[HN Gopher] My Poor Experience With Azure (or why I'm sticking w...
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My Poor Experience With Azure (or why I'm sticking with AWS)
Author : mooreds
Score : 158 points
Date : 2022-07-18 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (new.pythonforengineers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (new.pythonforengineers.com)
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I have a couple always free VMs on Oracle cloud. They are
| actually free.
| atlgator wrote:
| Azure is the obvious choice for the enterprise. Azure App Service
| is dead simple to deploy to and manage for enterprise monolithic
| application where elasticity really isn't a requirement. If you
| stay within the ecosystem of AD+Azure DevOps+App Service it's a
| no-brainer. For anything else, AWS.
| nathants wrote:
| all clouds provide buggy over priced services. some clouds
| provide stable primitives.
|
| judge clouds on the stability of their primitives, nothing else.
| halfbrite wrote:
| We are having a combined issue very similar to this, and other
| comments in this thread.
|
| We have been using Azure for 5+ years, we are quite heavily
| invested. Our payment card expired and so we decided (as good
| customers) to update our card, only Microsoft's billing will not
| accept it because it will not go over to the embedded payment
| gateway page.
|
| We provided screen share sessions to their "manager", we provided
| HAR files from Edge to support "engineering" diagnose the
| problem, and we provided proof that it is their own servers
| responding with 500 Internal Server Error messages and 403
| Forbidden errors.
|
| The Microsoft support agent admitted that there is a fault with
| their system. They admitted that they need to fix it.
|
| We keep asking for the issue to be escalated - it never is. We
| keep asking for the issue to be treated as a complaint - it never
| is. The agent simply will not do the things we ask.
|
| Communication is like getting blood out of a stone. Once a week
| if we push out two or three reminders, always out of hours even
| though they repeatedly ask us what ours suit us. They even
| schedule calls and don't call.
|
| 2 months later, they tell us that 35% of Microsoft customers with
| our bank have this issue and they're not going to do anything
| about it, so uh, I guess we're up the creek with this? Thanks
| Microsoft, you're letting down our 70,000ish customers and we're
| not going to take the blame for it - we'll be honest with them.
|
| And so we became AWS customers. Zero problems with payment. Zero
| problems with our Linux services migrating across. The only issue
| for us is a technical debt issue - migrating old .NET web apps.
|
| The whole affair has really soured my personal and our customers
| opinion of Microsoft.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Unfortunately, one common approach with clouds these days is
| "unless you're big enough or in good relation with us and
| advertise us to others at every opportunity (or otherwise align
| with our vision where we want to be), we won't do shit for you,
| because it doesn't affect our bottom line".
|
| In other words, after the initial years where clouds were
| startup-friendly, it became very enterprisey very fast.
| smsm42 wrote:
| A lot of sites are broken with ad blockers. It's usually even not
| because of ads. It's because of tracking JS, which gets called
| from everywhere (because we need metrics to track user behavior!)
| but the code around it assumes metrics never fail, so when
| metrics script gets cut by adblocker, everything fails. It could
| be pretty easy to avoid this, but nobody approves a budget to
| refactor the site to work with adblockers, and I am pretty sure
| nobody tests with adblockers. Also, as a bonus, if you break
| adblockers, people would disable them and give us our metrics we
| need to run A/B tests and generate nice reports, so it's a win-
| win, isn't it?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah... most large companies definitely need more testers
| running common adblockers like ublock or pihole with the
| default list.
|
| Of course, worse still is the clear misses on WCAG for visibly
| impaired... or people like me who max out text and content size
| on their phones... really pisses me off to no end when a modal
| + buttons are off screen with no ability to zoom or scroll the
| modal dialog. First two things I check when trying a _new_ ui
| framework, is how does that modal interaction work, and what
| does the calendar /time interface look like.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Azure has a pretty terrible product and user experience, but what
| may be even worse is the support. I pretty often try to report
| bugs that I encounter, but they ignore those and point to
| unhelpful documents that I've already seen. Usually, if I have a
| real problem, I will have to find the solution myself. One of the
| last support requests I raised was assigned to someone who went
| on a week long vacation the next day. This is what happens when
| the purchasing decisions are divorced from those who actually use
| the product - no incentive to improve on the Microsoft side (for
| basically all their products).
| linuxftw wrote:
| > This is what happens when the purchasing decisions are
| divorced from those who actually use the product - no incentive
| to improve on the Microsoft side (for basically all their
| products).
|
| If there was a way to sum up Microsoft's entire business model,
| this is it. Azure is a major player because they know how to
| sell to the C-suite.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > This is what happens when the purchasing decisions are
| divorced from those who actually use the product - no incentive
| to improve on the Microsoft side (for basically all their
| products).
|
| Microsoft is one of the largest consumers of Azure services. I
| don't think it's fair to say they are divorced from the users
| of their services.
| j_barbossa wrote:
| Azure has an excellent product support, at least compared to
| GCP.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It needs it. "Here are 10 ways to think about reservations in
| Azure" vs "GCP auto-applies a discount if you use a resource
| for more than 80% of a month."
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| Not in my experience
| js4ever wrote:
| I tried Azure 1 year ago and I was really shocked to see failures
| to deploy basic things like VMs or AKS, failures that required to
| contact support to get fixed. And support took several days to
| answer... WOW
| jeffwask wrote:
| Having used both... Azure pricing is like a used car dealership.
| Would you like groups with your active directory, that's an up
| charge. Every service has a tiered pricing model which may be
| cheaper but requires a ton of cognitive overhead.
|
| Now Azure presents it self as a much more cohesive platform that
| was designed with thought and care in how it worked with all the
| other tools.
|
| AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in their
| own black boxes.
|
| If you are using Microsoft workloads, Azure all the way but I
| would be hard pressed to move otherwise.
| 202206241203 wrote:
| _> AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in
| their own black boxes._
|
| And Linux (or whatever is even more convoluted) developers
| forced to do UX.
| timcavel wrote:
| pwarner wrote:
| Yeah the tiered pricing makes Azure super complex. Azure App
| Services is crazy. The problem there is there are technical
| differences too, so it's very hard to sort out what you need.
| Storage is more complex too. While AWS has lots of challenges
| from those 700 teams, each services is simpler.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Sounds like all microsoft licensing. Its ridiculously
| complicated and even the dedicated people hired to handle
| JUST that for you will often be confused or not up to date.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I've seen a few orgs who elected to use Azure because they
| don't want to give revenue to a competitor, leaving
| technologists to "make it work." Who makes technology choices
| in an org is an important question to ask when interviewing
| (which C level role, CTO vs CIO vs CFO etc).
|
| I have no preference either way, everyone's money is green.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams
|
| Clearly. Things that seem super obvious and intuitive for an
| end customer require one to go through multiple hoops to get
| done. At this point even AWS seem to have give up trying to
| look at big picture and provide higher level end to end
| services. They are happy to roll out lower level primitives.
|
| I guess there's a good amount of money to be made by building
| end to end solutions on top of AWS services.
| oneplane wrote:
| tl;dr: AWS teams seem to mostly build technology and building
| blocks, Azure seems to mostly be a continuation of business
| products and Microsoft-to-Business contracts that happen to
| be tech-related.
