITA on dedicated servers until you've spent a bunch of time setting it up.

UK-AL 10y ago
I can understand the comment "UI by designers", it looks pretty when you first logon, but then you try and use it then it feels slow, and quite an effort to get around.
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  I think there are actually three types of UI designs. 1) "UI by programmers". Very low use of graphics and animations. Everything looks very standardized. Usually has advanced options panels that let you tweak small parts of the algorithm. Gives a high level of control as there is little abstraction between the functional and presentation layers. 2) "UI by designers". Use of graphics and animations where necessary to make the UI more understandable, such as animations to show the result of user actions. Code is usually abstracted away and the interface is set up with the user in mind. Steps to perform common actions are very quick with the minimal amount of user input. 3) "UI by artists". Excessive use of graphics and animations. Animations that serve no functional purpose. High use of art with large images used for theme rather than function. Often no real link between what you expect buttons to do and what they really do. Steps to perform common actions are usually convoluted with multiple menus. Some even use hidden menus that must be invoked through arcane gestures in an effort to make screenshots look more appealing. I think the UI being described here is actually the "UI by artists" rather than a well designed UI by a designer and not an artist.
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    I agree, although on first glance the UI of azure's portal seems to be a 1 type UI.
    - UK-AL 10y ago
      I think a programmer UI would be fast, with a lot shortcuts and easy get around ONCE you know it. But awful for non technical people.
boulos 10y ago

reacharavindh 10y ago

If one has free credit for cloud resources, why can't they use the free money to just spin up some resources for non-critical work? Say log processing, run public tests etc.... I know I would if I were running a company and MS comes up to me with this.

sqeaky 10y ago
What if the hassle simply does not outweigh the cost of the flaky VMs? There are several reasons the hassles might not be worthwhile even if the free VM is 100% reliable. Most other VM hosts offer mostly Linux solutions and Linux skill is not always transferable to windows. If your organization has those skills then the wasted time cost might than a familiar VM would have cost.
- serge2k 10y ago
  You can run linux on azure.
__derek__ 10y ago
I've chatted with people who've gone through Microsoft Accelerator, and that's exactly what they're doing.
- azuretoss12 10y ago
  Yep. Also I can confirm that for at least some accounting, MS treats the free credits as revenue. They will give discounts and consideration based on your spend even when the spend is just credit another dept gave out. Clients have told me of very happy calls from MS reps when their projected spend for the year exceeded 50K even though it was nearly 100% credits.
bad_user 10y ago
If you're going to do log processing, it means you've got data to process. And I haven't worked with AWS since 3 years ago, but in general external bandwidth is expensive, which is why you want to keep everything in the same data center where bandwidth is free and where you have no latency.