Ask HN: Why is Azure so expensive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Azure so expensive?

69 pointstuyguntn72 comments

What is the benefit of using Azure comparing to AWS or Google Cloud? It is so expensive

Because its aimed at enterprises that have Microsoft OS's and applications. Those buyers are used to paying a premium and know they don't have to retrain staff.

You need to consider that the bulk of developers are actually using the Microsoft platform. For the most part they aren't interested in the free software community. Linux VMs are not an option for a lot of corporate tasks.

That is of course changing and probably the main driver for Microsoft being more open.

For what its worth - "More than 20% of Azure VMs run on Linux" (Oct 2014) [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/msftnews/status/524262781592539136

Hm. 1000% sure it's a Sales tactic. Price it high and cut "deals" for clients. Oldest trick in the book.

They're a lot more cooperative around BigCorp compliance related stuff than AWS. It doesn't sound like that big a deal, but it really is.

Oh yeah, that's for sure huge, but BigCorp isn't paying market price per container. I'm talking about the sales tactics played out against the little guy.

Yeah, you can get rather large discounts if you are a large customer or commit to X amount a year.

Or if you become a registered partner. No certifications necessary, it's a few hundred bucks a year, and there are many other benefits for MS-focused devs/consultants.

Is that really true? I thought Java and .NET had pretty comparable mindshare in the enterprise server-side world. Certainly Windows desktops rule but line of business web apps are often J2EE on RHEL/CentOS. Or is that not true anymore?

I imagine if the enterprise is running JVM based stuff they wouldn't use Azure. I think the point is, is that most of enterprise has used Microsoft before. While it might be more expensive, its a safe bet for them to stick with Microsoft even when moving to the cloud.

The number of times I've seen enterprises deploy Windows servers running Java on them is probably equal to the times I've seen it in production on Linux. Windows system administrators are easy to find in enterprise space and the process of keeping them fed and happy is really cut and dry compared to the myriad of options (read: ways to fail when you're as dysfunctional as most F500 organizations) on a UNIX variant. When you have both Java and C# developers but don't want to spend the money on both Linux and Windows computer janitors, your pick Windows for standardization of OSes, not Linux.

The lack of choice is liberating for enterprises constantly in a state of analysis paralysis over every random software requirement that could sink their ball of twine software stacks.

> Or is that not true anymore?

No, it's still true. Java's market share of server-side applications is enormous.

Azure just recently announced price reductions to be competitive with AWS. The blog post has some interesting links. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/helping-azure-custome...

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.

I can just say that Azure and AWS cost more than Google Cloud because Google Cloud has the worst customer support I ever saw.

Nice to hear that Google are consistent with their customer support across all their products!

I spent about 2 hours on the phone with Chromecast support yesterday for an intermittent problem I was having. On the bright side, they have a phone number you can call for support, on the bad side, it seems their strategy is to keep transferring you to different people, each who makes you go through the same trouble shooting steps until you just give up out of frustration, which I did.

Customer hung up? PROBLEM SOLVED!

What happened?

I've never used google cloud services but google is pretty famous for not having human support. They philosophy involves trying to automate as much as possible, and then pointing you at a community forum as a fallback.

Comparison (not exactly apples-to-apples):

~3-4Gb RAM: Azure (2cores, >100$/month), Google (1core, ~25$), AWS (37$, or compute optimized 75$)

high memory 13-14Gb: Azure (>246$), Google (~63$), AWS (16Gb, >172$)

...

UPD: Thanks to tyingq, Azure 3-4Gb RAM (2cores, starting from 70$)

Make sure you're looking at Linux or Windows VMs for both, Azure's ~3-4Gb RAM Linux VMs run $70-$90/mo, whereas their Windows (the default on the pricing page) are $115-$135/mo. All of Azure's VM offerings also include hard disk storage, which is extra on AWS.

Also, if you look at Azure's Compute Optimized VM running Linux at 3.5Gb RAM, it comes down to $57/mo, which is much closer and includes 50GB of SSD storage, which Amazon doesn't do at that price point.

Also, things like NoSQL databases are completely impossible to compare apples to apples (AWS DynamoDB vs Azure DocumentDB are priced completely differently: DynamoDB is priced on both storage and request streams, DocumentDB is priced on requests/second only)

Cloud pricing is complicated - what else is new?

