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Comment by jakewins | Hacker News Reader

> Also at one point there were no VMs available anymore in our region, which caused a lot of issues.

I'm not sure if this is a difference between other clouds, at least a few years ago this was a weekly or even daily problem in GCP; my experience is if you request hundreds of VMs rapidly during peak hours, all the clouds struggle.

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Right now, we can’t request even a single (1) non-beefy non-GPU VM in us-east on Azure. That’s been going on for over a month now, and that’s after being a customer for 2 years :(

We launch 30k+ VMs a day on GCP, regularly launching hundreds at a time when scheduled jobs are running. That’s one of the most stable aspects of our operation - in the last 5 years I’ve never seen GCP “struggle” with that except during major outages.

At the scale of providers like AWS and even the smaller GCP, “hundreds of VMs” is not a large amount.

If you’re deploying something like 100 m5.4xlarge in us-east-1, sure, AWS’s capacity seems infinite. Once you get into high memory instances, GPU instances, less popular regions etc, it drops off.

Now maybe after the AI demand and waves of purchases of systems appropriate for that things have improved, but it definitely wasn’t the case at the large scale employer I worked at in 2023 (my current employer is much smaller, so doesn’t have those needs, so I can’t comment)

Not a single VM possible to request on Azure us-east for over a month now though :-(

I was talking about real cloud providers :P

I don't use Azure much anymore, but I used to see this problem regularly on Azure too, especially in the more "niche" regions like UK South.

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