New lower Azure pricing
azure.microsoft.comAs kyledrake so eloquently said before: "The bandwidth is the soda."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129
AWS and Azure overcharge on bandwidth about 10 to 20 times the prevailing rate. Something to keep in mind for high bandwidth applications.
What I don't understand about Azure pricing is how much more expensive a Windows VM is compared to an equivalent Linux machine. A D1v2 costs $54 with Linux and $104 with Windows (per month). This extends to larger instances: Windows costs twice the price of Linux on the same instance. The only difference is the Windows licence, and $50 per month for the smallest machine (and hundreds for bigger instances) seems very unreasonable.
The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high.
There's also the fact that their Windows infrastructure is probably costlier to maintain. Windows wasn't built for this use-case, and they're desperately trying to catch up. In the meantime, they have this convenient project called Linux on hand.
"Costlier to maintain" how? "Not built for this use-case" errr? The real answer is licensing cost. If you already own a Windows Server license then you are free to use it and gain 41% price reductions via this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-use-benefit...
Interesting: when I combine your comment with the GP's comment, I start wondering about the recurring revenue aspect of Azure.
There seems to be three types of Windows Server licenses you can purchase [1]. Assuming a price differential $50 per month between Linux/Windows as GP states.
I don't know exactly what would be the server license you would purchase if you got the actual license. But after month 20, even after the 41% discount - lets round it out to 50%, you have paid more than a one-time payment for the Essentials server. After month 36, you have paid more than a one-time payment for Standard server. It takes a while to get to the DataCenter server (~20 years), and I honestly don't know enough to figure out which use case matches which license type, but if someone can manage with the Essentials server (touted as being useful for small businesses up to 25 employees), then you are now paying, just based on difference between Linux and Windows, a perpetual excess fee over getting a Windows server after about 1.5 years for Essentials and 3 years for Standard.
Obviously, on the cloud you get a lot of extra features, including not having to pay the cost of server maintenance. But for the traditional customers GP is referring to, that might well be a sunk cost. (E.g. you need your sysadmin anyway because of other internal stuff)
However, this statement from GP might actually make a lot of sense:
> The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high.
If, like is usually mentioned here on HN, you probably wouldn't go with Windows for server related stuff anyway if you just started out, this does seem like an excellent golden goose for MS - keep your traditional customers within the Windows ecosystem without really doing a whole lot for them in terms of competitive pricing, and in addition turn your one time revenue generating software (Windows server license) into a recurring revenue generating software.
Having said that, I suppose this also means it is generally easier for AWS and Google to compete on price, because MS cannot allow this pegging (Linux vs Windows comparison) to get too wide because you would get comments like GP's.
Is that a reasonable analysis?
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-serve... DataCenter: $6150 Standard: $882 Essentials: $500
How do you mean? All current Windows versions and Linux distributions have built in support for running under Hyper-V, which the Azure hypervisor is based upon.
It'll be price segmentation. Perhaps Windows VMs can't be scheduled so tightly together by a hypervisor, but it'll mainly be about charging what the market is prepared to pay.
Cloud Pricing is ridiculous ... made the comparison between a dedicated server and cloud offerings of microsoft, google, amazon ... rackspace (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times in the cloud for the same.
Restaurant prices are ridiculous ... made the comparison between groceries and menu offerings of McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King ... Olive Garden (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times at a restaurant for the same.
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You're not paying for hardware. You're paying for hardware, expertise, services, and convenience.
On-prem or colocation may be a good choice. But limiting your comparison to raw computing power mischaracterizes the decision.
Great analogy re: food! I'm going to steal that.
While undeniably true, you have to look at the levels of redundancy. With a dedicated server, if the box dies you're offline, if the storage dies you may lose data, etc.
Plus, there's also a premium just for access to the ecosystem/APIs. You are often paying for the theoretical convenience of being able to spawn additional instances programmatically.
Absolutely true - however, in a true "apples to apples" comparison, if you're only running a single EC2 instance (for example) and it dies you're offline as well - AWS does not "automatically" have a failover setup for you. In this case 2 dedicated instances with a load balancer is going to get you the same setup you'd get on AWS (only likely cheaper and a lot more powerful setup).
Like someone else said, your VM can die as well, the cloud provides some HA services but there are hosted/standalone versions as well. I think the real question is how spiky is your usage, even with renting bare metal you still can't scale dynamically like you can with cloud VM - if you need 5x the capacity to cover spikes you might as well use cloud and all the fancy stuff you get with it.