Just to illustrate how hard it is to do a simple comparison, you show Azure's 3/4 GB ram offering as being 2 cores and > $100/month.

But, if I go to their pricing page (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...), I see:

A2 - 2 Cores, 3.5GB, 40GB: $70

A2 - 2 Cores, 3.5GB, 135GB: $89

D1 - 1 Core, 3.5GB, 50GB: $104

D2 - 2 Cores, 7GB, 100GB: $115

D2V2 - 2 Cores, 7GB, 100GB: $127

Thus, I'm not sure which one you're referring to. You seem to be referring to one with 7GB RAM, which seems not to be a very direct comparison.

Had look and I get totaly different pricing (higher mostly), Central US/USD prices and couple examples:

INSTANCE CORES RAM DISK SIZES PRICE D1 1 3.5 GB 50 GB $0.14/hr (~$104/mo) D2 2 7 GB 100 GB $0.28/hr (~$208/mo)

So D1 same and yet D2 twice the price!

A2 is $134 for same setup.

Note they mention discounts for 12 months prepaid, though not exciting and talking 5% discount and you have to be spending $6000 to qualify for that over the 12 month period.

Certainly seems, use of proxies and your location effect what you are quoted and I'm located near London and used the Opera browser, so who knows.

Certainly indicates that shopping around, even if your hitting the same price page, is prudent.

You're looking at Windows instances. Click the linux tab.

You are absolutely right, thank you for clearing that up and indeed I get same prices as you now, accept upon D1 which is (~$57/mo)with D2 - same as you get ~$115/mo . The V2 flavours at $63 and £127 a month (D1 and D2 respectively).

You could calculate price per (RAM, CPU, disk) metric separately, at least.

Deleted comment

Then better Hetzner vServers, comparable to Linode and DO i guess? The setup is also done in a few minutes and they perform quite nicely.

Is Azure more expensive? I can't tell, in any simple way.

Is there a place that offers some simple apples-to-apples comparison for typical use cases? All three require complex calculators that account for bandwidth use, ip addresses, etc.

Edit: I do see some tools after searching some, but they are all flawed a bit because the three providers don't all offer the same thing. Azure's 2 core machines start with significantly more RAM than Google or AWS, so it's not a great comparison. The tools don't make that sort of mismatch easy to see.

The inability to directly compare signals a deliberate attempt to make the offer opaque for consumers and thus bias the market towards inefficiency.

I believe the term you're looking for is 'product differentiation'.

Yes — it's a business technique whose purpose is the reduction of competitive pressure.

I don't think so, but that would be an awesome tool.

I have seen many companies alter their operations to take advantage of cost savings on a given cloud platform, so such a calculator wouldn't be a definitive answer.

I have seen companies running back to metal a year later, once it becomes clear these "savings" are actually much more expensive when you have applications doing real work 24/7.

Just do it yourself. its pretty obvious Azure cost a lot more than both AWS or GCN.

It is not obvious...really.

Azure: 4 cores, 7GB RAM, 120GB Disk + 200GB xfer, Basic Tier: $156.84

AWS: C4.Xlarge, 7.5GB RAM, 80GB SSD, + 200GB xfer: $170.37

Can I make examples where Azure is more expensive...sure. But straight comparisons are hard to do. The product offerings don't line up well.

I'm referring to Linux instances. Also Azure charges you for both ingress and egress traffic. I've looked into it many times.

My example above is Linux, and Azure is cheaper for that one specific example.

Just making the point that it's not easy to compare. You mention one reason above. It's not as simple as "Azure charges for both ingress/egress." For example, Azure includes 5TB/month ingress/egress. AWS 1TB/egress, unlimited ingress. I imagine in some cases that 5TB in/out is better than 1TB/unlimited.

There are many others, like the fact that the instances don't have many 1:1 matchups across providers. Add in things like load balancing, storage, etc, and it gets more complex.

It does appear that Azure is usually more expensive, but it's not so easy to tell for sure.

@devsquid: Azure for sure does not charge ingress traffic. Just google for "azure pricing ingress" and you find "Inbound data transfers (i.e. data going into Azure data centers): Free"

I wont talk to the benefits of using Azure versus AWS versus Google Cloud, but Azure's sales model is a bit different.

If you're looking at Azure, and on HN, my guess is you're probably a startup, in which case you want to look into Microsoft Bizspark (https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark). This drastically changes Azure prices. If you're a larger company, Azure is all about enterprise sales, and bundling. If you buy multiple Azure services along with Windows, and O365, the Azure part is dirt cheap.

