4 ms·

In my experience (worked for organizations that used everything from on-prem server racks, to Linode to AWS to Azure), complaints about cloud infrastructure are

by hliyan 2y ago

In my experience (worked for organizations that used everything from on-prem server racks, to Linode to AWS to Azure), complaints about cloud infrastructure are proportional to managed service usage. I rarely hear teams that largely rely on virtual machines (perhaps with a managed RDBMS) complain. They do have to maintain a little extra scripting, but that's a minor inconvenience compared to battling issues and idiosyncrasies of managed services.

ajmurmann 2y ago
I'm sure it's gotten better now but back in 2016 provisioning VMs in Azure took so long that we joked that every time you provision an instance a Microsoft engineer gets in a car to buy the server.
- bjackman 2y ago
  Reminds me of how my Swiss bank doesn't support transfers outside business hours. I have to imagine when I click "send" in the UBS app, some guy named Hans-Ueli receives a tape printout and goes into the basement to move some silver pieces from one drawer to another.
- gunsle 2y ago
  If everyone in this thread shitting on Azure is going off how it worked in 2016 the comments here make a lot more sense. I know Microsoft bad still lingers in online communities but I have to say I’m surprised hackernews is still this anti Microsoft. In my experience, both Azure and AWS have their issues, it’s not like AWS is some perfect offering but you’d think that based on the comments.
- therealdrag0 2y ago
  Just restarting a vm still takes 20 minutes from clicking the restart button.
- HdS84 2y ago
  It's okay. We are forced ( by our client, who has forgotten to update it's it since 2005 ) to start several clients in a pipeline. Startup is less than a minute, going from zero to a full resource group with two VMS and ancillary resources.
xahrepap 2y ago
I wish I could better help my org see that. Luckily my boss agrees with me, but he's not in full control. Between the vendor lock-in, and the _almost but not quite api compatibility_ with OSS... I just dread as more teams adopt it. "But it's easier!" ... yeah, we'll see...
lancebeet 2y ago
I'm a little confused by this post. Obviously it's easier to maintain a plain VM than managed services. That's why people are paying a lot more money to the cloud providers for managed services, so they don't have to do it themselves. What you're saying is that this is essentially a pointless endeavor? I don't think this statement is entirely uncontroversial, since managed services are the main reason for many companies to migrate to cloud.
- conradev 2y ago
  Using managed services is not a pointless endeavor – they can save you a lot of time (and therefore money). Unless you need to switch providers, at which point it may take more time to adjust for differences in how those managed services operate. Managed services are absolutely not the main reason for moving to the cloud. Companies do it for the flexibility that comes with renting the real estate/energy/hardware instead of owning it.
  - scarab92 2y ago
    We use managed services, but only those that are managed versions of pre-existing software. For example, we'll used Managed Postgres, but not Azure or AWS's home grown databases. Makes migrating much easier.
    - withinboredom 2y ago
      Heh, until you need to rollback a specific table in postgres using their backup solution. IIRC, this is possible in AWS -- or at least, I'm 99% sure you can at least download the backup. In Azure? All you can do is restore the entire database, and you cannot download it.
      - seper8 2y ago
        You can def download it
        2y ago
scarab92 2y ago
Azure's anti competitive conduct is also the reason that AWS stopped lowering prices. Before 2014 or so, AWS would periodically reduce prices on major services passing on falling technology costs. Azure didn't like that, so they aligned their prices to AWS's, matching immediately the same discounts on the same service. This is a form a predatory pricing, because the goal is to kill the incentive for competitors to reduce prices, by denying them market share gains when they do.
- immibis 2y ago
  "Show us a better price and we'll match it" is not a new tactic nor exclusive to clouds.
Szpadel 2y ago
cloud services are great when they work. but in case something isn't you have no way to debug anything except maybe restarting the service if it's even possible. we had one customer that needed IPsec tunel to vpc where production servers were living, we didn't want to maintain such setup just for single customer so we check Aws offerings. and look at that they have managed IPsec solution, great. until client called that tunel is down and solution wa that they need to restart it on their end to resume connection. why? you can enable some logging to S3 but according to them everything should work. what we should do next? but even if you stick to just ec2 thing can go weird. our recent incident: ec2 instance stopped responding but ASG didn't replace it, any action on it throwers error that instance is not running but it was in running state.

