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Very anectodal, but some things are better on Azure, because they were late to the party, for example azure blob storage. It costs the same as s3, but it suppor

Very anectodal, but some things are better on Azure, because they were late to the party, for example azure blob storage. It costs the same as s3, but it supports journaling, so you can do journal archives. You can run your main thing on aws and keep backups on azure. If you wanted backups with journaling on AWS, you'd have to use EFS at minimum, which is orders of magnitude more expensive.

nkassis 8y ago
And some things are very much worse. I feel like if you stick to MS technology feature you are probably going to be ok but my anecdotal evidence around other features built around open source tech has been not good. For example AKS (azure kubernetes service) has been problematic for us. Similarly AWS RDS is much better than Azure PostgreSQL offering.
- merb 8y ago
  what is problematic on aks?
  - nkassis 8y ago
    We've had nodes die (more than what we've experienced with simple vms). We've had cluster go into failed state multiple times and require full rebuild. We've had nodes simply stop responding but aks claims they are fine. It's been relatively unstable and we've had to work with support multiple in the past year because of issues. It has improved but it was pretty awful when they announced GA. We were surprised when they did. We had been on AKS for a bit and it was no where close to ready for GA.
    - alpb 8y ago
      I worked at Azure in the past and this sounds like many Azure products. Azure takes a lot of time post-GA to actually stabilize a product.
GordonS 8y ago
Azure Blob Storage also supports immutable blobs (they can't be overwritten or deleted once written to), which is interesting for various compliance and auditing scenarios: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/azure-immutable-blob-storage-now-in-public-preview/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/azure-immutable-blob-...
- pmart123 8y ago
  Interesting. S3 does have object versioning, which I believe once enabled, causes the object versions to preserve always be preserved. I think the AWS equivalent though is using AWS Glacier and creating a vault lock.
outworlder 8y ago
Disclaimer: also very anecdotal: However, most things are way worse than either GCP or AWS. Azure is just now rolling out availability zones. There are strange constraints everywhere, like you can only use premium storage accounts with specific VM types. You cannot use the same premium storage account for blobs. In general, not all configurations of skus for storage accounts, vms and disks are supported. You need to match availability set skus between scalesets and load balancers. If you connect an internal 'standard' load balancer to an instance, then it cannot reach the internet anymore. You can only attach one internal and one external load balancer to a scale set. You can't use the internal load balancer to loopback (same as internal AWS NLBs, but AWS has other options). And so on. It all seems poorly integrated. Budget 5x as much time for a similar deployment on Azure as compared to AWS or GCP. Add more buffer if you need flexible automation, as you'll bump into those edge cases often as people change parameters. They have a ridiculously huge amount of features compared to the other two major cloud providers, but integration between them is iffy. It is improving. AKS seems pretty good, although it's still new and people are reporting issues. But it is promising, you can actually tweak quite a few things, and I have high hopes for the compatibility story (even more so than GKE). AWS's EKS is a marginal implementation at best. On Azure AD, the tables are turned: it's AWS that provides an inconsistent story. There are many options, none are as well polished compared to Azure. They did learn from some AWS mistakes. But technically speaking they have a bunch of polishing to do.
- 013a 8y ago
  EKS is, without a doubt in my mind, among the worst products Amazon has ever released. You pay $0.20/hour for the "benefit" of a managed high-availability control plane, no matter the size of the cluster, then are forced into a seemingly incomprehensible mess of CloudFormation templates to spawn a set of VMs which you now have to manage yourself. It makes no god damn sense. They had every opportunity to look at how Azure or Google were doing it and just straight-up copy it. For Christ's sake, they were over a year late to the game. I remember during the original announcement, maybe its documented somewhere, they announced that Fargate was coming to EKS "eventually". They don't even have managed worker nodes for normal VMs, if their intention is to bring Fargate as well we literally won't see it for another two years. It took them over six months to get from announcement to GA. The only good thing I have to say about it is that it's pretty reliable. Which isn't saying a lot because it doesn't do much, but they're happy to charge you $150/mo for what it does. Did I mention it takes over 20 minutes to create a new cluster? Well, actually, they "call" it a cluster, but its really just the control plane. The actual cluster can take up to 30 minutes for everything to actually connect and be usable. My company was interested in doing a "pristine" staging environment for every/some PR, throwing it away afterward. Interesting idea. Not worth it on EKS because their performance is so god awful. EKS is literally the reason why we abandoned AWS in favor of Google Cloud. I'm not suggesting that the rest of AWS isn't overall pretty great, but when nearly all of your workload is defined as "90% inside kubernetes, a few cloud-managed queues, and blob storage" Amazon isn't doing themselves any favors by ignoring the most interesting infrastructure technology to be released in the past five years. Oh, and our bill dropped by ~50% because preemptible instances on GCloud are actually easy to use, instead of the sheer insanity of trying to integrate spot fleets with an eksctl cluster.
pmart123 8y ago
What do you mean exactly by journaling? Do you mean that it supports an append mode or something else?

