7 ms·

Microsoft BizSpark includes free Azure access

86 points by niggler 14y ago

Avalaxy 14y ago
Azure is awesome, especially for startups :-) It's really easy to develop for (you don't need to set up everything by yourself, just use the available libraries) and it support virtually every programming language. Furthermore it's really fast (http://nasunicdn.s3.amazonaws.com/images/nasuni_infographic_the_state_of_cloud_storage_2013.jpg http://nasunicdn.s3.amazonaws.com/images/nasuni_infographic_...) and pretty cheap. It's a shame it's being ignored by most of the HN community.
- astrodust 14y ago
  It's because of Microsoft's historically hostile attitude towards anything Not Windows which rubs many people in this community the wrong way. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy?
  - cooldeal 14y ago
    The iPad killed Silverlight, not Microsoft. The idea of a plugin-free web powered by HTML5 will ultimately benefit everyone, especially given security exploits and performance issues in browser plugins. A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't. Silverlight still works on Windows 8 machines. What do you want them to do? Sue Apple for banning a Silverlight plugin from their tablets and phones? The actual Silverlight and XAML skills are directly applicable to developing Windows 8 Store apps and Windows Phone apps.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      So the iPod killed the Zune? And the old Windows Phone OS? Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows.
      - ghurlman 14y ago
        So you're saying the iPod didn't kill the Zune?
      - cooldeal 14y ago
        >Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows First, Microsoft has three major divisions bringing in somewhat equal amounts of revenue, Windows, Office and Server & Tools. Second, if you apply the same metric to other companies, it would be foolish to use OS X, Gmail, Docs. App Engine. Android, and perhaps even Azure. Third, Microsoft could've competed by making a better Zune, perhaps, but it's not the same thing as the iPad killing Silverlight, because that was done by not supporting plugins. Tablets are slowly overtaking PCs in sales, what sense does it make to push new versions of a plugin that will never run on most of them? The transitions have mostly been smooth, VB apps still run on Windows. Hell, a game bundled with the Windows 95 CD still runs unchanged on a Windows 8 machine. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hover/ http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hov...
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        astrodust 14y ago
        Google App Engine is a risky bet for the same reason as Azure, and perhaps even more so. Google could decide tomorrow that it's not worth supporting and tank it, or change the pricing model to make it no longer cost effective. I don't think the same thing can be said for Amazon's AWS or other infrastructure providers like RackSpace where that would be as much as going out of business. I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't take care of Windows, if anything they support it too much, but anything that's not Windows is just one executive decision away from being shut down.
        outside1234 14y ago
        XBox runs on Azure from what I hear. Its not getting shut down anytime soon. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd even go as far as to say that Azure is the future of Windows Server.
    - camus 14y ago
      Lol , Microsoft killed silverlight. And silverlight developers to use HTML5 instead , what a joke. Latest IE versions dont even support silverlight anymore but do support Flash ... that what you get when you use closed source solutions , you cant even patch them yourself...
    - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
      I don't think the iPad killed Silverlight per se. I think it was dead on arrival for the most part; it was just not a good technology.
  - HardyLeung 14y ago
    Steve Jobs killed Silverlight (and Flash). Not by providing a strictly superior technology, but by declaring that the category (rich web client) is unimportant. I'm unhappy that Silverlight is dead but not because of Microsoft.
    - camus 14y ago
      no he did not , MS killed it itself.
    - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
      I don't think that all development should be on the Web but I think the clear winner for Web "rich clients" is the browser, not all these plugins.
  - OGinparadise 14y ago
    Yeah and IBM helped [Goldman rule] before WWII so they cannot possibly do anything good, ever. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? Ironically, Microsoft is usually known to support things for ages, getting a lot of flak in the process.
    - tracker1 14y ago