BizSpark and BizSpark Plus will get you a lot of free time every month. Google will also do something similar if you go through an incubator they have partnered with.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

This isn't reddit. You can't post out of context EEE FUD here.

For our use case (fairly standard windows setup, sql server, about 8 VM's in total) Azure was less expensive, more so after we setup and saw true costs. We run our dev and test environments there and were able to get faster hardware & more storage for less as well (about 10% less for about 20% more). But again, that's a pure windows setup, comparing other components gets tricky because of different pricing models.

We recently explored putting about 25 of our VMs in Azure.

For our workloads, Azure is a worse deal. Broadly, we found that compared to EC2 instance types, you paid a slight premium of 20% or so to get 2x the RAM and 100s of gigs of ephemeral SSD storage (vs little or no SSD storage), while taking a perhaps 30% hit in CPU performance.

It's not terrible, and depending on your workload, might be better than EC2. I'm personally very partial to Amazon's spot instances and t2 family types, neither of which Azure offers.

Even so, compute only represents ~25% of our AWS bill. For enterprises who have significant Windows/AD investment, Azure might be a no brainer from an ops cost point of view.

Every time I go VM shopping, it's always going to cost around 30-50% more to run on Azure. Thats a pretty significant increase IMO, especially for companies where Cloud Servers account for around half of our expenses.

Setting aside the cost which I thought similar for Linux.....

If you are running Linux , azure works really well. Give it a try if you can set aside your bias.

This post should be flagged.

The OP needs to quantify the statement about azure being expensive or else it will just sound like anti-Microsoft fud.

Firstly, the hyperscale providers size their VMs differently, so it is generally not an apples to apples comparison. The best way to compare cloud environment is to consider 3 year cost of ownership, and try to price in various components/elements you might use such as big data stores, VLANs, autoscaling, tiered storage etc.

It is my opinion that the variance in pricing over the long run is no more (or will be no more) than 5% for these hyperscale providers over the long run. So your decision should be based on the type of applications you are trying to build in the cloud. If you are a microsoft "house", then it might make more sense to consider AZURE since they make it easier to port diretory services and licenses to their cloud. Likewise if you are a google house.

Obviously AWS has a lead in the market with regards to tools and functinalities as they were early to the cloud game, but MS and google are catching up fast. My personal choice of IaaS is google cloud because their interface is very easy to understand, but frm a customer support perspective, AWS and AMAZON are far better. Also, AWS and google frequently provide free credits for a period of time so it would make sense to try those out to see what works best.

> Obviously AWS has a lead in the market with regards to tools and functinalities as they were early to the cloud game

I really disagree with this statement. Having used both AWS and Azure, Azure is leaps and bounds ahead with the tools they provide. It's possible AWS made efforts to catch up, it's been several years since I ported everything from AWS to Azure.

This is a good question. I don't know of one.

There are some issues I've seen while trying to run systems there. Some of the network configuration there is very strange, and I've seen some crazy performance issues. Their API is very painful to use as well. Lastly, they run an agent on your node that can gain someone root access (worse than Linode's ability for someone to do that). Finally, their control panel has a basically unlimited session lifetime. I don't think I've had to log in once within the past 60 days.

I've found that systems running in Azure reliably perform worse than AWS. Systems in Azure with about the same CPU and RAM have worse performance by anywhere from 2x to 10x. I'm using this based on seeing things like GC run times in both Go and the JVM. The systems report 0.00% CPU steal, no idea where the bottleneck is.

Their network also leaves some to be desired. One of the biggest pain points is that they drop ICMP Echo / Echo Reply on the edge of the network. So doing network troubleshooting across the WAN is challenging. Another issue is that they seem to often either drop or de-prioritize UDP packets within their Fresno location. This causes some issues with software that uses UDP for communication. With that are the weird, and confusing, mix-match between NetworkSecurityGroups and Endpoints, with only one of them being configurable in the UI.

The last thing is their API and the SDK (at least Ruby). Their API is an XML behemoth with incorrect documentation (e.g., the example URL using a wrong path in the docs), and severe performance problems. There are times where the API takes over a minute to respond to a request, sometimes taking longer to respond with an HTTP 500. Their Ruby SDK, at least, isn't so much as an SDK as a library that's meant to be consumed via IRB.

