13 ms·
Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage
- diziet 13y agoThe lack of beefier instances is a bit tough to handle -- the largest memory machine is the A7 at 56gb, compared to a cr1.8xlarge at 244.
- JeremyMorgan 13y agoVery nice! I think Azure's biggest hurdle so far is the association with Microsoft and people assuming "well it must be expensive" only to be proven right when they sign up. That being said, some parts of Azure are pretty cheap and for small site it's affordable as it is now. You can get 10 free websites and a couple decent sized databases for around $40 a month which gives you better service and scalability than you would get from a hosting provider at $40 a month. If you're running a business or have some real traffic though, expect to pay considerably more for the service. It can really expensive, very fast.
- kenrikm 13y agoSo can hiring extra server admins, There's always a tradeoff.
- maaaats 13y agoAzure's pricing is great for side projects and small startups. Everything I have done so far has been free.
- rbanffy 13y agoDo they have a free tier like Amazon?
- JeremyMorgan 13y agoYou get 10 free websites with them, store your data elsewhere and just run applications. It's fast and reliable.
- patja 13y agoThe biggest unexpected fee I found in my comparison shopping was the $39 / month fee to support IP address SSL on Azure Websites.
- martinald 13y agoYes, definitely. This is a really annoying drawback of Azure websites, because apart from that it is a really good little service for lighter loads. We've found great success in using it for API services and the like that get little traffic, but could do with being separated out from the core website. It's actually worse than it just being $39/month, because you can't use the free or shared tiers, which is even more annoying. Azure peeps: please change this! It makes it very hard to justify using Azure websites when you could just get your own VM and install an SSL cert on that with no restrictions for lot less.
- bananas 13y agoWe spend about £1500 on Azure a month. It's considerably cheaper than a quarter rack with a ton of bandwidth and all the associated license management. It's cheap but not budget.
- apapli 13y agoI lost count of the times they mentioned Amazon or AWS in this article. This is going to be exciting, Microsoft are really gunning for them. Interestingly it looked like the price comparison tables were based on on-demand pricing. Does azure have something similar to AWS's reserved instance model?
- bskap 13y agoYes, it's just a percent off the on-demand pricing instead of being priced separately. Details at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/commitment-plans/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/commitment-plans/
- panarky 13y agoMicrosoft created an entirely new instance type to match EC2 prices, ostensibly because EC2 instances don't include load balancing. And the performance of the new "basic" instances will be reduced: Basic instances will have similar performance characteristics to AWS’s equivalent instances while the Standard instances will maintain their favorable performance. Anyone know how "favorable" Azure performance is on their standard instance type?
- snorrk 13y agoApparently some studies have shown that Azure has "3X better price for performance than Amazon EC2" http://www.scribd.com/doc/146167581/Cloud-Computing-Performance-a-Comparative-Analysis-of-5-Large-Cloud-IaaS-Providers http://www.scribd.com/doc/146167581/Cloud-Computing-Performa... Additional curated information can be found at: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/
- jw2013 13y agoIt's interesting that MSFT has already reduced Azure's price early this January to counter the price reductions by AWS back in January. And also in April 2013, MSFT responded AWS's price drop with 21%-33% Azure price reduction. Are we in the era of cloud price-bidding war? And the ultimate beneficiary are us the users.
- lelandriordan 13y agoYes. MS said that they would match any AWS price change.
- yulaow 13y agoWe have to hope they never form a sort of cartel or join an informal alliance. Until now we are really getting a lot of benefits due to this competition
- euank 13y agoI can't help but think that they already were in a sort of informal alliance. It took Google dropping prices for both AWS and Azure to drop... clearly they were both skimming profits off the top for the last while. Of course, a company does need to profit and I'm not accusing either of them of doing anything wrong, I'm just trying to say that these sorts of alliances form accidentally and naturally; both companies hit a competitive price and then hardware gets cheaper; software gets better... they could drop prices, but why cut into profits when there's no need? Inertia is a powerful force. It takes something actually happening to kick those price drops into action, generally.