      Aside from windows and some of the developer tools, not really aware of much that MS has supported more than 1 generation back, which is pretty typical of most software companies. My only point of contention here is that I won't use a "cross platform" MS technology that hasn't made it to a 3rd release on the non-windows platforms. I do a lot of .Net (ASP/MVC mostly) for server-side code... but never really saw an advantage to Silverlight over Flash/Flex development. I don't fault MS for shuttering Silverlight... but do think that MS should have made efforts for taking Silverlight projects into desktop applets, since the web stuff is a dead end for non-JS/HTML5. MS took what seems like ungodly long to release IE10 for Windows 7... a year ago, it was current... now a lot of new focus has been on WebRTC, where IE will again trail the pack. IE also introduced some new inconsistencies with the Metro docking behavior. I do like the IE10 grid system a bit better than what will likely become the blessed spec though.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? I don't know many happy Flash developers these days, either.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      If Adobe had made a lean, mean, mobile capable player, produced an (understandable) open standard for what Flash is they could've had a shot at being bundled into iOS. Adobe's done a pretty good job of sabotaging a good thing. Maybe they'll make a fully functional JavaScript Flash player to avoid having to use the plug-in in the first place.
      - camus 14y ago
        Adobe did sabotage Flash and basically every Macromedia products. What's left of Macromedia innovative vibe? nothing. Adobe has 0 strategy regarding web development solutions , Flash is dead, coldfusion is dead , Fireworks is dead (a great product for webdesigners), dreamweaver lacks of basic features even a little text editor like sublime text has ... all the edge stuff is a joke. I wish there would be a serious alternative to photoshop , i wish adobe was just died.
        speeder 14y ago
        I still.use Fireworks 8 to do game art, especially to mix pixel art with vectors. I wish a open source clone of it existed :( Also I wish that Adobe die in a fire. The only product they ever made that made me happy is the font Source Sans Pro.
        czk 14y ago
        Hi, Source Sans Pro is open source (SIL Open Font License): https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro
  - outside1234 14y ago
    Do you know any Apple Newton developers that are happy? Or Google Wave developers? Stuff fails in the marketplace - it is a sign of maturity that the company shoots the stuff that isn't working and focuses on the things that are.
  - ismaelc 14y ago
    Dude I'm a Silverlight developer, and I'm still able to leverage my XAML/C# skills to build Windows 8/Phone apps. I'm quite happy with that.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- 3327 14y ago
  we run on AZURE! it rocks (period).
  - Avalaxy 14y ago
    Could you share with us how you're using Azure? I'd love to hear from other startups running Azure.
    - cmircea 14y ago
      We're using Azure Web Sites for our site (public/admin), planning on using storage and cloud services soon. It's been very fast and perfectly reliable, also free thanks to BizSpark =)
    - scoj 14y ago
      I am on Azure as well for my startup (sharpplm.com). We are a document/quality management system for small mfg companies. The app was built as a straight .NET web app with sql server backend, so I went the VM path for now. Since its bootstrapped, Bizspark really has helped cut the startup costs. So far I've been really happy, also all the other software is a nice added bonus.
    - 3327 14y ago
      Yes, we run two webapps on azure, migration was super easy (we were on amazon before) its pretty straight forward couldn't be happier to be honest. We applied to bizspark and got accepted (which was also straight forward). So since we have Azure free for a year we deployed our apps pretty recently actually. TBH, not that any of the services are that complicated, the UI is way better than Amazon's, amazon has a strange way of doing things even on amazon.com. In short, clean, easy to scale, and does the job. edit forgot this: startup is www.bemvi.com
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - niggler 14y ago
    Not true at all. "So you basically need to buy windows and visual studio to work with Azure" Comes with BizSpark (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-47B9-A65D-DF84EF88511B/Products_by_Benefit_Level.xlsx http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-4... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500) "if you are not into windows centered development, Azure is not that interesting ." You can use their website to set everything up. I did it from my iMac. As a simple test: http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ <-- this is using their Heroku-like offering. You push to a git endpoint. http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ <-- this is using a ubuntu VM running in their AWS-like offering. Both are running the nodejs script: var http = require('http'); var port = process.env.PORT || 1337; http.createServer(function(req, res) { res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' }); res.end('Stop niggling!\n'); }).listen(port);
    - outside1234 14y ago
      you can do everything on a Mac or Linux. you don't need to be a Windows user. In fact, the CLI for Azure is a node.js app.
- nacs 14y ago
  Oh the irony of hosting a pro-Azure benchmark image on the Amazon (S3) cloud.
outside1234 14y ago
