Windows Azure Website Redesign - More emphasis on Node.js, PHP and Java support | Hacker News Reader

Windows Azure Website Redesign - More emphasis on Node.js, PHP and Java support

windowsazure.com

30 pointsvyrotek14 comments

A couple months back, they ran a two-page piece on the Brazilian edition of Linux Magazine, advertising their support for a language called "PHYTON".

http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/imagens/phyton_on_azure.jpg/...

Could be an acronym for Powerful Hack that Yields Things that are Outstandingly Neat. Os something like it.

Note: the agency who made the ad tried to recall the magazines, but, by the time they noticed it was way too late.

I'm really surprised by their pricing:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

Drag each of those sliders even one notch off the ground and you're looking at $600+/month. Our two fully licensed Windows boxes, taking up half a cage at a datacenter cost less than that, all in.

Coming from a backround of using Amazon's cloud stuff, I'm used to it being relatively cheap, or at least not insane. I can't imagine a real-world use case for a service like Azure if that's what it costs just to get off the ground.

I hardly see how that's the case? $90/small vm, $10/gb db, $7/50gb storage, $3/20gb bw. $109.99/month. ???

Did you accidentally click the '6 month plans' option? It spits out much larger numbers with the '/mo' label on some of the sliders when it's actually the '/6mo' rate.

Drag them? How do I do that on my iPad? #mobilefail

Yeah, it seems a little steep but I'm not sure if $600 for a relatively low scale instance is totally accurate either. But it's still steep. For a while now Microsoft has been focusing more heavily than usual on the enterprise market. The weird thing about this is that the design of this page and the pushinf of some of these languages seems to be targeting independant developers and startups whiles still having a pricing structure that feels like it would be for corporate/enterprise types.

It seems like they send mixed messages like this a lot. Like "hey, develop on Windows because you're used to it but in case you're not we can try to pretend we can comfortably accommodate those who don't exclusively develop in the MS ecosystem". I don't know, it feels almost like an attempt to be popular in the high school sense than to actually offer a viable alternative to AWS-type services to non Windows devs.

Explicit node.js support shouldn't be surprising at all, given that MS funded the Windows port and JS is a first-class language for W8.

Java, OTOH, caught me off guard. I'd have thought MS was totally done with Java given that it's a direct threat to .NET (and previous "disagreements" w/ Sun). Then again, they don't have much of a choice but to support whatever they can if they want to compete with Amazon.

96pt Arial everywhere. Yup, they're serious about this.

Does the font used actually matter? In my opinion I quite like how it looks, regardless of the font used.

I think it looks pretty damned good, until my eyes fall on to that godawful background image, urgh.

I'm not complaining about the use of Arial, it's that trendy Really Massive Sans Serif Headline on the landing page look: they're trying to make Node/RoR/etc. devs feel at home.

I think this is kind of a good thing for M$ since it really seemed like they were having a hard time "getting it" for a while there.

Windows Phone 7 seems cool, and there are rumours about Apple using Azure and AWS for iCloud, and now stuff like this. New hobbyist and start-up interest is exactly what M$ needs, so I'm glad they're doing things like this. Hopefully they have the infrastructure and support to match.

I think it's just supposed to fit in with other current Microsoft designs (i.e. "Metro-style"). It will use Segoe UI if installed (i.e. on Windows).

Dude, a comment like that will have the karma police around here all over you (and somewhat rightly) but I think what you're pointing out is the obvious lean toward trendiness their trying out here.

I think it's good they're showing that they kind of "get it". Microsoft is huge at the enterprise level but they're really leaving out all of us little guys who are into open languages and software. They've been really uncool for a long time and I know we shouldn't judge a company by how trendy it's tech is and I also think that there's a lot of people using obscure or trendy languages just for the sake of being different and trendy as well but the fact of the matter is that now there are enough people clambering for this that they can't ignore it.

On the face of it, to an outsider it would look like the majority of the startup and open source community were like a bunch of hipsters who think PHP is lame, Ruby and Rails is so awesome, using NoSQL over traditional relational DBs gets you major street cred, etc. I can't knock it either because I use the tools all the cool kids are using too.

So on the one hand I think it's cool that MS is getting into the whole "web apps running on cool hipster tech" game (while still pushing their own stuff though you can kind of tell they know it's kind of lame to some of us). On the other hand, I still can't quite bring myself to think of Azure the same way I think of Webbynode, Heroku, AWS, Linode, and others.

I'd also add, on another note, that trying to get something as simple as an AMP stack on Windows up and running seems to require jumping through far more hoops than necessary. It's just always been a pain to work on the web using Microsoft infrastructure. That's the biggest reason I won't be trying this out for a looong time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com