And you can use both at the same time (dynamically scale up through cloud, bare metal predictable workloads)
We're moving to AWS for our next release, managed by Rackspace. Had the same philosophy as you for years, and have saved a lot of money with DIY (maybe in the tens of thousands).
Turns out server admin is not my skillset, and it's caused problems, headaches and risks in the past.
I consider the additional cost going forwards in effect as our next hire and an important one. For small startups looking to save money DIY can be a good option, but moving onto the cloud at a later date can be a big burden.
You still need a server admin, cloud or not. It's not like there's a magic button in the cloud that replaces an admin.
Appengine (and I believe Elastic Beanstalk) are those magic buttons. I've used Appengine for years, and have loved not having to worry about patching, OS upgrades, scaling or redundancy.
If you're a small shop, this lets you concentrate on your core product instead of your systems. And by "small shop", I really mean "pretty big shop" - you're going to be a globally significant player before your Appengine charges get near a sysadmin's salary.
Yep, which is why we have Rackspace actively managing our cloud setup
A good cloud admin can manage far more in less time in the cloud
I can't imagine Rackspace managing anything being a positive
They seem great so far!
Welcome aboard!
Thanks!
Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud
Actually the guy I just replaced did, but that's because he didn't know what he was doing.
An ex-gig of mine lost their major customer, the new agency moved them to AWS (and poached a few staff, which is how I heard this story). The hosting(inc bandwidth) costs jumped to _nine times_ the previous arrangement, and the website performance dropped.
So far as I know, the guy who masterminded that has not been fired...
You're paying people to maintain your machines. You're eliminating the need for your own sys-admins to keep your servers up to date and patched. For small businesses who have no IT staff for instance, this is exactly what you want.
ec2!=heroku
Yes, but cloud scales in a way dedicated servers simply cannot. I agree that a lot of people use cloud when they shouldn't, but there are a number of cases where it remains very relevant.
Dedicated scales in a way that cloud cannot: vertically.
Want to build a 1TB DDR4 RAM beast with 40 cores? Yeah, you can do that with dedicated.
Fair enough. I guess its time to whip out the big guns then.
https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...
1. Eight socket R1 (LGA 2011) supports Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8800 v4/v3 family (up to 24-Core)
2. Up to 24TB in 192 DDR4 DIMM slots
That's 192 cores / 384 threads with 24TB of DDR4 RAM
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The amount that you can vertically scale with physical servers is far above and beyond what is offered by cloud services. Although I'm impressed that Amazon is now at the 2TB DDR4 RAM level.
Scaling vertically only buys you time until you are forced to scale horizontally.
That and "one huge server" is rarely the best design decision.
> Scaling vertically only buys you time until you are forced to scale horizontally.
Why not both?
> That and "one huge server" is rarely the best design decision.
I never claimed to build only one server. Only that dedicated scales vertically far more than cloud.
There's absolutely nothing stopping me from buying multiple 4TB servers if I wanted to. The reason you go vertical is because Intel's QPI is ~25.6 GB/s (That's big-bytes: so over 200Gbit), far faster than any switch or router on the market. (10-gbit Ethernet, or maybe fiber at 40-gbit if you go really expensive)
You CANNOT scale processes faster than Intel's QPI. Vertical scaling gives you faster communications than even the most expensive switches on the market.
Not what the parent asked for; that's 60 cores (120 threads).
Not "cannot" - just "easier" :)
I do releases by baking a new virtual machine with the code+config built in and booting it. I guess it's possible to do that on real hardware, but calling it simply "harder" borders on disingenuous.
I basically do that for my Xen VMs with NixOps in the "no provisioner" mode. Would be exactly the same for bare metal, plus I get dev VMs that match the prod environment for free.
You can deploy virtual machines to real hardware.
That's what kubernetes, etc. are for.
Keep in mind you get up to 75% discount at AWS for 3yr term upfront payments for reserved instances... (In reality, anything I use only seems to get a ~60% discount for that)
But nobody uses AWS 'cause it's "cheapest". That's completely missing the point.
3yr reserved instances is something that baffled me when I was doing the research for https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com .
What reasons push people to pay upfront and to commit to a solution whose main benefit is elasticity?
For those sweet sweet discounts?
Because who cares about costs next year or the year after, I'm just on a 6 month contract here!