2 small instances and storage for free. Its a great offer - we host our bootstrapped node.js application on Azure and it works great - and is net free for us.
- eli 14y ago
  It's actually more flexible than that too. You get 1500 hours of small instance credit, but you can apply it to larger instances sizes (for proportionally less time) or other services like "Websites" which I haven't used but is apparently some sort of PaaS.
- vineet 14y ago
  I was looking for this detail - and not sure where it says you get 2 instances free. Can you post a link? Edit: I did my math wrong previously. It is 1500 hours/month.
  - outside1234 14y ago
    1500 hours a month - so for a small instance that works out to 2 instances. Eli below has it right - you can scale that up as well and get a smaller number of free instance time.
    - Avalaxy 14y ago
      Can you also choose to use (more than 2) extra small instances? They provide better bang for the buck than the small instances.
      - cmircea 14y ago
        Sure. And you have 10 of those MSDN subscriptions, one for each developer. You can't use say 20 small instances for one site, but you can use 2 instances for 20 separate sites/services.
rdl 14y ago
BizSpark is really one of the best free/open resources for startups that I've ever seen. It's not as useful as, say, YC, but it's essentially open to any legitimate startup, and gives you fairly substantial benefits.
Jacob4u2 14y ago
Something that most people might not know about this is that you can spin up at least 2 small linux instances on this plan. I run a Node.js app on a small Ubuntu instance with git based deployment (great guide here based on ec2: http://cuppster.com/2011/05/12/diy-node-js-server-on-amazon-ec2/ http://cuppster.com/2011/05/12/diy-node-js-server-on-amazon-...). Right now this server also runs my Mongo server, but as we scale I'll probably move it to its own instance.
ridruejo 14y ago
Their VM depot is their equivalent to the AWS marketplace and is a good place to start if you want to launch apps on Azure http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/ http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/
vyrotek 14y ago
As others have mentioned, BizSpark is indeed a great program. IActionable.com just 'completed' the 3 year program. Azure sure has changed quite a bit since those early days :)
outside1234 14y ago
Another thing to know about BizSpark is that it has higher tiers. If you are doing something interesting on Azure and it gets traction, you should reach out to Microsoft and let them know. They have a tier called "Bizspark One" where you can get $60,000 in free resources and visibility in their customer base by co-presenting at shows etc. Finally, they also have an accelerator allied with TechStars in Seattle - where you can get all of this plus TechStars mentoring: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/accelerator/ http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/accelerator/
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
douglascrets 14y ago
Wow, reading through this and pretty psyched that people want to talk about this. I run community management in Mountain View for the global BizSpark program, which gives free software licenses to developers. I am all for helping you all know more about the program and helping get more information on Azure. If you all want to chat with me, you can email me at dcrets at microsoft. Thinking of doing a meetup on Azure and having some tech evangelists there. We would also livestream. Let me know if anyone is interested.
robryan 14y ago
It also seems at this stage of development Microsoft are putting a lot of resources into quality support. Someone at my office started using Azure for free through biz spark and got someone from Microsoft on the phone who knew the tech details answering their questions. Something I couldn't imagine ever getting from AWS or google, especially before dropping some serious dollars for extra support.
neotek 14y ago
I'm in a techstars-affiliated accelerator in Adelaide (Australia) and part of our perks include $60k in Azure credits, which is an absolute godsend for cash-poor startups like ours. There's no way we could afford to do what we're doing on AWS.
wilhil 14y ago
Ehh... Hasn't it always? I was on Bizspark which gave MSDN which gave Azure usage as part of the perks :/
spo81rty 14y ago
My startup is in Bizspark and uses Azure. (http://stackify.com http://stackify.com) We looked at AWS vs Azure and decided on Azure due to its PaaS capabilities. It has its quirks like anything done. Their support is fantastic. We have two local evangelist type reps, a local sales rep, and have talked to many people through their tech support. Even exchanged emails with their developers and management. I really like their SQL federations and table storage. Both are designed for massive scale. Although they don't have a true NoSql solution, you can accomplish most things you would want NoSql for with those two options. I do wish they would allow secondary indexes on their table storage. It is possible to use VMs on Azure and use MongoDB or some other product. But part of the reason we chose Azure is we don't want to administer any of that junk. Good news about Azure is they use the platform internally which will continue to drive it's innovation.

