Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit | Hacker News Reader

Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit

arstechnica.com

42 pointsavsaro33 comments

I tried Windows Azure recently - their cloud storage option to be specific. I was shocked to find out that they did not even have a UI for simple operations like uploading to the bucket etc. Yes, I know they're targeting developers, but I just can't be doing big XML REST requests for every thing. I also couldn't close my account without raising a support request.

The point being - Microsoft's biggest headache is catching up with AWS on the tooling and documentation. They seem to be going all out in competing with every vertical that AWS has, but that might not be the best approach as they might endup spreading themselves too thin.

It cuts both ways. AWS's console in general is much less usable than Azure's and Azure's Website interface (PaaS for apps) puts Elastic Beanstalk to absolute shame.

PS. Check out AzCopy for uploading blobs to storage from the command line.

Visual Studio has built in Explorer tools for viewing and uploading data. It works pretty well. There are some other tools as well. But I agree it should be on their website too.

We've been finding Azure very usable and it has a much nicer UX than Amazon in my opinion.

There is a blob explorer built into visual studio. There are also third party ones available, and lots of command line tools similar to s3cmd built by open source community.

I wish Microsoft would hurry up and open their Australian regions [1]. The government department we work with "does not support the storage of information ... outside Australia [2]".

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/12/microsofts_australia...

[2] http://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/policy_o... (page 3)

All of this causes people to get the wrong idea about AWS.

People aren't attracted to AWS because it is cheap, they are attracted to it for other reasons. When I left Softlayer, the retention specialist I talked to told me that AWS didn't give me free bandwidth, but I told him I wasn't worried about bandwidth costs on AWS because these scaled with my revenue and were a small fraction of it.

Out of curiosity, why did you leave Softlayer for EC2? I am looking at hosting for a new venture. Past experience with EC2 pricing and performance has left me feeling a bit burned, so SoftLayer is among the options I am looking at.

Every time I made a request to Softlayer it ended up in disaster.

For instance, I requested an upgrade in the port speed on my machine and somehow the trouble ticket system got screwed up so I couldn't make any more requests.

Later on I added a hard drive and they didn't make a partition table on it and somehow when the machine rebooted the superblock got overwritten and then I couldn't read the file system.

Once I was able to reconstruct the superblock I moved the contents of that hard drive to S3 and didn't look back.

Thanks for the reply!

I don't know - I think one of the things that makes people feel comfortable about putting their businesses on AWS is that they feel comfortable about the lock-in because they see this steady drip drip of prices going down.

Could you elaborate those other reasons?

One kind of interesting thing about Azure's compute pricing is that stopped VMs are free. You can pause a VM, deallocate it (which removes it from infrastructure like IP addresses / node allocation / etc. and puts it into cold storage), and not pay anything until you restart it. But when you restart it's in its previous configured state. AFAIK the only way to do that with other cloud or VPS providers is to dump a custom image and then boot off the new image. For some uses that's fine, but for other uses having an interface more like pausing/unpausing a VMWare instance, with persistent state rather than fresh provisioning via configuration management tools, is nicer.

I kind of like Azure and its management portal that makes it easy to setup and manage all their services, but I find the costs to be too high. An Extra small VM (1GHz CPU, 768MB RAM) runs at US$15/month without considering the additional cost of data transfer, storage transactions and storage cost. Compare that to DigitalOcean with their US$5/month for their equivalent offering.

What draws me to Azure is the fact that MS have datacenters where I live.

Does anyone know if Microsoft's Blob Storage can be used for static web site hosting like Amazon's S3 can be? I'm talking about the full experience that S3 offers. That includes selecting the index page filename, and the DNS support so that naked domains (like example.com) can be used directly instead of having to use a CNAME (like for www.example.com) and some redirection service for the naked domain. Azure's support for this was not very good at all the last time I looked and the information available about it today is outdated by several years or isn't encouraging.

I don't know the answer to that but they have a low cost website option called Azure Websites that would probably work and be much better than dealing with blobs.

"Your margin is my opportunity" - Jeff Bezos

Such is life when competing against anything Amazon. Price is feature of their product, just like UI, etc. If they find a way to make it cheaper - they will.

Looks like amazon might be afraid that Dropbox has plans to potentially build their own server infrastructure.

Dropbox does not pay the amounts advertised on Amazon's website, you can be sure of that :)

is that based on a hunch or is there a source for that? (or similar precedent)

It's not so much a hunch as it is common sense. When you subscribe to a service for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per month, then you can be certain that if you call them for a discount, they will pick up, and do business with you.

Considering that Everpix didn't "think of that" [1], I wouldn't assume that it's "common sense".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7040332

I can't believe you got downvoted for that. And the person you replied to replies with

> It's not so much a hunch as it is common sense

So you are completely right, he cited no source.

Absolutely right, it's a good question. I don't think you could come into Dropbox's position without having someone on your team who knows this, but if you didn't, the answer could save you millions ;)

But even for smaller amounts, if you sell 150K of goods per year through a reseller, and you pay a standard fee, it never hurts to e-mail them and negotiate a tighter deal. If you manage to shave off 1%, that's $1500 (clean profit). Say you pay 5%, you can apply pressure by saying you could get a better deal somewhere else, or implement their service yourself for that money.

AWS is well-known for not negotiating at all on prices - everyone gets the same deal.

Please don't spread lies..

I thought it had already been established that you were making assumptions not based on evidence?

Bezos made a decision to not negotiate with individual customers, and there are pros and cons to that decision.

We did no such thing, but do you have a reference to Bezos saying that? I know Amazon does not negotiate over contract terms, but that's something different than prizes.

Looks like I'm mistaken, confirmed with some of my own research too. Sorry!

No problem :)

The startup I worked at got a deal, so that's false.

I love this sort commoditization and competition.

I have a plugin for chrome that replaces the word "cloud" with "butt", this article was extremely confusing.

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