(Even more cynically, "because it's just like buying servers, but comes on the OpEx budget not the CapEx one, so _my_ KPIs look _awesome!_")
Even the worst reserved pricing gets you 30%-40% off of published rates (nothing upfront, just commit to a year)
It makes sense if you need to spin up several servers really fast. Like, "I can't wait 2 weeks for my Supermicro reseller to ship and build them" fast.
There is likely some optimal schedule where you start w cloud, order DIY replacements, and migrate, and repeat as you scale. Labour-intensive though.
Labor isn't cheap. If you spend more on labor to manage this shuffling than you save on cloud costs, it's decidedly suboptimal.
In that case, rent a dedicated server from Hetzner or OVH, it’s online in 120 seconds, and still 5 times cheaper than AWS.
What comparison? Can I simply ask the colo for a brand new dedicated server every time the machine dies or I want to do a new release? Do they offer services to provision, start, and load balance to new dedicated servers when the ones I have are at high utilization?
No? They don't? Maybe that's because you're comparing fundamentally different things that are only superficially similar to each other.
OVH does
For me the compute pricing isn't the main issue. The cutthroat bandwith prices from 9 to 18 cents per GB are the main cost drivers and should be at least mentioned in a blog post about price reduction.
Does anyone know about Azure auto-scaling? It says "most [VM's] include load-balancing and auto-scaling free of charge", is that true and is it any more friendly to hobbyists than the other two?
It was very disappointing to see the auto-scaling services for GCP and AWS basically require a $20/mo load balancer right off the bat. I have an app that is quietly puttering away on a single Digital Ocean droplet, but could at any moment, uh, make it big and I want to be ready. But I can't really stomach the $20 just to turn on auto-scaling somewhere.
To be fair - Amazon (and Google/Azure/whoever) aren't really targeting the sort of user who wants autoscaling for under $20/month... They've got different fish to fry.
There's kind of this uncanny valley of businesses who think their website/app-backend is kinda important, but keep asking about $5 or $20/month hosting when you've recommended ~$100/month for a load balanced redundant AWS setup. If you aren't prepared to pay for a load balancer, at least two ec2 instances, and a multi-region RDS instance - I don't really want to get your 2am Saturday morning phone calls asking why your site/app is down.
Advice: investigate your devops tool of choice (I like Ansible) and work out how to script the spin up of infrastructure at Digital Ocean - you'll need to invest some time to learn and get it working, but you should be able to set up a single command line script to provision additional droplets and add them behind an (automatically updated via Ansible/APIs) dns round robin set of "Floating IP" addresses (or Elastic IP addresses in AWS terminology) and use Heartbeat on each droplet to monitor the others and re-update the Floating IPs as needed. That's kind poorman's HA. For extra credit, you could work out how to automate provisioning of some HAProxy Droplets sitting in front of your app server droplets. Managing a shared database is left as an exercise to the reader who prefers not to pay for RDS ;-)
Did you look into just using DNS load balancing with AWS and GCP? I don't have any experience in that, but Loggly used it in lieu of an ELB in AWS. https://www.loggly.com/blog/why-aws-route-53-over-elastic-lo... So as long as you have a domain somewhere...
Yes, Azure load balancers are free compared to aws's elbs ~20$ charge.
aws elb support http and https termination, and can even provide free SSL certs. Azure's is tcp/udp only.
And the new aws Application load balancers offer even more features.
So it depends on your use-case.
Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.
I've not seen this issue. I work for Microsoft and use a Mac for most of my work.
Example screen shots or URLs?
I suspect the answer is that they are screen fonts designed with ClearType in mind.
Looks fine in Qupzilla on Linux
Never heard of this before, but apparently Qupzilla is a lightweight browser which uses the cross-platform Qt application framework, and it comes with a builtin ad blocker. Nice; I'm going to check this out soon.
Their calculator still seems to have the old prices in case you're like me and don't remember how much it used to cost, but want to see how much you are saving: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?servic...
I don't have any experience with Azure. Are prices competitive with AWS?
Absolutely not. If anything, they are worse at hidden billing than Comcast.
Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS.
I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've not looked at GCE.
But those are my experiences. YMMV
> just rear Glacier horror stories
In Amazon's defense, their pricing is pretty clear and straightforward except for Glacier, which even they admit doesn't follow their pricing model for all the other services.
Google's is still the best though -- they automatically give you "bulk discounts" instead of having to buy them in advance like AWS, and their general philosophy is "your cheapest option should be to finish your workload as quickly as possible", as opposed to AWS, where you have to do some acrobatics to fit into their pricing models efficiently.