|
| It is after all not a "Datacenter emulation as a service"
| like Microsoft Azure is. There are a handful of 'enduser'
| SaaS services from AWS, but most of it, as you describe, are
| primitives used to build other things.
|
| This is also where AWS originated from: just an internal
| system that was built to supply object storage and compute to
| internal teams. And when you start supplying commodity
| systems as a service it's just a matter of adopting and
| adding new services as they become more generic and more
| commodified. (RDS, container-based compute, FaaS, Load
| Balancing to name a few very common things that really are
| the same everywhere)
|
| A lot of people are used to specific services like GitHub
| where you pay for Git hosting, or Salesforce where you pay to
| get CRM, but those are not building blocks, just like Azure
| is mostly just "things that windows servers in datacenters
| used to do" in varying degrees of being managed. You can get
| a Windows VM and run a MSSQL instance on it, or you can get
| an MSSQL instance, or you can get a shared SQL partition,
| it's all the same service but with different contractual
| obligations, and that is exactly what Microsoft likes to do.
| That top-down difference is what feeds al the other
| differences between Azure and AWS (and GCP).
|
| This is not to say that they don't have Infrastructure
| building blocks, or that they don't have anything non-
| traditional, but it's mostly just pandering to the existing
| customer base on a business level, and not on a technical
| level. Same reason some people are stuck with MS Teams, not
| because it's good, but it was part of the MS contract that
| was essentially grandfathered in from legacy on-prem Office
| and Exchange to hosted versions to Microsoft 365. They mostly
| got people that way because of their failure on the
| intermediate step (Exchange Online from MS sucked), by simply
| hosting Sharepoint and Outlook for you, integrating
| everything else on top of that.
| MSM wrote:
| > AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in
| their own black boxes.
|
| Couldn't agree with this point more, and it's enough to make me
| prefer Azure. AWS is taking open source tooling and slapping a
| very thin veneer on top to make it their own. Almost nothing is
| cohesive or easily integrated. You can ask the same question to
| three AWS solution architects and get three similar-but-
| different stacks suggested.
|
| Azure seems to be going the way of solid, simplified,
| integrations between their tooling (things like Synapse), while
| AWS is trying to be first to market (or fastest, or cheapest)
| with all of these individual components.
| abawany wrote:
| I have experience with Google Cloud and AWS is overwhelming
| for me: it is like going to a buffet with 80 varieties of
| crab rangoons or something - it was really tough to make a
| choice. I was just trying to enable alerts on a container-
| hosted service and it took me quite a bit to get there and
| even then the result is not very nice. Probably my
| inexperience though.
| visarga wrote:
| Why don't they make an issue assistant AI bot? A GPT-3
| chatbot for navigating the offer and finding stuff.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| What does "navigating the offer" mean?
| kubanczyk wrote:
| In this context "navigating the offer" translates to
| introducing 81st variety of crab rangoons, apparently.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, the number of comparable & overlapping offerings in AWS
| is very confusing to someone not fully immersed in it for
| years and years.
|
| There isn't exactly clear comparison matrices or design trees
| on why you would use one service over the other. It really
| just feels like 100s of different services that were built
| for different specific end users and then slowly grown into
| overlapping offerings.
|
| It's worse in big corporate, and especially financial
| settings as only certain flavors of certain services will get
| the cyber/infosec blessing. Then you have vendor products you
| want to use in AWS which only support certain flavors of
| those same service types as well.
|
| So we end up having to bang heads against walls to actually
| get internal cyber&external vendor onto same page. If the
| product touches several service types
| (containers/storage/database/etc) then you have to make sure
| they can all be strung together in an approved compatible
| fashion.
|
| In the old days a vendor could say they support x86 Linux,
| and you knew you'd more likely than not be able to install
| their software. Now you have to go many layers deeper than
| "we support AWS" to understand if its actually going to work
| or not, sometimes with multi-week POCs.
| llama052 wrote:
| Azure is a shit show all around.
|
| Our account rep recommended that we change regions from westus1
| to westus2 because westus1 was legacy and that's why we were
| experiencing so many edge cases and bugs (lots of them). That was
| a year ago.
|
| Today we can't deploy any new postgres servers in westUS2 region
| because they claim capacity issues, but will let you deploy vms
| that use the same instance type. If we had to recreate a server
| we can't even do that! (Azure support will have us recreate
| instances if there's a problem)
|
| They tell us to use a new region and have no ETA on when they
| will have more "capacity". Their answer is to force us into a new
| region and pay out of our pocket for region bandwidth charges
| between them.
|
| The only reason we are even trying to create another postgres
| server is because they are deprecating their original postgres
| service for a new one (with no clear migration path that actually
| works).
|
| This is just my rant for the week about Azure as a platform, I
| have many gripes about how they handle things as a whole, not to
| mention the circular support that ends in us dealing around
| problems.
| dimitar wrote:
| I've used both and will gladly recommend AWS over Azure:
|
| * Azure APIs, tools and services get deprecated often. As soon as
| 3rd party docs get good and the bad bugs get fixed it will get
| deprecated. AWS has its share of v2 APIs, but most of the
| fundamental services are the same for more than 10 years. The new
| services build on top of the old ones, instead of replacing them.
|
| * MS reps will endlessly spam you and every colleague in your org
| to adopt their latest preview features (gasp! You are not using
| ML and AKS??); But if you end up trying them you will find that
| they are half baked and if you get any sort of incident they will
| ask you to rewrite your app to accommodate them, rather than
| fixing their own bugs/state.
|
| * AWS has great 1st party documentation, and the stability means
| great 3rd party documentation gets created as well. Azure gets
| astroturfed "community" docs written by Microsoft employees.
| Community means that support and official pages link to them, yet
| Microsoft has no obligation to keep them up to date or take any
| responsibility of their contents.
|
| * I admit I like Azure resource groups (a logical container of
| resources in an account, required for every resource and simpler
| than the AWS equivalent). However I don't really miss them when I
| follow best practices (billing alerts, separate accounts for
| environments, IAC, tags).
| rurp wrote:
| > if you get any sort of incident they will ask you to rewrite
| your app to accommodate them, rather than fixing their own
| bugs/state.
|
| As it happens I recently ran into this exact situation with
| AWS. My team hit a surprisingly low undocumented scale
| limitation with one of their services. The error message stated
| that the limit could be increased on request, so I did exactly
| that. Rather than simply increasing it, they delayed and kept
| asking to setup a call to talk about how my team could
| rearchitect our code to work around their limitation. I told
| them no thanks, finding a way around the limit was not the
| issue, having to burn time implementing it on our end was.
|
| Overall though I do agree with your point. AWS is generally
| pretty good about handling scale and not breaking older APIs,
| but there are exceptions.
| mwint wrote:
| Did they end up raising the limit? Curious what the limit
| was.
| ithkuil wrote:
| How did you obtain the estimate if the azure customers having
| that problem?
| iasay wrote:
| Typical Microsoft. Using their shit is like riding a
| schizophrenic donkey. I have been burned tens of times over the
| years and stuck with deprecated products and frameworks that
| were the official supported way of doing stuff on their
| platforms.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Azure also has Azure AD, thus first class support for user and
| app identity. Cognito isn't even close.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| What does Cognito lack?
| pwarner wrote:
| Resource groups seems awesome, and are nice in some ways, but
| they are sort of this slippery slope that encourage you to put
| more into a single subscription than you probably should.
| obert wrote:
| Why "should" one not put services in the same subscription?
