4 ms·

"Cloud services" should not be named "Azure IaaS" because Azure IaaS is named Azure IaaS.

by youdontknowtho 10y ago

nailer 10y ago
What's the difference between the two IaaSs?
- youdontknowtho 10y ago
  "cloud services" isn't really an IaaS at all. Kinda. Cloud services were a deployment model where you basically built code that deployed to two types of "roles". Web roles serviced http calls. Worker roles just executed code from a given entry point/method. Typically an app would be user facing web roles, azure storage or azure sql for persistence, and then worker roles for async processing. They are trying to get cloud service customers to migrate to Service Fabric, which, to be fair, is super dope. Not kidding. It's rad. I've deployed a couple of things on it and its bad ass. Love it. Never really used cloud services. Azure IaaS is really just what you would think. It's actually quite good. They don't have the "spot market" type instances that Amazon does. They don't oversubscribe CPU cores. (I think they may have one VM type that gives you a "partial core", otherwise your VM core is yours.) To get the most out of it you need to build with update and fault domains in mind. Here's a link... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virtual-machines-windows-manage-availability https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virt...
- itaysk 10y ago
  Short answer - Cloud Services is the old stuff. Virtual Machines is the new stuff. Never use cloud services for new projects. I wouldn't event include it in the article
  - dmarlow 10y ago
    Sure it's old, but Cloud Services and VMs are two different things and there's only a little overlap (in the sense that VMs creates availability groups and can load balance endpoints). Cloud Services offers machine provisioning via a packaged file that contains the code to run, configuration and other important bits. Any reason you recommend it to not be used for new projects? (yes, I understand it's ASM and not ARM and shows up as "classic" in the new portal, but you can still get quite a lot out of it that you can't easily get with VMs or App Services).
    - itaysk 10y ago
      The reason I don't recommend it is that it clearly has not future. It is not deprecated or killed, but it is kind of frozen. Will continue to be supported but no new investment there. it missed the train, and this train is going places, so you really want to be on it. Yes, Cloud Services and VMs are two different things, however, Azure's IaaS was built on top of this concept up until when they migrated to ARM and VMs. The way it used to be, was that Cloud Services was Microsoft's PaaS, and when they introduced IaaS (Yes Azure had PaaS first), they built it on top of cloud services. So essentially IaaS built on top of PaaS. Most people would expect it to work the other way around, and so that's exactly what they did with the new stuff - They invested heavily in re-doing the entire IaaS stack, and then built PaaS components on top of it. Regarding ARM, VMs, the new stuff- We call it 'new' to differentiate from the 'classic' stuff, but it shouldn't be considered as such. It is old enough, stable enough and it the recommended way to do stuff on Azure. If you are doing just IaaS - there's no question there. Use the ARM model. Cloud Services did have nice features mostly for programming model, and code deploy, but there are ways to do that with ARM as well. There is not a single direct replacement to Cloud Services, and it makes the transition harder. this is because the new model has different architecture and layering of the stack. If you are looking for these features, I recommend looking at a PaaS framework in the new stack like Service Fabric.
    - youdontknowtho 10y ago
      They really want people to transition cloud services apps to Service Fabric. It's quite good and has the same feel, with more flexibility in what your "roles" actually execute. Oh, and Service Fabric runs on Linux too.
anirudhgarg 10y ago
The way to think about Cloud Service is "Azure PaaS 1.0". Service Fabric is "Azure PaaS 2.0" focused on creating a micrososervice architecture for your services. Also, Azure Automation's equivalent is not strictly CloudFormation in AWS (that is Azure Resource Manager) but AWS Lambda for IT/Hybrid, it also does Configuration Management like Puppet/Chef. There are several others which are not entirely correct, look at the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445324 below. Disclosure: From the Azure Team

"Cloud services" should not be named "Azure IaaS" because Azure IaaS is named Azure IaaS.

nailer 10y ago

What's the difference between the two IaaSs?

youdontknowtho 10y ago
"cloud services" isn't really an IaaS at all. Kinda. Cloud services were a deployment model where you basically built code that deployed to two types of "roles". Web roles serviced http calls. Worker roles just executed code from a given entry point/method. Typically an app would be user facing web roles, azure storage or azure sql for persistence, and then worker roles for async processing. They are trying to get cloud service customers to migrate to Service Fabric, which, to be fair, is super dope. Not kidding. It's rad. I've deployed a couple of things on it and its bad ass. Love it. Never really used cloud services. Azure IaaS is really just what you would think. It's actually quite good. They don't have the "spot market" type instances that Amazon does. They don't oversubscribe CPU cores. (I think they may have one VM type that gives you a "partial core", otherwise your VM core is yours.) To get the most out of it you need to build with update and fault domains in mind. Here's a link... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virtual-machines-windows-manage-availability https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virt...
itaysk 10y ago
Short answer - Cloud Services is the old stuff. Virtual Machines is the new stuff. Never use cloud services for new projects. I wouldn't event include it in the article
- dmarlow 10y ago
  Sure it's old, but Cloud Services and VMs are two different things and there's only a little overlap (in the sense that VMs creates availability groups and can load balance endpoints). Cloud Services offers machine provisioning via a packaged file that contains the code to run, configuration and other important bits. Any reason you recommend it to not be used for new projects? (yes, I understand it's ASM and not ARM and shows up as "classic" in the new portal, but you can still get quite a lot out of it that you can't easily get with VMs or App Services).
  - itaysk 10y ago
    The reason I don't recommend it is that it clearly has not future. It is not deprecated or killed, but it is kind of frozen. Will continue to be supported but no new investment there. it missed the train, and this train is going places, so you really want to be on it. Yes, Cloud Services and VMs are two different things, however, Azure's IaaS was built on top of this concept up until when they migrated to ARM and VMs. The way it used to be, was that Cloud Services was Microsoft's PaaS, and when they introduced IaaS (Yes Azure had PaaS first), they built it on top of cloud services. So essentially IaaS built on top of PaaS. Most people would expect it to work the other way around, and so that's exactly what they did with the new stuff - They invested heavily in re-doing the entire IaaS stack, and then built PaaS components on top of it. Regarding ARM, VMs, the new stuff- We call it 'new' to differentiate from the 'classic' stuff, but it shouldn't be considered as such. It is old enough, stable enough and it the recommended way to do stuff on Azure. If you are doing just IaaS - there's no question there. Use the ARM model. Cloud Services did have nice features mostly for programming model, and code deploy, but there are ways to do that with ARM as well. There is not a single direct replacement to Cloud Services, and it makes the transition harder. this is because the new model has different architecture and layering of the stack. If you are looking for these features, I recommend looking at a PaaS framework in the new stack like Service Fabric.
  - youdontknowtho 10y ago
    They really want people to transition cloud services apps to Service Fabric. It's quite good and has the same feel, with more flexibility in what your "roles" actually execute. Oh, and Service Fabric runs on Linux too.

anirudhgarg 10y ago

The way to think about Cloud Service is "Azure PaaS 1.0". Service Fabric is "Azure PaaS 2.0" focused on creating a micrososervice architecture for your services. Also, Azure Automation's equivalent is not strictly CloudFormation in AWS (that is Azure Resource Manager) but AWS Lambda for IT/Hybrid, it also does Configuration Management like Puppet/Chef. There are several others which are not entirely correct, look at the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445324 below. Disclosure: From the Azure Team