Azure Stack – Azure On-Premises | Hacker News Reader

Azure Stack – Azure On-Premises

azure.microsoft.com

51 pointsmpweiher17 comments

This has been a recurring topic (with rebranding) for a while now. Has the pricing been released?

I heard that they moved from supporting any hardware to just a select few certified (expensive) vendors. Is that true?

In the whitepaper it references three vendors that will offer this- Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo.

I am using GCP and I am loving the ease of using GCP. I am wondering would Google consider to do something like this because some of my clients have 'hard' requirements such as they have to own/manage the data centre which stores their data.

One can say that Google's "on-prem GCP" is Kubernetes. Rolling it on top of bare metal fleet gives you a pretty sweet environment with much greater elasticity or ease of management than OpenStack-like private virtualized clouds. Everything else, like fancy management UIs or monitoring / logging front-ends and highly available databases can nicely run on top of it.

There are tools [1] that make Kubernetes clusters one-click deployable and remotely manageable behind firewalls, which makes MSPs jobs of running Kubernetes on private infra dead-easy.

[1] http://gravitational.com/telekube/

Full disclosure: I work at G and a huge believer in software delivered as a service on private infrastructure.

GCP is such a dream. I love using it. Azure's a mess.

Here's a lovely thing that happened. I wanted to figure out how much space my containers take in Azure storage. Once a day, MS will calc the total for billing purposes, but at the storage account level. There's no documented way to do this for individual containers than to enumerate every single file and sum it up.

Well, in the Azure portal, if you hit properties on a container, hey, it shows you the count and filesize. Neato! Obviously MS is aware and slipped in this functionality into the UI at least. So I check a few containers, it works. I try it on another container and it takes a bit of time. I tab away and do some other stuff. Then I get a text about my mobile data usage limit.

Turns out the Azure client portal, when you click properties, with no indication it's doing this, will page through all your files and sum them. By making requests for 2.5MB of XML metadata at a time.

Everything is just so clunky with Azure. GCP is the opposite, and I'm no fan of Google.

I've had exactly the same experience with Azure and GCP. Started out with Azure and got so fed up with the crazy interface that I switched to GCP and have been consistently impressed with the attention to detail - especially with the tools they provide in the browser.

google cloud astroturfing the worst part of hn imo.

I'm not so sure it's astroturfing in this case... I haven't done much with GCE, but the UX does seem to be better than AWS and Azure. AWS is just horrible, and some of the defaults while more secure make less sense often enough. Azure seems to have similar options, with a less horrible UX, but still not great.

Though if you're using Ansible or another management system that's scripted over the top, it makes less of a difference. I will say that some of the hosted services (data in particular), Azure is really nice... Azure Storage Queues/Tables are solid and Azure SQL is easiest to get a grasp on setup/cost of the three.

That said Google Cloud is better in terms of compute with docker containers.

I work for a Microsoft partner, so certainly not astroturfing. I just really don't care for Azure. Though, today's announcement re: Bash shell in the browser for Azure is certainly a step in the right direction for usability.

Maybe its because I'm a .Net dev but everythings been working out pretty good for me on Azure. Half the stuff I do on a daily basis I can do from VS to begin with. About the only problem I've run into is having the azure instance override certain configuration settings I had in my app when I published it, but I haven't run into that issue in a while.

I use .NET too. Problems we've experienced:

Dealing with the portal. It's just annoying.

Networking - first, when they had the idiotic "Classic" design where you had to share an IP for no reason. Then sometimes, the network just wouldn't work very well. We'd get Pingdom alerts even though the site was up and responding. PCAP showed TCP issues. Same issue with Azure CDN, until we re-created the account and selected Akamai. Or Verizon. It's just silly.

VMs hanging, and the suggestion being to stop/start or resize them to get them unstuck.

The moronic SSD situation. Seriously, you need a special class of VM? And for a while, that meant you got an "erased-at-any-time" temp drive SSD. Can't choose size of SSD, must use one of 3 presets. And if you need more perf/storage, they suggest RAIDing them together. It's a joke.

Everything slow and overpriced. GCP is 20-80% less than Azure for VMs - even getting an enterprise agreement didn't help much. And that's not even getting into scheduling preemptive VMs on Google.

SQL Azure seemed really slow (so we had to pay for the premium level) and prone to connection resets or "transient errors" requiring special coding. This was not using anything exotic or heavy workloads, we just got shit IO out of it, even at the, I think, $400/mo tier.

Everything just being "clunky". Networking rules, for instance, are just straightforward on GCP. Ping works, unlike on Azure (wtf guys). And again, I cannot stress how much of a pain that portal is. Maybe I should have everything scripted, but hey, I don't. It's just confusing, and even when you know where things are, it just feels cumbersome and slow. Perhaps I shouldn't be using subjective adjectives, but hey, there it is. And I know I'm not alone.

I get it. Azure wanted to be a full PaaS where you just uploaded your .NET dll and la-di-da. Unfortunately, a: Windows is terribly suited to not having RDP, and b: sometimes we just want IaaS. I also get that they're going to make bucketloads of money getting their enterprise customers cloudified. Existing AD/Exchange deployments aren't just gonna jump over to Google, but they'll migrate bit by bit to Azure and pay nicely for it.

I agree on the issue about the portal. I think they are trying to bring everything Microsoft into cloud which is really a pain.

> I also get that they're going to make bucketloads of money getting their enterprise customers cloudified. Existing AD/Exchange deployments aren't just gonna jump over to Google, but they'll migrate bit by bit to Azure and pay nicely for it.

I am wondering whether enterprises would go for GCP or other IaaS/PaaS for that matter if Exchange is something that can be replicated by Google.

I used to work a company that uses everything Microsoft but really other than Office, I do not think I will miss anything if the company suddenly decides to choose other vendors.

What is the situation in US/Europe that most enterprises hold so tight to Exchange?

As I wrote a few months ago [1], I believe that the only way for "public cloud" companies to keep growing is to enter the "private" IT market with a "cloud in a box" appliance. Azure is well positioned to do this properly; AWS is of course still holding a leadership position.

[1]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2017-ac...

So many enterprises are going to go after this because of pre-existing relationships with Microsoft... not realizing how badly Microsoft is going to have them over a barrel when all of their software (on-prem and cloud) is built and automated to only work with Azure.

Edit: Not sure why the downvotes, would love to hear other perspectives about why I'm off-base. Thanks!

Microsoft's social voting brigade is out in force today because of Microsoft's annual convention thing.

Today HN is a safe space for Microsoft supporters.

Many of us do not hide our identities the way you feel compelled to, and do not dismiss Microsoft out of hand because it was cool to do so when we were in our teens.

You–on the other hand–are so confident in your opinion that you have made an incendiary shell of an account to troll people.

If anyone's on the take, it's you.

Regardless of my username, I really like this product. Microsoft is the first to do it and (I assume) it works seamlessly with Azure.

Microsoft is certainly ahead of the pack with this product.

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