86 points by niggler 14y ago

Azure is awesome, especially for startups :-) It's really easy to develop for (you don't need to set up everything by yourself, just use the available libraries) and it support virtually every programming language. Furthermore it's really fast (http://nasunicdn.s3.amazonaws.com/images/nasuni_infographic_the_state_of_cloud_storage_2013.jpg http://nasunicdn.s3.amazonaws.com/images/nasuni_infographic_...) and pretty cheap. It's a shame it's being ignored by most of the HN community.

astrodust 14y ago
It's because of Microsoft's historically hostile attitude towards anything Not Windows which rubs many people in this community the wrong way. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy?
- cooldeal 14y ago
  The iPad killed Silverlight, not Microsoft. The idea of a plugin-free web powered by HTML5 will ultimately benefit everyone, especially given security exploits and performance issues in browser plugins. A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't. Silverlight still works on Windows 8 machines. What do you want them to do? Sue Apple for banning a Silverlight plugin from their tablets and phones? The actual Silverlight and XAML skills are directly applicable to developing Windows 8 Store apps and Windows Phone apps.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    So the iPod killed the Zune? And the old Windows Phone OS? Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows.
    - ghurlman 14y ago
      So you're saying the iPod didn't kill the Zune?
    - cooldeal 14y ago
      >Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows First, Microsoft has three major divisions bringing in somewhat equal amounts of revenue, Windows, Office and Server & Tools. Second, if you apply the same metric to other companies, it would be foolish to use OS X, Gmail, Docs. App Engine. Android, and perhaps even Azure. Third, Microsoft could've competed by making a better Zune, perhaps, but it's not the same thing as the iPad killing Silverlight, because that was done by not supporting plugins. Tablets are slowly overtaking PCs in sales, what sense does it make to push new versions of a plugin that will never run on most of them? The transitions have mostly been smooth, VB apps still run on Windows. Hell, a game bundled with the Windows 95 CD still runs unchanged on a Windows 8 machine. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hover/ http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hov...
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - astrodust 14y ago
        Google App Engine is a risky bet for the same reason as Azure, and perhaps even more so. Google could decide tomorrow that it's not worth supporting and tank it, or change the pricing model to make it no longer cost effective. I don't think the same thing can be said for Amazon's AWS or other infrastructure providers like RackSpace where that would be as much as going out of business. I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't take care of Windows, if anything they support it too much, but anything that's not Windows is just one executive decision away from being shut down.
        outside1234 14y ago
        XBox runs on Azure from what I hear. Its not getting shut down anytime soon. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd even go as far as to say that Azure is the future of Windows Server.
  - camus 14y ago
    Lol , Microsoft killed silverlight. And silverlight developers to use HTML5 instead , what a joke. Latest IE versions dont even support silverlight anymore but do support Flash ... that what you get when you use closed source solutions , you cant even patch them yourself...
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    I don't think the iPad killed Silverlight per se. I think it was dead on arrival for the most part; it was just not a good technology.
- HardyLeung 14y ago
  Steve Jobs killed Silverlight (and Flash). Not by providing a strictly superior technology, but by declaring that the category (rich web client) is unimportant. I'm unhappy that Silverlight is dead but not because of Microsoft.
  - camus 14y ago
    no he did not , MS killed it itself.
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    I don't think that all development should be on the Web but I think the clear winner for Web "rich clients" is the browser, not all these plugins.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  Yeah and IBM helped [Goldman rule] before WWII so they cannot possibly do anything good, ever. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? Ironically, Microsoft is usually known to support things for ages, getting a lot of flak in the process.
  - tracker1 14y ago