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Because one subscription is paid by exactly one
| entity/organization. Sometimes you split off services for
| legal/regulatory reasons.
| pwarner wrote:
| I mean, there is no right and wrong answer I suppose. You
| can have all the code for your project in one file. Forget
| a class per file or whatever, maybe it works for you.
|
| What I saw is that the more you co-locate in an AWS account
| or Azure subscription, the higher the bar goes on ensuring
| your cost reporting and access control are also completely
| aware of resource group boundaries.
|
| You really want to know is that $ for project A or B? You
| really want to ensure folks on project A have access to
| their cloud resources, but not project B. You can do that
| even in AWS, combine them and use IAM to segment things. I
| think there is just more room for error if you combine.
|
| Also I think Azure has some per subscription quota limits
| and you may not want team A and B competing for them.
|
| Again, no right answer, but I know we've done projects to
| split accounts and have never done one to combine them..
| epberry wrote:
| AWS Organizations are actually quite good for this.
| There's a "consolidated billing" function which puts
| everything under the same umbrella.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Azure APIs, tools and services get deprecated often_
|
| My experience with "new" Microsoft is that they're still
| learning how to play nice with others.
|
| Not in that they don't want to, but that they're objectively
| bad at it, because it's not something they're institutionally
| used to doing.
|
| "Old" Microsoft was "We build what we want, how we want, at the
| pace we want, and we produce some very polished final docs, and
| you use what we built how we expect."
|
| Continually iterating on externally facing services owned by a
| small team, and consumed in arbitrary ways by third parties, is
| a very different model than the above. We'll see if Microsoft
| can re-org to the challenge.
| metadat wrote:
| There is no "old" or "new" microsoft. Time and time again
| they've shown us they are still the same old thing. Company
| DNA is what it is. Uber also falls into this category.
|
| Don't let yourself be fooled by the same trick repeatedly.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Or we could accept that huge enterprises have a lot of
| institutional inertia, and real change plays out over a
| decade+.
|
| Or as the quip goes: culture doesn't change until the
| previous generation retires or dies.
| wjnc wrote:
| My firm is investing quite a lot of money / time / effort in
| our Azure infrastructure for relatively large and complex
| models (financial models with up to 10k cores; nothing very
| fancy just lots math and lots of customers). Our engineers
| are capable, they seem happy with the stack and we actually
| get pretty solid support from Microsoft. We ran into several
| Azure-specific bugs in the last few years which get timely
| triage, quick fixes within hours and solutions within weeks.
| We're probably overpaying and have been Microsoft-centric for
| the decade I'm with the firm, so the local relationship is
| probably excellent. All in all it's a lot more affordable
| than the license fees for niche supplier software we were
| using before. Point being it's relative cost and engineer
| satisfaction that matter more than the last few million in
| costs.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Might be worth comparing them with other cloud providers
| rather than niche supplier software.
| iasay wrote:
| They're the same asshats. With a thin layer of marketing
| veneer over the top, telemetry underneath all floating on a
| vat of poor testing, poor delivery and poor quality.
|
| I had a defect open for 9 years on connect that affected
| 20,000 users. Couldn't pay them to fix it even as a gold
| partner. Now they just abandon all their shit in GitHub
| instead and sell you a subscription to be served up ash and
| beer dregs while reminding you that they love Linux and open
| source while trying to get leverage and replace whole chunks
| of it with their bananas ecosystem.
|
| Edit: must be lunch time at MSFT. Downvote flurry.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Couldn't pay them to fix it even as a gold partner.
|
| People complain about the old MS, but it used to be if you
| paid enough things got fixed. Cough up enough money and
| you'd get a direct line to the lead developer of whatever
| product you were having an issue with.
|
| When I first joined MS back in ~2006 I got to witness this
| first hand, a high value customer had a problem with some
| C++ code and MS provided a translator and put the customer
| in contact with the compiler team.
|
| The issue with "metric driven development" is that if
| something doesn't move the needle, it isn't addressed. What
| the #s don't show is that the sum total of small annoyances
| lead to massive customer unhappiness.
|
| > while reminding you that they love Linux and open source
| while trying to get leverage and replace whole chunks of it
| with their bananas ecosystem.
|
| Many of the senior/principle devs at MS now grew up reading
| /. and hating the MS of the 90s. The culture there is
| massively different, both for better and for worse. 1990s
| MS had huge documentation teams and tested the living
| daylights out of all code before it hit customers. The
| massive doc teams were laid off during the '08 recession
| and AFAIK never hired back (at least not in the incredible
| # they used to be), and after Google/Facebook scared MS
| with "move fast and break things", MS got rid of their
| testers as well (as has the entire industry), so now the
| code isn't as reliable.
| la64710 wrote:
| AWS also actively work on reducing wastage on behalf of
| their customer and pass them back. Ther instance pricing
| have reduced some 30+ times I beleive.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I think it's more that your comment is 95% salt and 5%
| substance an so isn't adding much to the conversation. More
| details like the connect issue and less "ash and dregs".
| fifticon wrote:
| I can add some salt on azure web apps. I routinely get
| "everything is wonderful" answers from their weird admin
| guis, for services that I observe cannot reach their
| database or even start up. Unless I operate azure from
| the commandline, the ui is questionable.
| tremon wrote:
| Well, to give just one example: zip deploys (code) to
| azure functions always return 200 OK, regardless of
| whether the deployment actually succeeded. To know if the
| deployment succeeded, you need to use a second API (the
| kudu mgmt api) to access the text logs, and scan the text
| logs for errors. Due to our CI infrastructure, we do
| multiple deploys per day, and I can tell you that most of
| our deployments require 2-3 attempts to deploy
| successfully. We have a whole salt mine of workarounds
| like that in our deployment infrastructure.
|
| It's been that way for years. Every now and then, they
| pull another Microsoft on top of this. The latest that I
| remember is that even after successful deployment, the
| function would actually not get activated until you
| polled its existence using the Az cli tools. We hit that
| one because we used the Powershell Az module, and of
| course the cli tools and powershell exercise different
| code paths :/
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Oof. I've come to despise Kudu for these kinds of
| reasons. We ended up ditching direct zip deployments and
| now do Docker images, which get pulled automatically
| using the webhook on the container registry. It is far
| more reliable and also far easier to integrate into a
| devops pipeline.
| iasay wrote:
| I will write up the 30 years of using MSFT stacks and OS
| up at some point. That'll be 100% substance. But the salt
| will have to remain.
|
| If you want to see the real MSFT check out the dotnet
| team handling of the customer demands to remove
| telemetry. This is on GitHub issues. Or was if they
| haven't reorganised all the repos again thus backing up
| the other schizophrenic donkey comment.
