Has anyone tried the free trial with Microsoft Azure?

 

I am really wanting to try it but in order to register you must enter your credit card details for identification and it tells you it will not bill you unless you state otherwise.

Anyone else signed up to this free trial and then had a bill?

 

 

 

 

 

Looking at this but on a much larger scale (few million quid). Cloud services are a real bugger to figure out. The bills are elastic and so hard to predict but MS licensing is driving everything onto it.

 

The technology is pretty good, it's just the marketers and bean counters screwing thing up.

AWS and Google's offerings are solid too.

 

Lots of pitfalls though. It's like PCP for servers. When your in it's very hard to get out and you're open to getting gouged when your contract turns over.

 

Not a lot of help sorry, just sympathy

From a service provider side of things, running things in the cloud only makes sense under certain circumstances.

If you're heavily utilising a number of servers, you're often better off getting a few hardware vendors in to get some better pricing.

 

Most of the big boys claim you're getting a discount, but they've got plenty left to play with.

 

Also as above, once you rely on them, then they can turn the screws as you've lost your hardware and skills.

Should be ok if you check terms. So for example on some cloud providers (most) you'll pay for everything while it's running and most of it when it's not. 

 

So create a cluster of machines then power them down... the billing clock is still ticking. 

 

I've not tried azure ( as mentioned ) but if you're into the MS stack it seems to be well engineered from visual studio upwards. The license costings always threw me on MS/IBM/Oracle when comparable opensource was available. 

 

Problem is, the customer hasn't heard of anything else, and whilst your there as a paid professional, they want <foo>.

 

I suspect like amazon the raw performance isn't that great. But then that's not the draw. Cloud is the draw if you want dynamic scaling( hard work for apps ) or flexible workloads and the whole ecosystem. It's not good for setting up a single server to run the same load day in day out. It's overpriced for that, it can do it of course. I use it for brisky in terms of messaging and other aspects. But the web workload is primarily the same and VPS provision is "good enough" not to require dedicated machines. If cpu steal becomes a problem, then I'll look at dedicated tin again, probably in ovh in a  3/5 cluster because support isn't great...

 

If you had a few days to kill, I'd do it and try. you get a good free allowance, if you don't spin up huge servers to print hello world then you should make it last a good bit.

Azure is very costly... I found for a list of servers at my spec was going to cost X a year. In house the hardware with 3 years of parts replacement (24/support) would cost the same figure. There are no doubt benefits, but as said above, if you can do these things internally it can be cheaper - not that cost is ever the only factor.

For me at least, there is a small price to be had. I'm a small 1 man company, not got racks in a dc or major HA needs anymore.

 

If I ran my own tin, a half dozen say, not lots, but enough. When a disk pops at 23:00 on xmas eve, I'm the one replacing it. I could leave it of course ;) If the server goes down, I'm to get it up.

 

In the cloud/vps I pay to have 99% of those challenges smoothed out, I could pay for a shelf in a dc too and a guy with a screwdriver ;). I want another 200gb of disk, click it's ready. But as above you totally pay for it in the long run. 

 

Azure and AWS and rackspace are amongst the most costly... openstack I was interested in, but no longer.

 

Our Db server on azure would cost circa £433/£168 (D12v2 sufficient) a month vs £50 on a dedicated OVH box. At that sort of copper, I'd have 3 OVH in a snap.

 

I run a vps for clients if they want proper hosting. I tend to run one per client, rather than pile them high. Comparing A0 azure to entry tier on linode, upcloud you're in similar ball park costs, i.e. <£10 for 1cpu and <=1Gb ram. At £10 per month for a 'starting' server which does wordpress etc fine, it's an acceptable cost.

 

One good thing rfrom cloud is automation :) I just deleted all my scripts for ubuntu as I'm switching over to centos. Each line or change goes into an ansible script. The cloud providers, azure too can then be run up from wherever you sit and deploy working code. Or that's the unicorn's theory that sold me on it all.

One of the hard bits is figuring out how much your own stuff is costing you to run so you can use that figure to see if cloud hosting is actually cheaper or not.

 

We've got about 2000 servers of varying types all with god knows what combination of licensing, support agreements and compliance requirements. Some physical but many VMs running on a Hypervisor farm. Dealing with Oracle and trying to figure out if going from tin to cloud will mean you're going to get hit with a massive processor bill ain't fun.

 

Then I've got to figure out what components are needed to ensure we're DPA and GDPR

Work on about 30% utilisation...

If you're more than that tin is usually cheaper.
Also a lot of the models you might see flying around are based on a really inefficient DC at the local site.

 

We are seriously thinking of using Azure at work, doesn't seem to make sense given we have two big Datacenters in the UK we host many customers from but what we do like is Microsoft's approach if we do run said application with them - They will promote our service to bring in sales.

 

Win, Win for all - We get the business / Microsoft get business as we are firing up more VMs

We are seriously thinking of using Azure at work, doesn't seem to make sense given we have two big Datacenters in the UK we host many customers from but what we do like is Microsoft's approach if we do run said application with them - They will promote our service to bring in sales.

 

Win, Win for all - We get the business / Microsoft get business as we are firing up more VMs

 

I'd be dubious about that, mind you it is logical, not sure how much real promotion they would offer for your companies services though. Would it be more like X runs on Azure... End of. Not a promotion of your actual services as such? I might be being over sceptical though.