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Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in

Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.

shiftpgdn 12y ago
Glad I'm not alone. Trying to use my account during my Azure trial period resulted in getting 500 errors. I gave up and had a DO droplet going in like 30 seconds instead.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
You might want to try again. I have been using Azure for about 6 months with no problems at all.
city41 12y ago
Azure has been doing better. I've been using them for about 15 months now and the quality, uptime, speed, etc have all steadily improved. I haven't had an issue that was Azure's fault in quite some time now.
jread 12y ago
It's much better now. Check out the new Ivy Bridge/Haswell, SSD backed D and G series VMs. They are a vast improvement over the old AMD/magnetic backed A series.
photorized 12y ago
You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use than AWS, for example.
- jread 12y ago
  It was a multi-region, multi-hour outage on Nov 18. To my knowledge AWS has not experienced a multi-region outage. That said, they are learning from these events and improving stability.
  - photorized 12y ago
    You are right - the big outage happened in November. Feels like yesterday (it was a stressful day for me). AWS outages have been more limited in scope/geo, still took some sophisticated users of AWS offline (Netflix, Instagram come to mind).
  - aceperry 12y ago
    I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net. I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well. Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud. While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything critical.
    - rjbwork 12y ago
      They actually did a walkthrough of one of their DC's on video a while ago...it looked fairly impressive and well put together to me, but I've never been in anything but a small Co-Lo, so I'm not really sure what to look for.
    - antics 12y ago
      I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the situation, I hope you will understand why. It makes me think that you have not thought carefully about what you are saying here. If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.

shiftpgdn 12y ago

Glad I'm not alone. Trying to use my account during my Azure trial period resulted in getting 500 errors. I gave up and had a DO droplet going in like 30 seconds instead.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

You might want to try again. I have been using Azure for about 6 months with no problems at all.

city41 12y ago

Azure has been doing better. I've been using them for about 15 months now and the quality, uptime, speed, etc have all steadily improved. I haven't had an issue that was Azure's fault in quite some time now.

jread 12y ago

It's much better now. Check out the new Ivy Bridge/Haswell, SSD backed D and G series VMs. They are a vast improvement over the old AMD/magnetic backed A series.

photorized 12y ago

You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use than AWS, for example.

jread 12y ago
It was a multi-region, multi-hour outage on Nov 18. To my knowledge AWS has not experienced a multi-region outage. That said, they are learning from these events and improving stability.
- photorized 12y ago
  You are right - the big outage happened in November. Feels like yesterday (it was a stressful day for me). AWS outages have been more limited in scope/geo, still took some sophisticated users of AWS offline (Netflix, Instagram come to mind).
- aceperry 12y ago
  I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net. I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well. Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud. While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything critical.
  - rjbwork 12y ago
    They actually did a walkthrough of one of their DC's on video a while ago...it looked fairly impressive and well put together to me, but I've never been in anything but a small Co-Lo, so I'm not really sure what to look for.
  - antics 12y ago
    I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the situation, I hope you will understand why. It makes me think that you have not thought carefully about what you are saying here. If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.