| ghuntley wrote:
| See https://isdotnetopen.com
| iasay wrote:
| Well that was an interesting read and entirely
| unsurprising.
|
| I would never consider building a new product on .Net.
| It's an insane proposition at this point.
| mathattack wrote:
| The spamming (and outright lying) from MS reps was pretty
| ridiculous. At a prior employer we couldn't tell if our rep was
| clueless or unethical. We raised to three iterations of bosses
| but his leadership changed annually so he was never held to
| account. Finally a user revolt caused them to lose an $8mm
| deal. Even then they reassigned him rather than fire him.
|
| I'm impressed that they've moved on from being a Windows and
| Office company but their culture hasn't caught up.
| jwithington wrote:
| why not use GCP?
| petilon wrote:
| Last I checked AWS has poor support for Docker and Kubernetes,
| they charge a bit more for those than their own Fargate. Docker &
| Kubernetes are a threat to AWS because it makes applications
| cloud-independent, and AWS would prefer for you to weld your
| applications to AWS.
|
| The issues mentioned in this story are minor irritants that exist
| in Azure, AWS and Google cloud.
| oppositelock wrote:
| AWS support for Docker and Kubernetes is great, I'm curious why
| you say that.
|
| Managed Kubernetes (EKS) is really good at this point, and
| coupled with the ALB Ingress Controller, it beats anything else
| I've tried in terms of monitoring, ingress routing, etc. One
| little bit that is missing from EKS is selecting the size of
| your control plane, because the default is too small for
| dynamically scaling clusters running thousands of pods - you
| need to go through support to increase it.
|
| Docker is more a function of the OS you choose on your
| instances, and it work as well on Amazon Linux as in any other.
| In k8s, docker is no longer assumed to be the only CNI, so lots
| of changes are in flight to be able to change that.
|
| FWIW, my team is spending $400k/month in AWS right now. Suffice
| it to say, we use it a lot. It's been generally good, though
| it's hard to figure out new things due to terrible docs. Docs
| are plentiful, but not well integrated with each other and not
| kept up to date.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| 400k a MONTH?
|
| Man I'm jealous. :)
| dinvlad wrote:
| I don't want to assume things, but in many orgs this just
| means "we waste 10x more than we could have without it, and
| equally more on multi-team developer/management workforce
| needed to support it, because of course everything needs
| scale".
| hodgesrm wrote:
| +1 on EKS. It's not perfect but we've had an excellent
| experience building a database-as-a-service on top of it. We
| run well over 100 clusters and are growing rapidly. Best
| thing is that we didn't have to get enmeshed with K8s
| operations and instead focused on the applications on top.
| upupandup wrote:
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Not true_
|
| Care to... add more to the conversation? I don't even know
| which part you are saying isn't true. Or why it isn't true.
| Or what the truth is, since you seem to know?
|
| Edit: A reply of just "yes"... Is this some weird form of
| trolling?
| upupandup wrote:
| haolez wrote:
| Maybe, or maybe Kubernetes is the new legacy and by 2025 most
| companies will be using managed services like Lambda. :)
|
| I'm a heavy Azure user and you can tell that things are not as
| well designed and implemented as AWS.
| pid-1 wrote:
| In general I'm seeing folks move from managed services to
| Kubernetes.
|
| The common sentiment is that AWS managed services are complex
| anyway (except for very simple use cases), so you might as
| well go to K8s and get more flexibility and potentially
| reduced costs.
| ruoranwang wrote:
| For one already uses AWS it's pretty hard to switch to Azure. But
| just noticed Azure's growth is not that bad,
| https://holori.com/cloud-market-2022/#:~:text=Both%20are%20g....
| throwaway8203 wrote:
| parkingrift wrote:
| I joined an organization a couple of years ago who were already
| deeply in the Azure ecosystem. At some point we needed an
| instance with high disk performance and Azure basically told us
| to piss off. Spent almost two months trying to convince them that
| we were worthy of paying for this instance type, and nope. Piss
| off.
|
| We ended up taking our entire dev, staging, and production
| infrastructure to AWS and GCP.
| selimnairb wrote:
| My problem when I still used Azure ca. three years ago was being
| nickeled and dimed. The intro tier of Postgres database does not
| support use on VPC/private networks, requiring cumbersome and
| less secure node-locking.
| [deleted]
| j_barbossa wrote:
| Wait, so all that text just for telling us that a company -
| driven by capitalism - is not giving away cloud compute power for
| free? What a surprise! And AWS is better in that regard
| because...?
|
| Sometimes I wonder how articles like these can make it to the hot
| page.
| lmc wrote:
| > Build in the cloud with an Azure free account
|
| > Create, deploy, and manage applications across multiple
| clouds, on-premises, and at the edge
|
| That is literally the Azure home page.
|
| https://pasteboard.co/45dN3NL1Boa3.png
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| I recently read a tweet along the lines of "Azure's interfaces
| are designed for an accountant, not an engineer", and it explains
| it.
|
| Azure _sucks_. The terrible UX is just the tip of the iceberg.
| Things often just... don't work. And good luck getting someone to
| talk to about it. The security at Azure is a total shitshow too,
| don't forget.
| geoffeg wrote:
| > The terrible UX is just the tip of the iceberg. Things often
| just... don't work. And good luck getting someone to talk to
| about it.
|
| The same can be said for AWS. Even when you have access to
| Proserve getting answers can be difficult.
| jcmontx wrote:
| In my experience, Azure is a must for .NET applications.
| Everything is just so well integrated together. You can setup a
| web/api that's deployed via Github Actions with just a couple
| clicks. Same goes for webapps build with React/Angular/etc.
|
| You can include a managed SQL server instance; or go for the
| unmatched CosmosDB. The Storage is also pretty good and almost
| free.
|
| I just don't see this level of integration in other cloud
| providers.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| I disagree. .NET actually literally is better supported on AWS.
| But, if what you say were true then that is a reason to never
| use .NET anymore.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Even with .Net ... on small to even medium-ish scale, you can
| deploy a couple Dokku nodes, deploy to all three, set them
| behind a load balancer and use the hosted PostgreSQL + replica.
| This can handle a _lot_ of load with minimal startup cost and
| scale relatively easily on almost any mid-tier provider at a
| lot less cost.
|
| You can still deploy with Github actions, still have redundancy
| on the front end and pay a couple hundred a month vs. many
| hundreds or thousands.
| parkingrift wrote:
| You can do all those things trivially with practically every
| major hosting provider.
| amerine wrote:
| As someone who helps deliver a free tier to customers at my work,
| I can sympathize with Microsoft's pains here. It sucks the author
| had such a bad experience, but fraudsters are scammy bastards who
| are ruining "free compute" for everyone.
| logifail wrote:
| > fraudsters are scammy bastards who are ruining "free compute"
| for everyone
|
| Does that mean there are people out there who'd sign up for a
| free trial but who have no intention of paying for any product,
| ever? Wow*
|
| (This is a genuine question) in the spirit of scientific
| enquiry, that would appear to be far more of a problem with
| your marketing department and their assumptions about
| converting trials to paid, rather than with the people who have
| no intention of paying for your product?
