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Curious about details too. The parent's conclusion is to write off Azure, but I wonder if it's actually AWS or the way they use AWS that makes it hard to migrat

by mi_lk 2y ago

Curious about details too. The parent's conclusion is to write off Azure, but I wonder if it's actually AWS or the way they use AWS that makes it hard to migrate. Or put it in another way, if Mojong were to start with Azure but couldn't manage to migrate to AWS, which provider is the parent going to write off?

noodletheworld 2y ago
My experience has certainly been that AWS is both a) more stable, and b) has more migration resources and guides than the reverse. It was easier to go to AWS than to Azure; and I've done both in the past ~4 years. Migrating to AWS was just technical work. Migrating to azure was 'fight unexpected bugs and the fact it doesn't actually work in surprising situations'. The only reason to go to azure was that Microsoft waved a big fat $$$ discount to use their services. Migrating to AWS was a breeze.
- nosefrog 2y ago
  Yup, the hardest part about migrating to Azure was jumping between all the managed services that work everywhere else but are insanely buggy on Azure. We ended up with the most basic architecture you can imagine (other than AKS, which works great as long as you don't use any plugins) and we're still running into issues. We have a very long list of Azure features and services that we've banned people from using. Just got off a call with someone at Azure today who told us to setup our own NAT gateway instead of using Azure's because of an outage where we made too many requests and then got our NAT Gateway quota taken away for the next 2 hours.
  - cj 2y ago
    To be fair AWS also has quotas on NAT Gateways. Maximum 55k concurrent connections. After that, they make you deploy NAT gateways in other availability zones. And a max throughput of 10 Gbps. I imagine AWS would also tell you to deploy your own gateway if you were running into the 55k concurrent connection limit of managed NAT. AWS tends to be flexible with their quota enforcement in my experience, though.
    - nosefrog 2y ago
      Yea, I don't have a problem with the quota, more that the "out of quota" throttling lasts 2+ hours even after the traffic spike dies down.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > Yup, the hardest part about migrating to Azure was jumping between all the managed services that work everywhere else but are insanely buggy on Azure. Care to point out a concrete example? I've worked with Azure a few years ago and I wouldn't describe it as buggy. At most, I accuse them of not "getting" cloud as well as AWS. For example, the whole concept of a function app is ass-backwards, vs just deploying a Lambda with a specific capacity. That is mainly a reflection of having more years working with AWS, though.
- patmcc 2y ago
  My experience with AWS is the documentation can be bad/wrong, it can be difficult to find stuff, but the actual services are very solid. It does what you tell it to do. Stuff works. My experience with Azure is that it simply breaks in ridiculous and frankly unacceptable ways, all the time. It's like someone is unplugging network and power cables every couple hours just for fun.
- motorest 2y ago
  > My experience has certainly been that AWS is both a) more stable, and b) has more migration resources and guides than the reverse. I'm not sure how well founded the stability argument is. I still remember the infamous series of AWS outages that took place a couple of years ago. The fact that AWS invests heavily in vendor lock-in is a problem created by AWS, not their competitors.
  - noodletheworld 2y ago
    … I was scrolling back through the “400 reasons not to use azure” in the OP and off the top of my head I’ve seen a dozen of them personally. You decide if that’s more or less stable than AWS. I’d say the evidence is pretty empirical, but hey, all I can say is my experience was utterly unambiguous. You can argue a lot of things, but hundreds of azure fails in a big giant list is probably one of the tougher ones to go “no, this is fine compared to AWS!” about, imo.
smackeyacky 2y ago
The networking is so, so bad in azure. We ran into all kinds of craziness with simple things that kept kicking us in the nuts like port exhaustion between different subscriptions. I quit my last job partly because they were wedded to azure.

by mi_lk 2y ago

noodletheworld 2y ago

My experience has certainly been that AWS is both a) more stable, and b) has more migration resources and guides than the reverse. It was easier to go to AWS than to Azure; and I've done both in the past ~4 years. Migrating to AWS was just technical work. Migrating to azure was 'fight unexpected bugs and the fact it doesn't actually work in surprising situations'. The only reason to go to azure was that Microsoft waved a big fat $$$ discount to use their services. Migrating to AWS was a breeze.

nosefrog 2y ago
Yup, the hardest part about migrating to Azure was jumping between all the managed services that work everywhere else but are insanely buggy on Azure. We ended up with the most basic architecture you can imagine (other than AKS, which works great as long as you don't use any plugins) and we're still running into issues. We have a very long list of Azure features and services that we've banned people from using. Just got off a call with someone at Azure today who told us to setup our own NAT gateway instead of using Azure's because of an outage where we made too many requests and then got our NAT Gateway quota taken away for the next 2 hours.
- cj 2y ago
  To be fair AWS also has quotas on NAT Gateways. Maximum 55k concurrent connections. After that, they make you deploy NAT gateways in other availability zones. And a max throughput of 10 Gbps. I imagine AWS would also tell you to deploy your own gateway if you were running into the 55k concurrent connection limit of managed NAT. AWS tends to be flexible with their quota enforcement in my experience, though.
  - nosefrog 2y ago
    Yea, I don't have a problem with the quota, more that the "out of quota" throttling lasts 2+ hours even after the traffic spike dies down.
- motorest 2y ago
  > Yup, the hardest part about migrating to Azure was jumping between all the managed services that work everywhere else but are insanely buggy on Azure. Care to point out a concrete example? I've worked with Azure a few years ago and I wouldn't describe it as buggy. At most, I accuse them of not "getting" cloud as well as AWS. For example, the whole concept of a function app is ass-backwards, vs just deploying a Lambda with a specific capacity. That is mainly a reflection of having more years working with AWS, though.
patmcc 2y ago
My experience with AWS is the documentation can be bad/wrong, it can be difficult to find stuff, but the actual services are very solid. It does what you tell it to do. Stuff works. My experience with Azure is that it simply breaks in ridiculous and frankly unacceptable ways, all the time. It's like someone is unplugging network and power cables every couple hours just for fun.
motorest 2y ago
> My experience has certainly been that AWS is both a) more stable, and b) has more migration resources and guides than the reverse. I'm not sure how well founded the stability argument is. I still remember the infamous series of AWS outages that took place a couple of years ago. The fact that AWS invests heavily in vendor lock-in is a problem created by AWS, not their competitors.
- noodletheworld 2y ago
  … I was scrolling back through the “400 reasons not to use azure” in the OP and off the top of my head I’ve seen a dozen of them personally. You decide if that’s more or less stable than AWS. I’d say the evidence is pretty empirical, but hey, all I can say is my experience was utterly unambiguous. You can argue a lot of things, but hundreds of azure fails in a big giant list is probably one of the tougher ones to go “no, this is fine compared to AWS!” about, imo.

smackeyacky 2y ago

The networking is so, so bad in azure. We ran into all kinds of craziness with simple things that kept kicking us in the nuts like port exhaustion between different subscriptions. I quit my last job partly because they were wedded to azure.