You'd think Microsoft would be the go-to provider for SQL Server workloads, but Azure SQL is terribly expensive for some (many?) workloads. For read-intensive SQL Server workloads you'll be paying upwards of $465/mo (Premium P1 [1]) for something that can be easily handled by a beefy VM for a fraction of the price. Also, the Azure SQL pricing model links performance ('eDTUs') to storage which skews the billing model even further.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-databa...
[Disclosure: I work for Microsoft]
One thing to keep in mind for Azure SQL: you are getting a guaranteed SLA [1], business continuity and full point-in-time backups (up to 30 days) [2] for that price. To compare effectively you would need to price out a comparable Always-On cluster, domain controllers, SAN storage (for replication), and backup solution + storage.
[1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/sql-data... [2]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql...
Precisely.
I highlight a similar pricing breakdown with their IoT / MQTT service and their price inanities as well. As far as I can tell, this insane pricing is for the idea of "Can't go wrong with purchasing Microsoft Services".... when in actuality, you can go very much wrong.
I find the prices pretty straightforward mostly, the portal will give you an estimate of the monthly cost for all your current services. The problem is the data transfer pricing. Say you have a website that has 5000 visits a day, it is really hard to estimate your IN/OUT GB, then do the same for blob storage or other services.
Also, isn't AWS billing per utilization/hour? For small projects this means it is many times cheaper than Azure. Azure is more focused to enterprises than to individual devs.
wat? Azure has minute billing... So does google. AWS is a mess.
Yes, and if you were doing anything with the recently killed (or soon to be) RemoteApp, billing there was a disaster. Absolute horrible disaster. Overbilled to my employer because their websites did not equal to what they quoted us. They also refuse to honor enterprise contract regarding transfer (Internet2 peer). Just horrible terrible bad no good.
And their MQTT service (IoT) pricing is a joke. $50/month for 400k messages a day (!second, typo) with a cap of 4k? Seriously? That's just 4.6 messages a second, WITH a data restriction that MQTT itself doesn't have.
I routinely load pictures with motion to "house/frontdoor/motion/" topic in the form of a jpg. MQTT specifies nothing about said data ~ I could even store a dvd VOB for video in a topic.
And this offering is for a max data of 48GB/month. To put this in perspective, a dialup modem(!) Gets a top speed of 5.2KB/s , which sustained across a 30 day month = 43.2GB
I can (and have!) bought a cheap-shit VPS server and installed Mosquitto on it. I can use MQTT as the spec indicates, including Websockets and storing picture data. And it's more on the price range of $40/year, not $600/yr
source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/iot-hub/
Your dialup modem math is wrong: https://www.google.com/webhp?ie=UTF-8#q=(5.2+kilobytes%2Fsec...
(13.48 GB)
I can only blame the... uhh..err.. uhmm... The Windows Calculator! Blast it all!
:)
Not in Azure SQL
Azure is per minute
Reserved instance pricing on AWS absolutely destroys Azure. If you do on-demand on both, they look competitive, but there are ways of bringing AWS down which Azure simply cannot match.
Have you had a chance to look at Google's Preemptible VMs? They're a fixed 70-80% off of list price.
Another point is, Google's VMs are generic CPU/RAM combinations. You don't need "network optimized VMs" or "storage optimized VMs" - you simply get those things on any VM. This makes the "excess instance supply" market much more fluid and simplifies folks' lives.
Happy to discuss further!
(work at GCP)
Google's sustained use discounts for standard (non-preemptible) VMs are a huge win as well. No need to predict usage and reserve instance time in advance; the discount is simply applied progressively as you use a particular instance type more during a month.
That's nice, I'm using azure for a windows vm and it's been super frustrating trying to get reasonable performance. (RAM/CPU/etc. is all great but the standard IO is so slow it's basically unusable (i'm maxing out at 10M/s (I think due to iops limitiations).
Why is GCP (just like AWS and Azure) still 5 times more expensive than comparable dedicated cloud services from competitors?
I can get this https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 in a few hours, with more performance than anything you offer for even 5 times the price. Same at most other dedicated hosters.
Do you even ever intend to be price competitive?