|
| * not really
| sam0x17 wrote:
| The fraudsters are really like 50x more of a problem than
| what you're talking about in practice. Even if you _think_
| you're the sort who will never go beyond free tier, circle
| back in 3 years and you've probably forced your employer or
| someone you consult for to start paying for stuff even if you
| still use free tier for your personal stuff. I call it the
| "Adobe effect" -- a reference to how in the early 2010s some
| Adobe insiders famously released some of their own pirated
| photoshop torrents, with, rumor has it, company approval,
| because they realized the kids pirating photoshop would
| convert to sales ~5 years later when they work for whatever
| company. Free converts very well even if it is in surprising
| / indirect ways.
|
| The fraudsters and miners, however, are a whole other thing.
| They will suck up the maximum amount of resources they can
| and extract a tiny profit from it. It will inevitably cost
| you, the cloud provider, money, because mining typically
| isn't profitable without GPU compute anyway, so the entire
| profitiably of what they're doing is based on the fact that
| you are offering free electricity. It's a net loss, as these
| users will also probably never convert proportional to the
| usage they incur. Most users of free tier services use a tiny
| fraction of the available free resources within the tier.
| These guys will hover at 99.99% always, ruining the whole
| profitability model and dramatically increasing the cost of
| acquriing a customer via free tier.
| amerine wrote:
| 100% this. Excellent, salient, description of the problem.
| RajT88 wrote:
| The other thing that happens is domain squatting.
|
| A lot of cloud services (not just Azure, but certainly in
| Azure) are assigned a globally unique resource name, which
| also gets assigned a DNS name.
|
| Domain squatters can walk the domain to find these services
| and keep an eye for if they lapse. (Sometimes this happens
| if a service needs to be recreated due to upgrade)
|
| What a malicious user can do during that maintenance is
| trigger a deploy of the same service name now that it's
| available and snap it up. They can either shut down the VM
| or scale down the service to be sitting there and not
| costing them anything, and see if they can extract payment
| from their victim to release the domain (which might be
| hard coded somewhere). Worse yet, they could leave it as is
| and try and see what interesting traffic starts coming in
| and tinker with it.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Free hosting services very quickly fill up with bitcoin
| miners and Minecraft servers.
| haasted wrote:
| Could imagine that Minecraft servers are very good
| candidates for later upgrades.
| amerine wrote:
| No. We love customers who don't need to grow beyond the free
| tier. What I mean is people exploiting free compute for
| crypto mining, phishing, botnets, cp, hacking, etc. The
| efforts/systems necessary, and business decisions around the
| free-tiers businesses have are directly impacted by the time-
| space spent on keeping things safe from fraudsters. It's
| wild.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Azure is really big outside the US and the EU. In LATAM, they
| practically have a monopoly, so much so that governments use them
| exclusively. They have a thight grip on that front and I'm
| willing to bet that shady things are happening to a lower extent.
|
| Heck, country managers from a big European company were
| conducting all sort of dealings with local companies under the
| table. They were discovered and of course they were cancelled but
| by that time they were rich and didn't care.
| jwsteigerwalt wrote:
| Microsoft's entire subscription process is a mess, it's not a
| surprise that Azure follows suite. Just try and start a visual
| studio pro subscription, it will take you well over 30 min if you
| are lucky. On the corresponding side, open an AWS account and you
| can spin up an instance and create some workmail accounts in
| minutes.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Theres just no way Google/Microsoft can catch up to the AWS
| product, without some significant improvement in distributed
| systems theory. AWS has had too many years of grinding tens of
| thousands of engineers to get things perfect. The customer
| obsession, rigorous on-call, and perfectionist work culture are
| what make AWS. The corporate culture of MSFT/Google would never
| allow for the working conditions at AWS and it shows in their
| respective inferior products.
| tester756 wrote:
| What's the "AWS" culture?
| beckingz wrote:
| poor.
|
| edit: AWS somewhat famously burns through engineers and ties
| personal compensation and career development to making things
| happen even if it requires insane workloads.
| rr888 wrote:
| 80 hour work weeks and an average 18 month before employees
| quit or get fired.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah... Google has no experience with global distributed
| operations, data centers and applications at all. Neither does
| Microsoft, they probably don't even know what a entwork is, am
| I right?
|
| /sarc
|
| Seriously though. AWS isn't the end all, be all here and there
| are incredibly smart and talented network and systems engineers
| at many companies. The UX for AWS is often pretty bad, and it's
| sometimes difficult to know _HOW_ to configure something, even
| if you know _WHAT_ to configure. Like allowing a higher usage
| threshold for redis caching instead of trying to keep 50% of
| memory open by default. You can find the actual redis
| configuration option, how to set it in AWS, who knows (at least
| when I was using it). At this point DynamoDB 's autoscaling is
| probably a much better experience, but getting it to
| grow/shrink appropriately was very painful at one point.
|
| On Azure, some of the simpler services are some of the easiest
| to use and get started with... Data* (Tables, Queues, Blobs) in
| particular.
|
| Of the three, I found Google's Cloud the most interesting to
| deal with.
|
| All of that said, I don't think any of them are incapable of
| correcting course and making things better... but it's easy
| enough to let things get worse. I think Amazon's biggest
| problem is they now have so many competing and overlapping
| services, it's become harder to even know what's right. Same
| for Azure to an extent...
|
| I am finding DigitalOcean's offerings to be compelling and may
| find myself trying that path with a project, or at least part
| of a project in the future.
| JackFr wrote:
| > The UX for AWS is often pretty bad,
|
| Why worry about UX? Shouldn't your infra be scripted, version
| controlled and repeatable?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Because you have to start somewhere... if the UI doesn't
| work, why should I trust their console app.... I have
| similar views about phone apps... If your website doesn't
| work, WTH should I trust your app?
|
| Also, in my original post s/DigitalOcean/Cloudflare
| Workers/
| nkzd wrote:
| Because learning terraform or cloud formation takes time. I
| am an average developer and I understand foundational infra
| theory. I know I can click around AWS without help in order
| to deploy a CRUD app. Why bother with scripted infra if I
| am going to revisit it once a year to fix an issue?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| People writing/operating serious software never make
| config changes through the UI. AWS console then is mostly
| just to view/investigate what is already configured
| JackFr wrote:
| If it's something you only do once a year, honestly, it's
| more important to script it.
| [deleted]
| treesknees wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you mean by "without some significant
| improvement in distributed systems theory"? If it's as you
| suggest, that it's the work culture which hold back Google and
| Microsoft, I don't see how improvements to distributed systems
| theory would result in ever passing AWS or its market share.
| throwaway_4ever wrote:
| Probably that if there's enough of a paradigm shift in best
| practices for managing software infra, it would deprecate a
| significant portion of existing AWS and give Google or
| someone else a huge headway into implementing the new
| paradigm. A smaller scale example of this is Kubernetes,
| where GCP is leading adoption.
| upupandup wrote:
| The thing is after spending a decade on AWS I'm hesitant to move
| to a different cloud. Like you are going to have to pay me a lot
| of money or give extremely generous credit and even then its a
| maybe.
