Ask HN: Does anyone use Azure? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone use Azure?

5 pointsvshlos7 comments

Does anyone use windows Azure for their startups? What are your impressions?

Yep! Our company IActionable.com is running on Windows Azure platform. In fact, I'm writing this comment from the Microsoft campus in Redmond. We are attending a Windows Azure Deep Dive hosted this week.

My CoFounder and I were both .Net developers in the past and love C# and SQL Server. We are happy with the Azure platform so far. We're using a little bit of everything too. Worker and Web Roles, Queues, Table Storage and SQL Azure. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have.

It's OK. We just started hosting on Azure, and I wonder what people thought of it in the long term with scaling and usability. It is however some buggy and sometimes slow, but in general I really like it.

It seemed like the pricing structure (for SQL Azure, particularly) made for a big unknown. Was the billing in line with your expectations? What are things to watch out for?

Some things completely depend on the type of project you run. We decided that only the bare-minimum/must-be-relational data will go into SQL Azure so that the database doesn't grow too fast. Instead, we use Table Storage for the really big data. It does require a big change in the way you think about storing and querying your data though since you lose functions such as Count,GroupBy,Joins,etc.

But, there is now something called 'Federations' coming out for SQL Server which will let you automatically and sometimes magically shard your data across multiple database with little maintenance. I'm not sure what the roadmap of that feature is but it eliminates any of the GB cap worries that existed before.

The biggest surprise we ran into was the cost of Transactions. Even though you get 10k storage transactions for pennies, it does add up. Especially since every request for items from a queue is a transaction. So a lot of thought has to go into things to make sure parts of the system aren't too 'chatty' when it comes to Azure Storage. You don't have this problem with SQL Azure. There is no transaction cost, only the GB used.

We mainly use TableStorage as well for storing data, however since none of the data that we have is stored (besides user information) we have each webnode talking directly to each other. I am not quite sure if each of these transactions costs money, but since all the connections between servers are stable connections that are left open in a separate thread, I am thinking it will be pretty cheap. We did run into some problems when using TableStore since I think we underestimated how much we need Count, GroupBy, Sort, etc. Even basic operations such as bringing back a list to display to the user, then clicking to sort by a column is difficult.

I'm considering using Azure atm & would love to hear some opinions/limitations. Initial reading is suggesting there will be a lot of configuration to get things going.

My first recommendation is to get into the BizSpark program. It will give you an MSDN account and a nice chunk of free Azure Hours every month and (I think) 3 1gb Sql Azure databases.

Our company deals with lots of data and real-time responses so we push many of the existing features to their limits. We haven't really had any blockers that didn't have some sort of reasonable work around. And most of the time the next release of features will eliminate a good chunk of those.

We're pretty lucky in that we're part of Microsoft' early adopter programs and get to peek at some features coming down the pipe soon. There is some awesome stuff coming, but of course we're under NDA.

There are some extra things to consider but they are more a result of using the Cloud in general. For example, it highly recommended that you add retry logic into your code which makes sql queries. This is because your data is triple replicated and fail overs or db moves can drop your pooled connections.

Also as I mentioned in my other comment. There are some limits to Table Storage which you need to account for or you'll find yourself stuck and frustrated. Things like Count,GroupBy,Joins,Distinct,etc are not available. For those familiar with NoSql db then this is no surprise. But if you're a hardcore relation guy like I was then this takes getting used to.

We're pretty happy with our decision to use Azure.

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