Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheeze | Hacker News Reader

Man... Azure seems to be an order of magnitude worse than AWS and GCP when it comes to reliability.

Seems like they have tons of global dependencies within their services which cause these cascading failures rather often... Seems like only a few months ago we were reading about a global outage that affected auth?

View on HN

When it comes to outages, just recent Azure downtimes broke our SLA 5 times over for the whole year..

Tho for w/e reason i cannot convince higher ups, that the switch was a stupid idea. But hey! We got some credits to spend in Azure to compensate. (Too bad we had to pay our clients with real cash)

Sometimes I'm not sure how Azure makes any money with the amount of credits they give out.

I'm exaggerating, of course, but from my POV Azure looks subsidised.

Azure is subsidized by Microsoft so they retain customers and mindshare, they also seem to have a mix of talent working for them. In some areas like reporting dashboards and such, Azure is head and shoulders better than AWS and GCP, but few if any of their large clients use these features (missing the primary value you'd get from using Azure).

Our interaction with the GCP sales team has repeatedly been aggressive US based sales agents, whereas Microsoft sent us to deal with (incompetent) sales agents out of India after promising us significant startup credits when we crossed paths with them at a conference near Seattle.

I think the regular prices for cloud services are super high. a1.xlarge has 4 vcpus and 8GB memory for $500 a year? They can afford to give a lot for free.

Yep [0].

They had cooling issues at one of their data centers that took most of South Central off line for hours to days, depending on the services you were using

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17910916

Coincidentally, a neighbor of mine recently retired from consulting and told me, a couple of days ago, that he's still been getting a lot of calls from people wanting to move off Azure due to reliability issues. He said he's thinking of jumping back in due to money he thinks he's now left on the table to be made.

What does the consultant do to help them move? Sounds like a cushy job!

Of course it isn't! You're talking about moving server software from Azure to something else which isn't likely going to be something from Microsoft so you're talking Linux or BSD or UNIX--a completely different platform.

To me that sounds like fun, but maybe I’m weird. But I doubt the consultant does it. They probably draw some architecture diagrams and get a team to do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com