|
| The greatest trick AWS pulled was convincing the world cloud
| needs to be complex and they succeeded. We have spent so much
| resources and time on it, its too painful to leave it.
|
| The only exception is some Google products like Firebase which
| clearly shine above the pile of burning trash that is Cognito.
| Perhaps some other products AI related I don't know about.
|
| Azure? Unless you are running .net from Visual Studios don't see
| why you need to be on it. Many generation of developers grew up
| not knowing what .net or Java is.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Firebase just feels like the ultimate vendor lock-in though.
| I've tried really hard to minimize lock in... mostly to things
| that are easy enough to change/migrate... but RDBMS always
| PostgreSQL (pretty much all support it, can self host,
| cockroach and others as potential scaling options depending on
| how you use it).
|
| I really like the Azure Storage (Tables, Blobs, Queues)
| myself.. for small-mid usage, super cheap, simple, easy to
| completely replace if needed. Some of the more advanced stuff,
| seems like stuff to keep C-suite or SecOps people impressed.
| logifail wrote:
| > The greatest trick AWS pulled was convincing the world cloud
| needs to be complex and they succeeded. We have spent so much
| resources and time on it, its too painful to leave it.
|
| This bit made me wince, it's so true. "Concorde syndrome"[0],
| anyone?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
| dinvlad wrote:
| Same thing with Kubernetes and every other bit of enterprise
| software ever written. It's all rotten to the core with the
| same principle, even when the initial motives might've been
| pure.
| RajT88 wrote:
| If you could be construed in any way to be a competitor of
| Amazon (retail namely), you'd be crazy to pick Amazon, who is
| in the business of stealing their customer's lunch money at
| every level.
|
| You'll be surprised to learn that quite a lot of major
| companies running on Azure aren't Microsoft/.Net shops.
| Linux/Java workloads are very common. The tooling is pretty
| good for all that stuff too (nearing "First Class Citizen", but
| mayybe not quite).
| tedivm wrote:
| I was tempted into running on GCP for some new projects and my
| experience completely turned me off to the platform. I ended up
| with a bug where the Google Webmaster Tools Domain Verification
| wasn't being picked up by GCP, but the only way for the service
| to issue an SSL certificate was via that domain verification.
| The domain verification itself worked fine, it was just that
| GCP couldn't read it.
|
| I mentioned this on twitter and a PM for the project lectured
| me about how I shouldn't use preview services and expect them
| to work and suggested I use a different service- one that was
| also in preview. That was my last attempt at using GCP.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I use both today. Not a big fan of either. Azure is better if you
| are really deep into Microsoft tech. I'd lean towards Azure
| because of our tech stack. If we were not a Microsoft shop, I'd
| be heavily in favor of AWS.
| smcin wrote:
| As to the ad-blocker on the payment verification page, it
| probably just wants to run some third-party JS for
| fingerprinting, to prevent the free tier being abused. If you can
| figure out which domains want to set cookies, you can whitelist
| them in your ad-blocker.
| snapetom wrote:
| Pretty much my same experience with AWS. We had a customer with
| some infrastructure on Azure that we had to integrate with. The
| hoops we've gone through are:
|
| 1) Wade through poor documentation to find how to do it, follow
| the docs to a letter. Even find a perfect example of what we are
| trying to do that another company did. 2) Get vague error
| messages that basically only say, "You can't do this." What? Why?
| Alternatives? None of that. 3) Contact support. Tell them we are
| trying to do X and give the other example. Get kicked to a team
| in the Philippines. After a day or two of conversation, don't
| hear from them for a week. 4) Get told we were placed in the
| wrong support team. Get kicked to another team in another
| country. 5) Repeat 3 and 4 but then this time told we are being
| kicked to the real Azure team in Redmond. 6) Finally make
| progress. But very little communication, and certainly nothing
| like what went wrong, what we should have done, etc.
|
| We are waiting for them to take a final step before we can even
| test our integration. It's been three months since this started.
| kgeist wrote:
| Had a similar experience when integrating with Microsoft Teams.
| The integration worked OK for 99% users, but for 1% users we
| were getting some vague "not supported" errors without
| explaining anything (what's wrong or how to fix it), sometimes
| just 500's. Nothing in the documentation about the errors.
| Filed a ticket, the support guy gave a few suggestions, but it
| was clear he didn't really understand the documentation
| himself, I explained why his reading of the documentation was
| demonstrably wrong and had nothing to do with my problem, he
| agreed and promised to escalate to the actual dev team. Haven't
| heard from them since then (it was several months ago). I've
| had several such interactions with MS which led to nowhere.
| Meanwhile a competitor (we integrated with, too) used to solve
| all our problems in 1-3 work days.
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| I have used both AWS and Azure, and ended up settling with Azure.
| The services all seem to hang together much more cogently. The
| service ecosystem also seems to move slower and feels less
| experimental, which is a positive when I am faced with supporting
| enterprise solutions.
|
| Regarding support, I have found Azure support to be very good,
| albeit I subscribe to paid support. For those who claim AWS
| support is better than Azure support, are you paying for a
| service plan or are you referring to free tier support?
| [deleted]
| rjbwork wrote:
| I agree. I used Azure at my last 2 companies and joined the
| company I currently work for right before it was decided to do
| a total rewrite and use AWS instead of Azure. I'll be looking
| for another Azure gig if/when I leave my current position.
|
| AWS...works. But everything feels very primitive and few things
| work together coherently. They expect you to tie just about
| everything together with Lambdas instead of making various
| services work together well.
|
| And some of their services are just a complete joke compared to
| Azure. Azure Data Factory is probably the greatest ETL tool
| I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Glue... _does_ do
| ETL, I suppose. Event Hubs and Stream Analytics feels much
| nicer and better integrated than the equivalent Kinesis
| offerings. AWS has even deprecated their "legacy" SQL Kinesis
| analyzers. Now you have to write lambdas to do it.
|
| In general I just think there's better overarching technical
| vision at Azure, whereas at AWS it's hundreds of independent
| teams that aren't coordinated well at all.
| Goleniewski wrote:
| I use it, am currently going through my certifications and also
| make a living doing it so I feel qualified to comment...
|
| Those people moaning about price... If you have to ask the price
| you can't afford it. My F500 employer spends upwards of
| $30,000,000 a year with MS and somehow (Don't ask me, I just work
| here) everything goes cloud first now.
|
| To state the obvious, the big boys pay nowhere near calculator
| pricing prices. The pricing is a different galaxy away. Living in
| a world where one small tweak can save $1,000 a day, its all
| about efficient planning of what your doing, ie design it right
| but Azure designers who are good don't come cheap.
|
| What wasn't made obvious (and this is where a lightbulb may go
| on) is that MS is engaged in a hearts and minds war for Sysadmins
| like me. So much so that MS have a special program available to
| big spenders where:
|
| 1) Pretty much the entire Azure training catalog is available for
| free, ie AZ-401, AZ-5XX, AZ-2XX? When I say free I mean real
| attend in person courses with the full course content as you
| would normally pay $3,000 for. You can do it as many times as you
| like, as often as you like. 2) All personal labs are paid for
| with free credits (its a bit grey area this one) 2) All the exams
| are 100% free. All those Pearson Vue exams? 100% discounted. Did
| I also mention unlimited retakes?