    Aside from windows and some of the developer tools, not really aware of much that MS has supported more than 1 generation back, which is pretty typical of most software companies. My only point of contention here is that I won't use a "cross platform" MS technology that hasn't made it to a 3rd release on the non-windows platforms. I do a lot of .Net (ASP/MVC mostly) for server-side code... but never really saw an advantage to Silverlight over Flash/Flex development. I don't fault MS for shuttering Silverlight... but do think that MS should have made efforts for taking Silverlight projects into desktop applets, since the web stuff is a dead end for non-JS/HTML5. MS took what seems like ungodly long to release IE10 for Windows 7... a year ago, it was current... now a lot of new focus has been on WebRTC, where IE will again trail the pack. IE also introduced some new inconsistencies with the Metro docking behavior. I do like the IE10 grid system a bit better than what will likely become the blessed spec though.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? I don't know many happy Flash developers these days, either.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    If Adobe had made a lean, mean, mobile capable player, produced an (understandable) open standard for what Flash is they could've had a shot at being bundled into iOS. Adobe's done a pretty good job of sabotaging a good thing. Maybe they'll make a fully functional JavaScript Flash player to avoid having to use the plug-in in the first place.
    - camus 14y ago
      Adobe did sabotage Flash and basically every Macromedia products. What's left of Macromedia innovative vibe? nothing. Adobe has 0 strategy regarding web development solutions , Flash is dead, coldfusion is dead , Fireworks is dead (a great product for webdesigners), dreamweaver lacks of basic features even a little text editor like sublime text has ... all the edge stuff is a joke. I wish there would be a serious alternative to photoshop , i wish adobe was just died.
      - speeder 14y ago
        I still.use Fireworks 8 to do game art, especially to mix pixel art with vectors. I wish a open source clone of it existed :( Also I wish that Adobe die in a fire. The only product they ever made that made me happy is the font Source Sans Pro.
        czk 14y ago
        Hi, Source Sans Pro is open source (SIL Open Font License): https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro
- outside1234 14y ago
  Do you know any Apple Newton developers that are happy? Or Google Wave developers? Stuff fails in the marketplace - it is a sign of maturity that the company shoots the stuff that isn't working and focuses on the things that are.
- ismaelc 14y ago
  Dude I'm a Silverlight developer, and I'm still able to leverage my XAML/C# skills to build Windows 8/Phone apps. I'm quite happy with that.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
3327 14y ago
we run on AZURE! it rocks (period).
- Avalaxy 14y ago
  Could you share with us how you're using Azure? I'd love to hear from other startups running Azure.
  - cmircea 14y ago
    We're using Azure Web Sites for our site (public/admin), planning on using storage and cloud services soon. It's been very fast and perfectly reliable, also free thanks to BizSpark =)
  - scoj 14y ago
    I am on Azure as well for my startup (sharpplm.com). We are a document/quality management system for small mfg companies. The app was built as a straight .NET web app with sql server backend, so I went the VM path for now. Since its bootstrapped, Bizspark really has helped cut the startup costs. So far I've been really happy, also all the other software is a nice added bonus.
  - 3327 14y ago
    Yes, we run two webapps on azure, migration was super easy (we were on amazon before) its pretty straight forward couldn't be happier to be honest. We applied to bizspark and got accepted (which was also straight forward). So since we have Azure free for a year we deployed our apps pretty recently actually. TBH, not that any of the services are that complicated, the UI is way better than Amazon's, amazon has a strange way of doing things even on amazon.com. In short, clean, easy to scale, and does the job. edit forgot this: startup is www.bemvi.com
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- niggler 14y ago
  Not true at all. "So you basically need to buy windows and visual studio to work with Azure" Comes with BizSpark (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-47B9-A65D-DF84EF88511B/Products_by_Benefit_Level.xlsx http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-4... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500) "if you are not into windows centered development, Azure is not that interesting ." You can use their website to set everything up. I did it from my iMac. As a simple test: http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ <-- this is using their Heroku-like offering. You push to a git endpoint. http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ <-- this is using a ubuntu VM running in their AWS-like offering. Both are running the nodejs script: var http = require('http'); var port = process.env.PORT || 1337; http.createServer(function(req, res) { res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' }); res.end('Stop niggling!\n'); }).listen(port);
  - outside1234 14y ago
    you can do everything on a Mac or Linux. you don't need to be a Windows user. In fact, the CLI for Azure is a node.js app.
nacs 14y ago
Oh the irony of hosting a pro-Azure benchmark image on the Amazon (S3) cloud.