- _delirium 13y ago> these sorts of alliances form accidentally and naturally The airline-ticket market is kind of fascinating to watch from that perspective. On directly competing routes major carriers often end up with the same fares and matching each others' moves, but the exact process of who leads and who follows is complex. There is all kinds of informal signalling where companies attempt to figure out the others' intentions without directly colluding. For example, a company might trial a $50 fare increase in response to increasing costs, and hope others will match it. If others don't, they might be forced to roll back the increase to avoid losing market share, admitting the trial was unsuccessful. It's in effect an offer of, "hey everyone, I think we should raise prices $50 on this route, do you match?", followed by "ok, I guess not, retracting" if they don't, but not explicit.
- iambateman 13y ago<rant class="disgruntled"> I've used Azure's cloud hosting in production for a half dozen sites and I have to say it's driving me nuts. We tried to flip DNS to Azure and it wouldn't resolve. It took our senior developer two days of talking to Azure support to solve. Ended up being their fault. Today I ported some work using PHP's mail() function, which evidently Azure doesn't support? This is probably our own fault for switching environments but we've moved sites from Media Temple and GoDaddy to Azure and consistently had problems. Needless to say, a price drop isn't making me any more excited about Azure. Their UI is convoluted (though beautiful, for sure) and I've had nothing but issues with it. </rant>
- city41 13y agoI've had some issues with Azure too and have fought it a bit. My app is Node/Postgres based. I'm pretty positive if I had developed a C#/SQL Server app, then Azure would be almost entirely smooth sailing. I can't really blame MS for targeting their own tech first. Node, PHP and the like are not quite as first class citizens in Azure yet.
- keithwarren 13y agoI never had trouble with any .net stack stuff but when i tried node I had some issues. Ultimately I used the MS tooling to provision the site the first (webmatrix) and from then on everything was fine.
- marshray 13y agoIf you (or anyone in the this thread) would be so kind as to write up a description of some specific functionality or interactions that we can improve and email them to me (m/a/r/a/y at microsoft dotcom) I would appreciate it. I can't promise instant gratification results, but I will do my best to get your feedback to the right person. Thanks :-)
- ravibhatt 13y agoI can give some point here: (A cluster below is hadoop cluster) - Machines reboot without any notifications. - Blob storage gets throttled ( i was told by a support staff) and at times become unreachable. - Some clusters i create, go into "Operational Mode" in that beautiful UI. and there is no way to delete that cluster! - At one instance, a cluster failed because, i was told, some internal azure tables got deleted! - Start up time (for PasS) for a cluster is 13+ mins regardless of how many machines you have in it.
- jtchang 13y agoHate on Microsoft all you want but this is a great thing. If Microsoft feels they want to play in the infrastructure as a service game they need to earn the customer's trust. Price matching is certainly one way to do it. Azure does run linux by the way (a lot of people don't know that). One thing I've been going back and forth about is whether I "trust" Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure more. Both are juggernauts but Microsoft seems very intent on staying and competing in this space. For what it's worth I've used Azure before and don't find the interface too bad. Also for spinning up the latest and greatest Windows Server instance you can't really beat Azure.
- yulaow 13y agoAlso with Bizspark you can have, if I remember well, like 150E/month to spend on azure for 3 years. Considering that almost any IT startup can access to bizspark, it is a nice thing to at least try it. Also I love the fact they are distributing their sdks for other os (linux and osx) and that they are all opensource on github
- bignaj 13y agoYou can also get free access to Azure with a MSDN subscription which is nice for those who have one :)
- sixothree 13y agoOurs gets us $100 / month credit. Which previously was not quite enough for one medium vm.
- city41 13y agoIt's also worth pointing out that BizSpark imposes no requirements or obligations on the startup. You are free to join BizSpark and never use any of its services and you don't owe MS anything at all.
- sachinag 13y ago
- nlh 13y agoYet another example of competition working out well for the consumer. Innovation, price drops, etc. Can you imagine a world where consumer broadband had the same level of competition? Sigh...a nerd can dream...