Lastly, the nodes all run an agent called WALinuxAgent. This allows Azure to take action on your node without your approval. It can also do things like add new users to your node, and give then full sudo access. This is also done without a reboot, so you have no indicator that someone just took this action on your system. Scary!

I've also seen this agent get weird responses from the endpoints it talks to causing it to think it should reprovision your node. It proceeds to then rewrite your SSH host keys, vomit an exception, and then exit. It's brilliant.

Trying to get help from support is impossible. I've had issues with the quality of the responses given, but also issues with them just never responding to open issues. AWS's support team should be commended in comparison.

> One of the biggest pain points is that they drop ICMP on the edge of the network. So doing network troubleshooting across the WAN is challenging.

Do they drop all ICMP, or just ICMP Echo Request/Response? Because if they drop all ICMP, including "Fragmentation needed but Don't Fragment set", it will cause problems.

Echo/Echo Reply only I believe; not done an exhaustive test to confirm all that are dropped. I've clarified in my post that I was referring to E/ER. Thanks for calling that out.

As far as I understand Microsoft licensing, in normal VPS + Windows solution you would have to pay Windows Server CALs for each user connecting to your web app on that server (even if you dont use windows authentication).

In Azure, MS frees you from that CAL charge.

I would be grateful if someone could confirm or reject this licensing issue - I heard it once from a MS employee but perhaps he misunderstood the thing about VPS somehow?

As of Windows 2012, you don't need CALs for a "web workload" (basically, Internet web pages and POP3 email) on the standard edition. Before that, there was a special edition for "web workloads" that was limited in other ways.

Well, I spoke to MS licensing person from Warsaw 3 months ago and she was sure about the need for an external connector license if you don't want to pay CALs (costs around 100 CALs if I remember correctly). What is your source of information if I may ask? Or maybe you can point me towards a publicly available document?

You do need an external connector license for the servers that aren't running "web workloads" (serving pages), e.g., a database or mid-tier application server.

See question 5 at http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume-licensing/archive/2014/03/...

That blog post is also a great demonstration of the hilariously complicated MS licensing regime. Hilarious if you don't have to deal with it, that is.

Thanks a lot for the link!

It seems that if I have a web app and database on the same server then user<->web app does not require CAL even if database is involved in handling that web app work load! That's good news for my use case. It really shows how twisted MS licensing is if MS licensing staff does not understand MS licensing )

I am not sure however, whether this changes if authentication is involved - is it still a publicly available web solution or not?

I really hope ASP.NET will become rock solid soon on Linux so one can avoid MS licensing twists altogether,

You need CALs for things like Domain users (people logging in to managed desktops), Sharepoint users, and Exchange accounts. Your business's internal users of Microsoft products.

Your own code running on Windows Server, no. MS charges editions of things like SQL Server and IIS based on functionality, cores, nodes, etc.

don't think you need cals for web apps - a server license is enough for web apps

What is more expensive? The pricing seems on par with Amazon.

Is it even relevant? You need to work out how much your hosting costs as a percentage of your overall expenses. In my business it is less than 5% running on Azure. I could convert to AWS and save a bit and it might be 4%, hardly worth the effort. If you have hosting costing > 10% then you have bigger issue, not enough revenue, or terribly inefficient software.

It's not just that. If you did things yourself on dedicated hosting (which would save you 70-80% of your bill) you'd have more options. You'd have much more bandwidth, much more cpu, much more disk for the same price.

Of course it'd be more work. But if you think you can transform more bandwidth, faster calculations or more user storage into more customers, you definitely want to get off cloud.

And then when one of those customized servers dies...

Because it's not. Azure and AWS are largely comparable. The only reason to select your cloud provider between Azure and AWS is the feature set you care most about.

If you are a .NET shop, Azure absolutely dominates AWS for what it provides.

This reminds me of this article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/ballme...

Microsoft partners get benefits like unlimited Azure support incidents at some partnership levels. They also get consulting hours.

My guess is that they are selling to existing MS stack install bases hat are much more price agnostic.

So expensive? Can you please provide some data / your usage to back you statement?

Azure/Google is definitely more expensive but that is probably because they don't treat their employees like crap. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243

In any cost comparison I have done, Google comes out ahead of AWS, followed by Azure.

if you need windows VMs it's alright

Well duh.

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