outside1234 14y ago

2 small instances and storage for free. Its a great offer - we host our bootstrapped node.js application on Azure and it works great - and is net free for us.

eli 14y ago
It's actually more flexible than that too. You get 1500 hours of small instance credit, but you can apply it to larger instances sizes (for proportionally less time) or other services like "Websites" which I haven't used but is apparently some sort of PaaS.
vineet 14y ago
I was looking for this detail - and not sure where it says you get 2 instances free. Can you post a link? Edit: I did my math wrong previously. It is 1500 hours/month.
- outside1234 14y ago
  1500 hours a month - so for a small instance that works out to 2 instances. Eli below has it right - you can scale that up as well and get a smaller number of free instance time.
  - Avalaxy 14y ago
    Can you also choose to use (more than 2) extra small instances? They provide better bang for the buck than the small instances.
    - cmircea 14y ago
      Sure. And you have 10 of those MSDN subscriptions, one for each developer. You can't use say 20 small instances for one site, but you can use 2 instances for 20 separate sites/services.

rdl 14y ago

BizSpark is really one of the best free/open resources for startups that I've ever seen. It's not as useful as, say, YC, but it's essentially open to any legitimate startup, and gives you fairly substantial benefits.

Jacob4u2 14y ago

Something that most people might not know about this is that you can spin up at least 2 small linux instances on this plan. I run a Node.js app on a small Ubuntu instance with git based deployment (great guide here based on ec2: http://cuppster.com/2011/05/12/diy-node-js-server-on-amazon-ec2/ http://cuppster.com/2011/05/12/diy-node-js-server-on-amazon-...). Right now this server also runs my Mongo server, but as we scale I'll probably move it to its own instance.

ridruejo 14y ago

Their VM depot is their equivalent to the AWS marketplace and is a good place to start if you want to launch apps on Azure http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/ http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/

vyrotek 14y ago

As others have mentioned, BizSpark is indeed a great program. IActionable.com just 'completed' the 3 year program. Azure sure has changed quite a bit since those early days :)

outside1234 14y ago

Another thing to know about BizSpark is that it has higher tiers. If you are doing something interesting on Azure and it gets traction, you should reach out to Microsoft and let them know. They have a tier called "Bizspark One" where you can get $60,000 in free resources and visibility in their customer base by co-presenting at shows etc. Finally, they also have an accelerator allied with TechStars in Seattle - where you can get all of this plus TechStars mentoring: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/accelerator/ http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/accelerator/

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

douglascrets 14y ago

Wow, reading through this and pretty psyched that people want to talk about this. I run community management in Mountain View for the global BizSpark program, which gives free software licenses to developers. I am all for helping you all know more about the program and helping get more information on Azure. If you all want to chat with me, you can email me at dcrets at microsoft. Thinking of doing a meetup on Azure and having some tech evangelists there. We would also livestream. Let me know if anyone is interested.

robryan 14y ago

It also seems at this stage of development Microsoft are putting a lot of resources into quality support. Someone at my office started using Azure for free through biz spark and got someone from Microsoft on the phone who knew the tech details answering their questions. Something I couldn't imagine ever getting from AWS or google, especially before dropping some serious dollars for extra support.

neotek 14y ago

I'm in a techstars-affiliated accelerator in Adelaide (Australia) and part of our perks include $60k in Azure credits, which is an absolute godsend for cash-poor startups like ours. There's no way we could afford to do what we're doing on AWS.

wilhil 14y ago

Ehh... Hasn't it always? I was on Bizspark which gave MSDN which gave Azure usage as part of the perks :/

spo81rty 14y ago

My startup is in Bizspark and uses Azure. (http://stackify.com http://stackify.com) We looked at AWS vs Azure and decided on Azure due to its PaaS capabilities. It has its quirks like anything done. Their support is fantastic. We have two local evangelist type reps, a local sales rep, and have talked to many people through their tech support. Even exchanged emails with their developers and management. I really like their SQL federations and table storage. Both are designed for massive scale. Although they don't have a true NoSql solution, you can accomplish most things you would want NoSql for with those two options. I do wish they would allow secondary indexes on their table storage. It is possible to use VMs on Azure and use MongoDB or some other product. But part of the reason we chose Azure is we don't want to administer any of that junk. Good news about Azure is they use the platform internally which will continue to drive it's innovation.