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GCP is such a dream. I love using it. Azure's a mess. Here's a lovely thing that happened. I wanted to figure out how much space my containers take in Azure st

GCP is such a dream. I love using it. Azure's a mess. Here's a lovely thing that happened. I wanted to figure out how much space my containers take in Azure storage. Once a day, MS will calc the total for billing purposes, but at the storage account level. There's no documented way to do this for individual containers than to enumerate every single file and sum it up. Well, in the Azure portal, if you hit properties on a container, hey, it shows you the count and filesize. Neato! Obviously MS is aware and slipped in this functionality into the UI at least. So I check a few containers, it works. I try it on another container and it takes a bit of time. I tab away and do some other stuff. Then I get a text about my mobile data usage limit. Turns out the Azure client portal, when you click properties, with no indication it's doing this, will page through all your files and sum them. By making requests for 2.5MB of XML metadata at a time. Everything is just so clunky with Azure. GCP is the opposite, and I'm no fan of Google.

darrmit 9y ago
I've had exactly the same experience with Azure and GCP. Started out with Azure and got so fed up with the crazy interface that I switched to GCP and have been consistently impressed with the attention to detail - especially with the tools they provide in the browser.
- asytorktorkrto 9y ago
  google cloud astroturfing the worst part of hn imo.
  - tracker1 9y ago
    I'm not so sure it's astroturfing in this case... I haven't done much with GCE, but the UX does seem to be better than AWS and Azure. AWS is just horrible, and some of the defaults while more secure make less sense often enough. Azure seems to have similar options, with a less horrible UX, but still not great. Though if you're using Ansible or another management system that's scripted over the top, it makes less of a difference. I will say that some of the hosted services (data in particular), Azure is really nice... Azure Storage Queues/Tables are solid and Azure SQL is easiest to get a grasp on setup/cost of the three. That said Google Cloud is better in terms of compute with docker containers.
  - darrmit 9y ago
    I work for a Microsoft partner, so certainly not astroturfing. I just really don't care for Azure. Though, today's announcement re: Bash shell in the browser for Azure is certainly a step in the right direction for usability.
lovich 9y ago
Maybe its because I'm a .Net dev but everythings been working out pretty good for me on Azure. Half the stuff I do on a daily basis I can do from VS to begin with. About the only problem I've run into is having the azure instance override certain configuration settings I had in my app when I published it, but I haven't run into that issue in a while.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  I use .NET too. Problems we've experienced: Dealing with the portal. It's just annoying. Networking - first, when they had the idiotic "Classic" design where you had to share an IP for no reason. Then sometimes, the network just wouldn't work very well. We'd get Pingdom alerts even though the site was up and responding. PCAP showed TCP issues. Same issue with Azure CDN, until we re-created the account and selected Akamai. Or Verizon. It's just silly. VMs hanging, and the suggestion being to stop/start or resize them to get them unstuck. The moronic SSD situation. Seriously, you need a special class of VM? And for a while, that meant you got an "erased-at-any-time" temp drive SSD. Can't choose size of SSD, must use one of 3 presets. And if you need more perf/storage, they suggest RAIDing them together. It's a joke. Everything slow and overpriced. GCP is 20-80% less than Azure for VMs - even getting an enterprise agreement didn't help much. And that's not even getting into scheduling preemptive VMs on Google. SQL Azure seemed really slow (so we had to pay for the premium level) and prone to connection resets or "transient errors" requiring special coding. This was not using anything exotic or heavy workloads, we just got shit IO out of it, even at the, I think, $400/mo tier. Everything just being "clunky". Networking rules, for instance, are just straightforward on GCP. Ping works, unlike on Azure (wtf guys). And again, I cannot stress how much of a pain that portal is. Maybe I should have everything scripted, but hey, I don't. It's just confusing, and even when you know where things are, it just feels cumbersome and slow. Perhaps I shouldn't be using subjective adjectives, but hey, there it is. And I know I'm not alone. I get it. Azure wanted to be a full PaaS where you just uploaded your .NET dll and la-di-da. Unfortunately, a: Windows is terribly suited to not having RDP, and b: sometimes we just want IaaS. I also get that they're going to make bucketloads of money getting their enterprise customers cloudified. Existing AD/Exchange deployments aren't just gonna jump over to Google, but they'll migrate bit by bit to Azure and pay nicely for it.

darrmit 9y ago

I've had exactly the same experience with Azure and GCP. Started out with Azure and got so fed up with the crazy interface that I switched to GCP and have been consistently impressed with the attention to detail - especially with the tools they provide in the browser.

asytorktorkrto 9y ago
google cloud astroturfing the worst part of hn imo.
- tracker1 9y ago
  I'm not so sure it's astroturfing in this case... I haven't done much with GCE, but the UX does seem to be better than AWS and Azure. AWS is just horrible, and some of the defaults while more secure make less sense often enough. Azure seems to have similar options, with a less horrible UX, but still not great. Though if you're using Ansible or another management system that's scripted over the top, it makes less of a difference. I will say that some of the hosted services (data in particular), Azure is really nice... Azure Storage Queues/Tables are solid and Azure SQL is easiest to get a grasp on setup/cost of the three. That said Google Cloud is better in terms of compute with docker containers.
- darrmit 9y ago
  I work for a Microsoft partner, so certainly not astroturfing. I just really don't care for Azure. Though, today's announcement re: Bash shell in the browser for Azure is certainly a step in the right direction for usability.

lovich 9y ago

Maybe its because I'm a .Net dev but everythings been working out pretty good for me on Azure. Half the stuff I do on a daily basis I can do from VS to begin with. About the only problem I've run into is having the azure instance override certain configuration settings I had in my app when I published it, but I haven't run into that issue in a while.

MichaelGG 9y ago
I use .NET too. Problems we've experienced: Dealing with the portal. It's just annoying. Networking - first, when they had the idiotic "Classic" design where you had to share an IP for no reason. Then sometimes, the network just wouldn't work very well. We'd get Pingdom alerts even though the site was up and responding. PCAP showed TCP issues. Same issue with Azure CDN, until we re-created the account and selected Akamai. Or Verizon. It's just silly. VMs hanging, and the suggestion being to stop/start or resize them to get them unstuck. The moronic SSD situation. Seriously, you need a special class of VM? And for a while, that meant you got an "erased-at-any-time" temp drive SSD. Can't choose size of SSD, must use one of 3 presets. And if you need more perf/storage, they suggest RAIDing them together. It's a joke. Everything slow and overpriced. GCP is 20-80% less than Azure for VMs - even getting an enterprise agreement didn't help much. And that's not even getting into scheduling preemptive VMs on Google. SQL Azure seemed really slow (so we had to pay for the premium level) and prone to connection resets or "transient errors" requiring special coding. This was not using anything exotic or heavy workloads, we just got shit IO out of it, even at the, I think, $400/mo tier. Everything just being "clunky". Networking rules, for instance, are just straightforward on GCP. Ping works, unlike on Azure (wtf guys). And again, I cannot stress how much of a pain that portal is. Maybe I should have everything scripted, but hey, I don't. It's just confusing, and even when you know where things are, it just feels cumbersome and slow. Perhaps I shouldn't be using subjective adjectives, but hey, there it is. And I know I'm not alone. I get it. Azure wanted to be a full PaaS where you just uploaded your .NET dll and la-di-da. Unfortunately, a: Windows is terribly suited to not having RDP, and b: sometimes we just want IaaS. I also get that they're going to make bucketloads of money getting their enterprise customers cloudified. Existing AD/Exchange deployments aren't just gonna jump over to Google, but they'll migrate bit by bit to Azure and pay nicely for it.