|
| As for the complaining about APIs and products being retired,
| well, the trick is to stay with the mainstream items offered.
|
| In short I have had about $20,000 of training from MS this year
| alone and its not cost me one single cent. I really dislike MS
| but if they want to make me a very rich and in-demand person with
| companies who think cloud will save them from being dinosaurs, I
| won't bitch too loudly.
| outworlder wrote:
| My main problem with Azure is all the artificial restrictions
| they have between 'SKUs'. In GCP and AWS you can, for the most
| part, mix and match components. AWS announces a new EBS volume
| type, you can be pretty much assured it will work with any
| instance type there is. Maybe some are more optimized than
| others, but if you want to attach them, they will work.
|
| Not so much on Azure. Need to match your 'premium' instance with
| your 'premium' storage. And even when you use the correct
| SKUs(and correct instance types and whatnot), there are many
| limitations. For example:
|
| "Premium SSD v2 limitations Premium SSD v2
| disks can't be used as an OS disk. Currently, Premium SSD
| v2 disks can only be attached to zonal VMs. Currently,
| Premium SSD v2 disks can't be attached to VMs in virtual machine
| scale sets. Currently, taking snapshots aren't supported,
| and you can't create a Premium SSD v2 from the snapshot of
| another disk type. Currently, Premium SSD v2 disks can't
| be attached to VMs with encryption at host enabled.
| Currently, Premium SSD v2 disks can't be attached to VMs in
| Availability Sets. Azure Disk Encryption isn't supported
| for VMs with Premium SSD v2 disks. Azure Backup and Azure
| Site Recovery aren't supported for VMs with Premium SSD v2 disks.
|
| "
|
| AWS has very few artificial limitations. New disk type launched?
| Want to use as part of an Auto-Scaling group? Knock yourself out.
| Want that as a boot disk? Sure. Encryption? Available.
|
| And that's only an example on the storage side. Compute, storage
| and networking are the bread and butter, and one of the very
| first services you would expect in the cloud today - before all
| the abstractions are added on top.
|
| Many of those limitations are not very well documented. You end
| up learning about then when your Terraform code runs (assuming
| Azure APIs didn't throw cryptic 400 errors).
|
| Then there's all the hidden surprises. I'm pretty much used to
| attaching a load balancer (any type) to any instance with no
| issues whatsoever - on AWS. Imagine my surprise when I added a
| private load balancer to an Azure instance and it lost internet
| connectivity! I understand all the SNAT B.S. now, but it feels
| like a very thin layer over a network appliance. And not what you
| expect in the cloud.
|
| Maybe the more specialized Azure services (Active Directory, AKS)
| are a better value proposition. But compute, networking and
| storage? Go AWS or, even better, GCP. GCP will give you seamless
| VM migrations(none of this scheduled maintenance stuff), easy
| access to anycast load balancers. AWS will give you a myriad
| instance types and storage options, and decent networking. All of
| them except Azure will give you multiple availability zones
| everywhere.
| larrybud wrote:
| (Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft)
|
| I don't think it's fair to generalize about limitations of
| Premium SSD V2 disks. This service is brand-new and still in
| preview; literally was announced _today_
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/azure-premium-ssd-v2-...
|
| Services in preview are just that, preview, and may not be
| fully featured yet. I would expect many/most of these
| limitations to be removed by the time the service reaches GA
| (just speculating, I don't have any specific knowledge of the
| service)
| odysseus wrote:
| AWS does have a couple of annoying un-configurable limitations:
|
| * There is a Global Accelerator idle timeout of 340 seconds for
| TCP connections
|
| * And a Global Accelerator idle timeout of 30 seconds for UDP
| flows.
|
| These timeouts are not customer or support-configurable.
|
| Many customers have requested configurable Global Accelerator
| timeouts and AWS at least has a feature request open for it,
| but we have no way of knowing how or if they're prioritizing
| that.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| To be fair, all of the clouds are poor for what they consider
| "unimportant" users, such as free-tier, low-use, non-prod, etc...
| They all target big enterprise, because that's where the profit
| is.
|
| However, unlike AWS, Azure is poor at "big enterprise" as well,
| which is rather shocking for Microsoft. Their strength has always
| been that they "know" enterprise and tick all the right
| checkboxes to make their big fleets of systems work.
|
| Not in Azure!
|
| Several people have pointed out that they suggest rewriting
| applications to be compatible with their bugs instead of _simply
| fixing the bugs_.
|
| I call it the "you" problem. The marketing, documentation, and
| _support staff_ will all use that word like it means something.
|
| I'm an external consultant for an enterprise org with over 15,000
| staff, 300 of which are in IT, not counting several hundred
| external IT contractors, vendors, service providers, etc...
|
| If I call Azure support to report a bug, they will cheerfully
| say:
|
| "Please use X instead of Y in _your_ app, then it will work. "
|
| To which I want to find a polite way to say: "What the fuck are
| _you_ talking about? What do you mean 'your' app!? I got this
| thing dumped in my lap! It's a lift and shift of 10-year-old
| abandonware! Your _marketing_ assured some _other_ manager here
| that it would 'just' work! I'm a subcontractor to a contractor
| with a contract to move this thing to Azure that took 6 months to
| draft and 3 months to sign, with Microsoft reps involved at every
| step! There's no going back now. Make. _Your_. Shit. Work. "
|
| For people that downvote random salty anger with no substance,
| here's one random example:
|
| Azure SQL has literally zero support for database-level locale or
| time zone options.
|
| None.
|
| Zero. Zip. Nada.
|
| It's permanently set to use US English and UTC time zone. There
| is no recourse. There's no setting. There is no way to fix this.
|
| The Azure SQL Database Migration compatibility verification tool
| will _not warn you_ if you use 'legacy' functions like
| GETDATE(), which assume that the server time zone is set
| correctly.
|
| The documentation mentions this in passing once, on a page you
| will only ever see if googling this in a panic at 4:55pm on a
| Friday _after_ a week of live usage in production... which is
| when users will finally notice that "sometimes" dates appear to
| be wrong.
|
| So now your data has had local and UTC datetimes _blended
| together_ , essentially shredding your data. Too late for
| rollback. No global setting to fix, no vendor support to update
| the code, and nobody picked this up in UAT because a few hours of
| offset is _just small enough_ not to be detected in most cases
| unless the user happens to enter a record at just the right time
| (before 10am in our case).
|
| I called Azure Support and they told me that yes, it's _broken by
| design._ Azure SQL is designed for use in our future space
| colonies, where the time zone is UTC, not for the legacy planet-
| dwellers that failed to "move on".
|
| This was an unmitigated disaster for us, and a lot of sleepless
| nights for me.
|
| What does AWS do with their RDS for SQL offering? Do _they_
| support time zones?
|
| Of course they do:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_...
|
| That's because their programmers are not... well... err...
| there's just no polite way to say what I think of Azure SQL's
| development team right now.