by hliyan 2y ago

ajmurmann 2y ago

I'm sure it's gotten better now but back in 2016 provisioning VMs in Azure took so long that we joked that every time you provision an instance a Microsoft engineer gets in a car to buy the server.

bjackman 2y ago
Reminds me of how my Swiss bank doesn't support transfers outside business hours. I have to imagine when I click "send" in the UBS app, some guy named Hans-Ueli receives a tape printout and goes into the basement to move some silver pieces from one drawer to another.
gunsle 2y ago
If everyone in this thread shitting on Azure is going off how it worked in 2016 the comments here make a lot more sense. I know Microsoft bad still lingers in online communities but I have to say I’m surprised hackernews is still this anti Microsoft. In my experience, both Azure and AWS have their issues, it’s not like AWS is some perfect offering but you’d think that based on the comments.
therealdrag0 2y ago
Just restarting a vm still takes 20 minutes from clicking the restart button.
HdS84 2y ago
It's okay. We are forced ( by our client, who has forgotten to update it's it since 2005 ) to start several clients in a pipeline. Startup is less than a minute, going from zero to a full resource group with two VMS and ancillary resources.

xahrepap 2y ago

I wish I could better help my org see that. Luckily my boss agrees with me, but he's not in full control. Between the vendor lock-in, and the _almost but not quite api compatibility_ with OSS... I just dread as more teams adopt it. "But it's easier!" ... yeah, we'll see...

lancebeet 2y ago

I'm a little confused by this post. Obviously it's easier to maintain a plain VM than managed services. That's why people are paying a lot more money to the cloud providers for managed services, so they don't have to do it themselves. What you're saying is that this is essentially a pointless endeavor? I don't think this statement is entirely uncontroversial, since managed services are the main reason for many companies to migrate to cloud.

conradev 2y ago
Using managed services is not a pointless endeavor – they can save you a lot of time (and therefore money). Unless you need to switch providers, at which point it may take more time to adjust for differences in how those managed services operate. Managed services are absolutely not the main reason for moving to the cloud. Companies do it for the flexibility that comes with renting the real estate/energy/hardware instead of owning it.
- scarab92 2y ago
  We use managed services, but only those that are managed versions of pre-existing software. For example, we'll used Managed Postgres, but not Azure or AWS's home grown databases. Makes migrating much easier.
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    Heh, until you need to rollback a specific table in postgres using their backup solution. IIRC, this is possible in AWS -- or at least, I'm 99% sure you can at least download the backup. In Azure? All you can do is restore the entire database, and you cannot download it.
    - seper8 2y ago
      You can def download it
      - 2y ago

scarab92 2y ago

Azure's anti competitive conduct is also the reason that AWS stopped lowering prices. Before 2014 or so, AWS would periodically reduce prices on major services passing on falling technology costs. Azure didn't like that, so they aligned their prices to AWS's, matching immediately the same discounts on the same service. This is a form a predatory pricing, because the goal is to kill the incentive for competitors to reduce prices, by denying them market share gains when they do.

immibis 2y ago
"Show us a better price and we'll match it" is not a new tactic nor exclusive to clouds.

Szpadel 2y ago

cloud services are great when they work. but in case something isn't you have no way to debug anything except maybe restarting the service if it's even possible. we had one customer that needed IPsec tunel to vpc where production servers were living, we didn't want to maintain such setup just for single customer so we check Aws offerings. and look at that they have managed IPsec solution, great. until client called that tunel is down and solution wa that they need to restart it on their end to resume connection. why? you can enable some logging to S3 but according to them everything should work. what we should do next? but even if you stick to just ec2 thing can go weird. our recent incident: ec2 instance stopped responding but ASG didn't replace it, any action on it throwers error that instance is not running but it was in running state.