- pjmlp 13y ago> Can you imagine a world where consumer broadband had the same level of competition? Sigh...a nerd can dream... Yes, in most European countries. :)
- hueving 13y agoWell that's disappointing then. I wasn't particularly impressed with the service I got at my various hosts' homes in the UK. Is it really the case that the last mile physical infrastructure is considered common there so any provider can use it?
- matthewmacleod 13y agoYes - the UK telephone network is regulated, and any provider can supply services over the formerly-public BT network. ADSL2+ is available up to ~20Mbps; there's also BT's Infinity, which I think is FTTC with VDSL - that's up to about 70Mbps. Virgin Media has a private cable network, which is great if you're not in an oversubscribed area - bandwidth up to 152Mbps is available for low cost. In general the situation is pretty good, with a pretty wide variety of options.
- justincormack 13y agoLast mile fiber is not a free for all yet.
- cmarschner 13y agoYes but no only there. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
- marek1985 13y agoAzure is the right thing...
- opendomain 13y agoI am a Microsoft fan, but they are doing the cloud all wrong. To setup Azure, you have to use silverlight. To access the servers, you use remote desktop. Microsoft office 365 is $100 PER YEAR - much more than I would pay for the full suite (over 4years of average use) If you want to use SQL server, expect to pay $$$ - and integration or reporting services are not included. There is another feature that is actually nice: if allocate one server, you get 5 extra services automatically, including active directory, block storage, and network setup. if you do not know each part of the cloud, this helps you out, but it is done the "Microsoft way" and can be confusing compared to other cloud services.
- bignaj 13y agoSome of this just flat out isn't true... I access my Azure instances with SSH just like I did on AWS. No Remote Desktop.
- nigelsampson 13y agoAlso the management portal hasn't required Silverlight for at least a year now, it's all HTML5. And if you don't want to use the portal then there's command line tools for both Node and Powershell.
- _delirium 13y agoSeems to have been a more general change; the Bing Webmaster Tools portal dropped Silverlight about a year ago as well. Not sure if there was an official announcement or they've just quietly decided to move away from it.
- ternaryoperator 13y ago>To access the servers, you use remote desktop. Same exact thing on Rackspace for Windows instances. So what? >Microsoft Office 365 is $100 PER YEAR much more than I would pay for the full suite Huh? It can be used on up to 5 machines by, yes, 5 different users.
- spo81rty 13y ago
- dantiberian 13y agoSteve Martin comes off as oddly defensive when announcing these changes I’ve yet to meet a developer who travels just to hear about pricing updates, so you won’t see us take the stage at Build and use the opening moment to announce a price cut. This isn’t retail; innovation matters. I’ll cover pricing right here, right now. I'm not sure what purpose it serves except for making a stab at Amazon and Google.
- outside1234 13y agoI think he makes a valid point, why waste keynote time on prices? I'd much rather hear about the innovation.
- dantiberian 13y agoIt's a valid point but phrased oddly. He could have said something like: "We have so much amazing stuff to tell you at Build that we won't have time to cover price drops on Azure. Effective May 1 ..."
- asharpe 13y agoThat's a very cynical position to take. For once, here is a large market player focussing on providing delivering value via the product and not wasting time on pricing. In many cases, even with these price reductions (and their claim to match AWS/GCE), pricing is not the driver for hosting adoption - rather features, ease of use, performance etc. It is refreshing to see one of the big boys elevate this. It does set a high benchmark for what they are presenting: saying they have big innovation to announce ... and then not deliver ...
- Shebanator 13y agoWhat he means is: "we weren't expecting the Google and Amazon price cuts, so we aren't going to change our carefully planned keynote to announce this."
- dudus 13y agoAh, image tables, why use <table> when you can just add an image right? And I bet these tables were drawn in Paint. You can clearly see that in the first table the borders don't even match (bottom left). Am I the only one that gets annoyed with this?
