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I wish gcp and aws would take some notes (or make some acquisitions) to get close to Azure Devops... It has been a natural - dare I say pleasant - exercise to

I wish gcp and aws would take some notes (or make some acquisitions) to get close to Azure Devops... It has been a natural - dare I say pleasant - exercise to move some really rancid 15-year old legacy .net sql server/stored procedure nightmare applications to the cloud and get them into modern devops pipelines. That would not even be a project I would contemplate with aws or gcp. It's actually on par cost-wise in a lot of cases with running it on-prem which is a rare thing to say about the cloud. Azure is growing pretty damn fast. One thing they don't have over AWS however is the scale of cheap resources. If you're using public cloud properly, you should be leveraging spot instances wherever possible - and in that case, azure doesn't really have a solution here. GCP preemptible instances are closer. You can spin up a rediculous amount of machines for pennies on the dollar at 2am in us-east and I see no such solution in Azure. So all-in-all it seems that a good chunk of Azure's growth is proprietary migrations and thus they don't have to focus too hard on being cost competitive at the hardware level.

discordance 7y ago
Spot Instances have been around on Azure for a while. They were called Low Priority VMs previously but are now called Spot VMs [0]. 0: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  It's interesting because the blog post is dated December 2019 and they are in "preview". Cute strategy if they are indeed a rebrand. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-preview-of-azure-spot-virtual-machines/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-previe...
texasbigdata 7y ago
Didn't they just get spot instances recently? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/
GordonS 7y ago
Azure Batch let's you use pre-emptible VMs for at least a couple of years now. I used it on a compute-intensive AI project a while back - it worked quite well, and was cost efficient relative to normal VM pricing.
throwaway894345 7y ago
Can you elaborate on Azure DevOps? Is that the Azure infra-as-code solution? And if so how does it compare to CloudFormation?
- darkcha0s 7y ago
  The things are so different, you should really look both up. DevOps is essentially an entire suite for developers, from git repos, ticket boards, ci/cd pipelines, knowledge management and hell even a little package management sprinkled in. Brilliant tool.
  - throwaway894345 7y ago
    Ah, ok. Will do. Thanks for the recommendation.

discordance 7y ago

Spot Instances have been around on Azure for a while. They were called Low Priority VMs previously but are now called Spot VMs [0]. 0: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/

texasbigdata 7y ago
It's interesting because the blog post is dated December 2019 and they are in "preview". Cute strategy if they are indeed a rebrand. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-preview-of-azure-spot-virtual-machines/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-previe...

texasbigdata 7y ago

Didn't they just get spot instances recently? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/

GordonS 7y ago

Azure Batch let's you use pre-emptible VMs for at least a couple of years now. I used it on a compute-intensive AI project a while back - it worked quite well, and was cost efficient relative to normal VM pricing.

throwaway894345 7y ago

Can you elaborate on Azure DevOps? Is that the Azure infra-as-code solution? And if so how does it compare to CloudFormation?

darkcha0s 7y ago
The things are so different, you should really look both up. DevOps is essentially an entire suite for developers, from git repos, ticket boards, ci/cd pipelines, knowledge management and hell even a little package management sprinkled in. Brilliant tool.
- throwaway894345 7y ago
  Ah, ok. Will do. Thanks for the recommendation.