Also, there's nobody to contact at Microsoft regarding Azure billing. I was prototyping some app that used App Service, Document DB, and Notification Hub and for a few months they billed at around $10 - $20, all of a sudden it's $1,200 for a month. The app was not launched, I was the only user. There's no way to figure out why other than it's a DocumentDB charge. There's no way I'd put anything in production with Azure.
If you can PM askdocdb at Microsoft and share details on your subscription, we can take a look and help you. Thanks
Did you open a support ticket, there is a category specifically for Billing issues.
Thanks, I just did. For some reason I did not see that option before.
seems like mostly updating to the newest models and making the entry level sku's much cheaper to attract more people kicking the wheels and lower the bar for dev's wanting to try out Azure. I would love to see they take this to an extreme and either make the A0 or A1 free like AWS.
The A0 standard and the A0 basic prices did not change. Both of those instances will be dramatically outperformed by a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet for 1/2 to 1/3rd the price.
Well, so are Amazon's lowest tier nodes. I think its fair to say that AWS and Azure aren't competing against cheap VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean.
Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS).
https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/
https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml
For a certain scale, aiming at dedicated is probably cheaper, especially when you consider how much faster a dedicated SSD box is than a shared VPS.
The main benefits of AWS (or Azure) are all of the other features they offer on their platform. But I don't think that they are low-cost anymore, especially in today's world with ~$42/month dedicated SSD Xeon servers.
You might also want to add https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 to your list of cheap dedicated servers.
It’s seriously crazy how expensive AWS, Azure, and co are.
I will add my thanks for your nocix suggestion. I prefer to do my development on a beefy VPS, most often from OVH, but I think I will try switching to novix for a few months. (I don't like my laptop heating up or running out of capacity, and it is nicer to have a dev setup that I can hit from any laptop (or tablet)). For development, I don't need super high reliability.
Well, development seems more like a VPS job, since you aren't going to be utilizing the CPU too much.
I think high-load web servers (which will be hitting the disk often) or video game servers (especially world-simulations like Minecraft or Factorio) that will benefit from dedicated servers the most.
But give it a shot. I know that the higher-cost VPS are more expensive than those dedicated boxes. I'm also surprised at how cheap dedicated has gotten recently.
I do have high CPU utilization tasks, like large Haskell builds, Tensoflow, etc. I agree that the cheap physical server costs are surprising, given facility and power costs.
Wow thanks for the Nocix link. I never came across them before. That is dirt cheap.
You have $25/month for free for a year... And $200 free trial.
You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.
> You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.
For non-production use only. There's a lot of fine print on the MSDN "free credit."
I have a few hobby projects stored on github and it's easy to get linux VMs so that when I commit something it gets checked out and built and packaged automatically. It's easy to find a VM for a reasonable monthly price. But it seems to be much harder to find reasonable windows options to do the same there?
I currently make it build on my machine at home, but that't not very scalable or reliable.
I don't really want a full windows machine. I want a decent windows machine for doing builds that only runs for a few hours in total each month and is cheap.
Is there such a thing?
Cloud providers should make their smallest instances basically free. Bottom end instances/pricing is the drug through which developers become addicted to a platform.
Base AWS and GCE VMs are like $4 a month. Isn't that basically free?
AWS also has a free tier for many services (EC2 included) for the first 12 months of usage. They're well familiar with the "first hit's free" business model...
And then there's Azure at €11 point something. The local web hosting company does better specs for half the price, and the lowest one (only slightly lower specs than Azure's) is €3 a month.
Things like this pricing difference between VM and App Service which run on the same dedicated hardware, not sure why its still 2x the price? http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png
We had planned to develop a Saas solution based on Azure, but the App Service and sql pricing have forced us to drop it.
We love Azure, and we would like to use it for all our web projects, but it is hard to justify it with the current pricing.
Talk to a Microsoft rep. There are several categories of Microsoft customers. One category is enterprises using Microsoft products internally. Another is software/SaaS companies using Microsoft products to develop or deliver a product. The prices you see are for that first group. The prices for the second group tend to be _heavily_ discounted.
Shoot me a message (email in profile) if you have questions. I do not get heavily involved in licensing discussions, but can try to answer more questions if you have them. If you want to build a SaaS on Azure, though, you are the customer Microsoft wants - take advantage of that.
with App Service you're basically paying for a managed server (patched etc.) and a host of capabilities that VMs don't have out of the box (autoscaling, monitoring etc.)
Don't use Azure. Alway have a network problem.
does anyone know of a no-frills side-by-side cost comparison of top cloud services, for say, a micro instance?