- justinlink 13y agoI don't understand why Microsoft doesn't drastically reduce the price of their Windows instances. Microsoft is matching all of AWS prices, which means the Windows servers are more expensive than the Linux servers. Why not set your Windows server prices as the same as your Linux servers since you don't have to pay the licensing to yourself. This would make azure the easy choice for those running Windows servers. Maybe I'm missing some anti-competition law here or something, but it sounds funny that Microsoft is price matching Amazon's prices on Microsoft Windows Servers.
- matthewarkin 13y agoThey do have to pay licensing, its money that goes from one business unit to another within the Microsoft Corp, thus to not destroy the Azure budget, they pass the license costs to you instead of eating it.
- nnq 13y agoIt's not as if one business unit can't give a "90% discount" to the other if the grand common leadership thinks it's a good idea... now, that would be anticompetitive to all other hosting providers, but it would makes sense as a tactic in the "great war against *nix" that they are 100% loosing on the server side :)
- allochthon 13y agoI feel like this is one of the few times where I've seen capitalism work clearly and unambiguously along the lines that Adam Smith had in mind. I'm deriving something approaching mischievous glee.
- encoderer 13y agoI don't know, I see it every week a block from my house. Chevron drops the price of gas twenty cents and before the end of the day the citgo across the street has dropped theirs 21 cents. Of course when one raises prices, the others follow right back up.
- simonmd 13y agoYeahhh, if Rackspace would just go ahead and follow AWS,Google and Microsoft, that would be grreat...
- Patrick_Devine 13y agoDoes anyone else feel like Rackspace is just getting left behind in the IaaS business? Their prices and services offered is getting out of whack compared to everyone else.
- mandlar 13y agoI really wish they would have included some price cuts on the web site services.. Or at least give us an extra small instance for standard web sites. Scott Hanselman said it was "coming soon" back in August: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoAzureWebsitesMakeSense.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoA...
- TomGullen 13y agoWhy are all the cloud services suddenly dropping so dramatically? Is this a dramatic shift in strategy/tactics from the sector, or is it a cartel popping?
- amaks 13y agoAWS and Azure are getting defensive against Google's price drop: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/googles-cloud-platform-goes-on-the-offensive/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/googles-cloud-platform-goes....
- davidbanham 13y agoFYI, Azure runs Linux but does so on a Windows host. Whenever Windows needs a security update, it has to be rebooted. This means you need to plan for your Linux VM to go down weekly.
- leddt 13y agoIn my experience (running a Windows vm) the forced reboot is more like every two months. Also they have a feature called availability sets where you can load balance two VMs and they guarantee that one of them will always be up. Edit: Looking back at my email history, it's much less often than that. The interval between the previous two reboots was 6 months. They also gave about two weeks notice when it happened.
- shuffle2 13y agoI just had this happen recently and there was no warning. Perhaps it depends on the "level" of services you are using. My instance was just an "extra small" vm.
- davidbanham 13y agoBack when we were using Azure heavily, the answer from the Azure team members I was talking to was that they had no mechanism to warn me when the machine was going to go down. The primary workload we were running was video game servers. The server stores all state ephemerally in RAM tied to the process. When it goes down, that play session is over and all players are booted. This was just a constraint of the software that we had to live with. What I was looking for was some kind of heads up so that I could at least try and take down the process gracefully, but that wasn't possible. As said, this was a while ago. Hopefully the situation is now different.
- MichaelGG 13y agoBut in order to use Availability Sets, you MUST use their load-balancer thingy and share a single IP address. Meaning if you want to individually address each server, you've gotta get creative with port mapping. It's very annoying.
- sytelus 13y agoI still don't know why people find these "low" prices exciting. A most minimum spec VM in cloud still costs $380 per year. Considering these providers have advantage of scale plus load balancing ability, the cost should be 1/10th of this. I was looking for new host for my site and after I looked at Azure/AWS, I was floored how expensive these things are. Cloud prices had been riding in clouds for quite sometime. It has now came down but it's still way up there. The low margin claims by cloud providers is pure bullshit. The fact is that all of these people could have lowered their prices for quite sometime but they just chugged along until there was competitive pressure. Eventually, someone will become monopolist in this area and they would have free ride and all of these guys are in game to become that monopoly.