nkassis 8y ago

And some things are very much worse. I feel like if you stick to MS technology feature you are probably going to be ok but my anecdotal evidence around other features built around open source tech has been not good. For example AKS (azure kubernetes service) has been problematic for us. Similarly AWS RDS is much better than Azure PostgreSQL offering.

merb 8y ago
what is problematic on aks?
- nkassis 8y ago
  We've had nodes die (more than what we've experienced with simple vms). We've had cluster go into failed state multiple times and require full rebuild. We've had nodes simply stop responding but aks claims they are fine. It's been relatively unstable and we've had to work with support multiple in the past year because of issues. It has improved but it was pretty awful when they announced GA. We were surprised when they did. We had been on AKS for a bit and it was no where close to ready for GA.
  - alpb 8y ago
    I worked at Azure in the past and this sounds like many Azure products. Azure takes a lot of time post-GA to actually stabilize a product.

GordonS 8y ago

Azure Blob Storage also supports immutable blobs (they can't be overwritten or deleted once written to), which is interesting for various compliance and auditing scenarios: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/azure-immutable-blob-storage-now-in-public-preview/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/azure-immutable-blob-...

pmart123 8y ago
Interesting. S3 does have object versioning, which I believe once enabled, causes the object versions to preserve always be preserved. I think the AWS equivalent though is using AWS Glacier and creating a vault lock.

outworlder 8y ago

Disclaimer: also very anecdotal: However, most things are way worse than either GCP or AWS. Azure is just now rolling out availability zones. There are strange constraints everywhere, like you can only use premium storage accounts with specific VM types. You cannot use the same premium storage account for blobs. In general, not all configurations of skus for storage accounts, vms and disks are supported. You need to match availability set skus between scalesets and load balancers. If you connect an internal 'standard' load balancer to an instance, then it cannot reach the internet anymore. You can only attach one internal and one external load balancer to a scale set. You can't use the internal load balancer to loopback (same as internal AWS NLBs, but AWS has other options). And so on. It all seems poorly integrated. Budget 5x as much time for a similar deployment on Azure as compared to AWS or GCP. Add more buffer if you need flexible automation, as you'll bump into those edge cases often as people change parameters. They have a ridiculously huge amount of features compared to the other two major cloud providers, but integration between them is iffy. It is improving. AKS seems pretty good, although it's still new and people are reporting issues. But it is promising, you can actually tweak quite a few things, and I have high hopes for the compatibility story (even more so than GKE). AWS's EKS is a marginal implementation at best. On Azure AD, the tables are turned: it's AWS that provides an inconsistent story. There are many options, none are as well polished compared to Azure. They did learn from some AWS mistakes. But technically speaking they have a bunch of polishing to do.

013a 8y ago
EKS is, without a doubt in my mind, among the worst products Amazon has ever released. You pay $0.20/hour for the "benefit" of a managed high-availability control plane, no matter the size of the cluster, then are forced into a seemingly incomprehensible mess of CloudFormation templates to spawn a set of VMs which you now have to manage yourself. It makes no god damn sense. They had every opportunity to look at how Azure or Google were doing it and just straight-up copy it. For Christ's sake, they were over a year late to the game. I remember during the original announcement, maybe its documented somewhere, they announced that Fargate was coming to EKS "eventually". They don't even have managed worker nodes for normal VMs, if their intention is to bring Fargate as well we literally won't see it for another two years. It took them over six months to get from announcement to GA. The only good thing I have to say about it is that it's pretty reliable. Which isn't saying a lot because it doesn't do much, but they're happy to charge you $150/mo for what it does. Did I mention it takes over 20 minutes to create a new cluster? Well, actually, they "call" it a cluster, but its really just the control plane. The actual cluster can take up to 30 minutes for everything to actually connect and be usable. My company was interested in doing a "pristine" staging environment for every/some PR, throwing it away afterward. Interesting idea. Not worth it on EKS because their performance is so god awful. EKS is literally the reason why we abandoned AWS in favor of Google Cloud. I'm not suggesting that the rest of AWS isn't overall pretty great, but when nearly all of your workload is defined as "90% inside kubernetes, a few cloud-managed queues, and blob storage" Amazon isn't doing themselves any favors by ignoring the most interesting infrastructure technology to be released in the past five years. Oh, and our bill dropped by ~50% because preemptible instances on GCloud are actually easy to use, instead of the sheer insanity of trying to integrate spot fleets with an eksctl cluster.

pmart123 8y ago

What do you mean exactly by journaling? Do you mean that it supports an append mode or something else?