|
| Let me put it this way: Microsoft's sales reps have convinced my
| customers to lift and shift _hundreds_ of individual _legacy_
| databases to Azure SQL, and of those I 'm betting 90% are quietly
| shredding their date-related data, causing random glitchy
| problems.
|
| This is just one example of _many_ like this. It 's not that
| every cloud does it worse. Without exception, what Azure does is
| always clown shoes compared to what everyone else does, and it's
| not even possible to convince them to fix it, because they always
| turn around and say: "No sir, _you_ are wrong, it is designed to
| be broken! "
| tracker1 wrote:
| Always use UTC when storing or crossing the wire with dates.
| I've been setting all servers, cloud or local to UTC when I
| have that option for about a decade and a half... I nearly
| always store dates as UTC unless there's a location attached,
| such as for a localized event... Doing _anything_ else leads to
| heartache, despair and weird bugs.
|
| Trying to read TZ1, convert to TZN then send to a user vs.
| storing as UTC, reading as UTC, and letting the client convert
| to/from local (far easier than other options.
| tremon wrote:
| _Azure SQL has literally zero support for database-level locale
| or time zone options._
|
| This isn't true, you can set the database collation when
| creating a database. Or are you referring specifically to the
| language of SQL informational responses (such as error
| messages)?
|
| _There is no recourse. There 's no setting. There is no way to
| fix this._
|
| Well, the fix is documented quite explicitly in the developer
| documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/sql/t-sql/functions/getdate...), which of course isn't the
| place where an administrator would look:
|
| > Azure SQL Database (with the exception of Azure SQL Managed
| Instance) and Azure Synapse Analytics follow UTC. Use AT TIME
| ZONE in Azure SQL Database or Azure Synapse Analytics if you
| need to interpret date and time information in a non-UTC time
| zone.
|
| Note the addition _with the exception of Azure SQL Managed
| Instance_ : if you need server-level control over the time
| zone, you should use a Managed Instance.
|
| As an aside, this problem with datetime fields depending on the
| server's timezone isn't just a problem in Azure. We've had
| countless joys with a naive on-prem CRM application storing
| birthdays in a datetime-field with 00:00:00 as the time part.
| When we switched to daylight savings time, all those people
| were suddenly born at 23:00 the day before. Try explaining that
| one to your users, who (of course) only see the date part in
| their UI.
| iowej23oij wrote:
| I can create a fully functional website in 1 minute using Azure
| Web Apps, but it will take me 2 days to configure millions of
| options for AWS Beanstalk... So definitely Azure is better,
| because AWS is extremely overengineered and needs a lot of
| administration overhead.
| master_crab wrote:
| The fact that you are considering Beanstalk leads me to believe
| you have some timely gaps in your AWS knowledge.
| iowej23oij wrote:
| With many hundreds of services every single person has gaps
| in AWS knowledge.
| 202206241203 wrote:
| Strange names also help hiding the semi-duplicate products.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Kind of agree on that, but I almost feel the opposite with AWS
| Lambda vs Azure Functions... The advantage of functions, is of
| course direct access options over http.
| la64710 wrote:
| AWS Amplify
| bratbag wrote:
| I can get a website up in around a minute with aws amplify.
| surfer7837 wrote:
| No-one uses Elastic Beanstalk -- use ECS instead. With ECS
| Copilot you can do it in 1/2 commands.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I thought Beanstalk was decent for Docker before they had EKS
| and (whatever the new thing is called) though.
| radiojasper wrote:
| It seems that on the last screengrab [0] it may have been that
| the payment system is loaded in an iframe right in the white
| overlay and that your ad/script blocker stopped that. But
| overall, that's one terrible experience and just false
| advertising if you ask me?
|
| [0]
| https://new.pythonforengineers.com/content/images/size/w1000...
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| as much as i get annoyed by the azure cli, after using both aws
| and azure, I think azure has a better developer experience, imo.
|
| which is saying something, because my developer experience using
| azure was pretty bad. lol
| rexreed wrote:
| In the post he mentions that he could use a simple $3/mo Lite VPS
| (or vms is what he says) for what he needs.... so why go all the
| way to AWS if you can use something lite? Why are things like
| DigitalOcean / Linode / Hetzner / OVS etc so discounted? (edit:
| discounted in terms of opinion, dismissed so easily, not
| discounted in price. Obviously they are cheaper)
| jerjerjer wrote:
| > Why are things like DigitalOcean / Linode / Hetzner / OVS etc
| so discounted?
|
| AWS, Azure, GCP is premium.
| rexreed wrote:
| I mean to say discounted in terms of opinion, not price. I
| know why they are cheaper. I'm just asking why people dismiss
| them so easily.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Because they are hosting services more than platforms
| marcinzm wrote:
| >DigitalOcean / Linode / Hetzner / OVS
|
| Some people prefer to pay for providers whose datacenters have
| fire protection.
|
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fire-destroys-ovh...
| gravypod wrote:
| A single data center is not reliable. We all know in 2022
| that having a backup offsite is important. No data center can
| offer 100% uptime in perpetuity.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Sure but the less reliable the more those data centers will
| be discounted in public opinion. Which is what OP asked
| about. Same reason AWS us-east-1 has a horrible reputation.
| alexklarjr wrote:
| hetzner is not a datacenter, it is a closet with old hardware
| that for some reason is still powered on.
| Innominate wrote:
| AWS/Azure/etc. are just not the place to get up a low cost
| personal server. I think the free tier confuses people into
| trying it, but ultimately what you get is a tiny VM with
| limited services that is designed for you to rapidly outgrow.
|
| That's okay though, because that's not why the big clouds are
| valuable. I'm going to refer specifically to AWS, but I also
| include Azure, GCP, etc. AWS is not cheap. If you only need a
| single host, or a small fixed group of hosts, AWS is an
| expensive option with little to justify the added cost. What
| you're paying for with AWS isn't just the resources you use,
| but the resources AWS keeps available for use at a moment's
| notice. If you don't have that need to scale your resources up
| and down, the costs of using AWS become harder to justify.
|
| If the goal is to do it on the cheap, a $5/mo vps is going to
| do better than the AWS free tier. If you need more power, the
| price gap between a bare metal private server and an equivalent
| AWS instance just gets bigger as the server gets more powerful.
| rstupek wrote:
| AWS also provides lightsail which meets the $5/mo vps needs
| kcb wrote:
| I use AWS to host a couple small personal instances. The key
| is to utilize reserve instances.
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| I am convinced that every decision behind Azure goes like this:
| "Did AWS do it like that? Then no." "But it makes everything we
| do worse if we do it differently." "That's fine."
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| This is how I feel about Apple.
| dinvlad wrote:
| And also "what can we do that will make our cloud even more
| enterprisey and vendor lock-in than AWS?"
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| AWS has a lot of problems but at least it has decent docs and
| customer support.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Their support is easily the best among all SaaS and FaaS
| vendors I've used. Can't stress this enough, it's the main
| reason I would never go to Azure or GCP. I've had many
| maddening experiences with Google's and Microsoft's support.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Google's free tier is awesome. They also have a generous startup
| credit program.
| whyagain1885 wrote:
| unfortunately, most of the useful interesting free tier items
| are available only in North America region.
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