- nl 13y agoA most minimum spec VM in cloud still costs $380 per year. Not sure where you are getting that. On Azure, it is $1612=$192/year[1]. If your "in cloud" means other large providers as well, Digital Ocean will do it for $512=$60/year[2]. If you are prepared to go with smaller providers, then a very quick look around finds providers at $5/year[3]. I've worked on pricing at a large (enterprise) hosting company and I can assure you the "low margin" claim isn't "pure bullshit". The fact is that all of these people could have lowered their prices for quite sometime but they just chugged along until there was competitive pressure. Eventually, someone will become monopolist in this area and they would have free ride and all of these guys are in game to become that monopoly. Don't these two claims conflict with each other? Prices are dropping because of competitive pressure. If someone will become monopolist in this area AND margins are as high as you seem to think, won't it be simple for another provider to enter the market with slightly lower prices and take market share from the incumbent monopolist? [1] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma... [2] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ [3] http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/
- berns 13y agoNo low margins at all. Don't forget the bandwidth pricing. No low margins there at all. Digital Ocean includes up to 5 TB of free transfer. That would cost $614 per month at AWS. Not to mention dedicated server providers like OVH where you can get a modern Xeon and unmetered 300 Mbps bandwidth for $ 137 per month. Edit: typo
- afhsfsfdsss88 13y agoIt would just feel so dirty running a *nix vm on a Windows Server host...DIRTY.
- dalek2point3 13y agodoes anyone have a link to the usability of AWS v Google vs Azure? I'm looking to setup a personal server for all kinds of data wrangling, personal projects, websites etc. Im wondering what the most cost effective solution might be.
- sadfaceunread 13y agoMicrosoft has always been terrible at branding. Is it 'Microsoft Azure' or 'Windows Azure' it is both ways multiple places on their site.
- marshray 13y agoThe change to 'Microsoft Azure' was announced 6 days ago http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/03/25/upcoming-name-change-for-windows-azure.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/03/25/upco... beginning 3 days from now. So, yeah, it's in transition.
- chetanahuja 13y agoI'll just shamelessly copy my own tweet about the branding problems of Azure "It took them too long to understand that the Windows brand is tarnished forever. I propose ditch "Microsoft" too. Just "Azure"."
- chetanahuja 13y agoSeems like someone at Microsoft is reading this thread. In that case, an incubator I'm involved with (Tandem Entrepreneurs in the bay area) would like to get that sweet incubator deal if it's still on. We're already on a similar deal with AWS. And ahem, Google cloud folks if you're reading this... you know what to do. You can email me at my username at gmail
- mason240 13y agoThey really need to cut prices. I created a card-lookup site for a collectible card game (http://www.lotrlcg.com/ http://www.lotrlcg.com/). Originally it was written in PHP and was on regular shared hosting through InMotion Hosting for about $5/month. I rewrote it in ASP MCV and hosted it through Azure and they are charging about $20/month - a jump that I was not expecting. The convenience of being fully integrated into the MS stack is great, but I was planning on moving everything with project I start. Hopefully the price difference will be good enough to stay.
- bananas 13y ago$5 to $20 doesn't even raise itself above the noise for most people. The net gain for deployment with web deploy is enough on its own.
- jroseattle 13y agoThis is a good thing, but I wonder how this will affect people like Digital Ocean, Rackspace, etc. Still, this is a really great thing. Competing on price and/or features will only improve the environment for everyone. Probably not quite a race to the bottom, but there are deep pockets involved in the AMZN/GOOG/MSFT collective. I expect all the management tools to start to get a lot better.
- amits89 13y agoThis is a great strategy by Microsoft and it's part of "1st Mobile & 1st Cloud" strategy which is being adopted by Microsoft New CEO. As Nokia X came into market where user will get 7 GB of free cloud & this will increased upto 10 GB if user allow camera access to the cloud. Cut-throat competition is about to begin in cloud market, each and every player are ready to compete with attractive offering.