Comment by Lelala | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lelala | Hacker News Reader

At Lelala (https://www.lelala.de), the MS stack with the typical layers is used: - IIS + ASP MVC - MSSQL (via ORM layer) - bunch of .NET/C# tools & stuff to support the main system

Since it was asked what happens if the BizSpark period is over, let me state on detail about the model: In BizSpark, its true that you go vendor lock in as long as you are building strict dependency on their platform, lets say if you use EF for accessing SQL, you may have a problem in the long run. But: Even if you've left BizSpark, a MS Server License is to be paid once? (not per year, not every two years etc.) I do not understand where the myth comes from that one has to pay every year or continuously to use MS licenses? The math is simple: A W2K12 Standard server license costs around 850 USD (~ 700 EUR) - once - even if Opensource would is cheaper in term of license costs, a software running 24/7 for a one-time payment of 700 EUR isn't that expensive.

Now, it comes down to scale up or scale out: - in the one scenario, because of no costs you can scale massivley out, going from one machine to n machines - but if you ever tried to administrate your machine park lonely(!!) if it counts 5+ machines (while you have to develop/maintain & run the app itself, too!), some may consider to hire a network admin (which is a fixed salary per year which usually outweighs the costs of your MS Server license)

The reason why C# is used, is simple (and was stated above): - C# and .NET are very convenient and mature environments to write apps in - C# is considered by me as a beautiful language, i really like it (coming from x years of "C-styled-syntax-languages" could make me somehwat biased ;-)

Instead of the licensing costs of MS products, i see much more important difficulties in the mid- to long-run future if someone built on it: MS maybe not survive the upcoming decade because of huge market shifts; then, in 10 years, it may be a problem if you will not get any support because the company maybe no more existing. God thanks, the next version of ASP MVC has a VM for *nix-derivatives, so you could solve this issue by running your app on a Linux-box. (And if you then have built your app additionally on a top of an ORM, you won't have any issues)

> Even if you've left BizSpark, a MS Server License is to be paid once?

Microsoft has a 3-year release cycle for their products. You'll end up paying every three years. For every single product. Microsoft's biggest cash cows are it's OS and Office products and always have been.

> A W2K12 Standard server license costs around 850 USD (~ 700 EUR)

Assuming you have just one server. At the least you will need a production server and a development server. And at least one for every developer. That's one OS license, one SQL Server license and one Visual Studio license per developer. Personally, I love work with a lot of virtual machines off Vagrant for development, testing and deployment. I am not sure how that works with MS licences.

> if it counts 5+ machines [...] some may consider to hire a network admin

It's fairly easy to manage ~100 machines using Ansible, Docker, Chef, etc. But in the Microsoft stack you probably want to keep the number of machines much lower.

> scale up or scale out

Scaling up is the right approach on Windows platforms but here is the issue I have with it. You cannot add RAM on the fly, as and when you need it. Nor can you add more processor cores on the fly. With horizontal scale, it's a no brainer but with vertical scale you cannot scale-up temporarily and then scale back down either. This is quite common and desirable for web applications.

I was on BizSpark and I was really grateful for the free trial. However, ultimately I shifted away and I am glad I did, even though C# is awesome and I absolutely love Visual Studio, I moved away for a number of compelling reasons.

You can buy developer versions of sql server licenses. Last time I bought them they cost £35 for the full enterprise package.

You can buy msdn packages for unlimited development use of any OS across VMs. Around £600 / year I believe. More expensive MSDN subscriptions include development OSes, Visual Studio & Sql Server at around £1000 / year.

So this all reminds me of when I was an IT manager and my sysadmin spent like 25% of her time just managing license compliance. My dev worked in open source and spent 100% of his time getting stuff done.

MS seems to be getting a lot better about this stuff (dev licenses, free short-term VM images for testing purposes, I don't know what else) but making things cheaper while not relaxing compliance requirements doesn't make it all that much easier.

> You cannot add RAM [+ CPU Cores] on the fly...

I doubt that this type of instant scaling is useful for the typical .NET shops that serve small and medium size businesses and still sell a lot of on-premise solutions and niche-market web apps.

> That's one OS license, one SQL Server license and one Visual Studio license per developer.

Not necessarily. I just worked with a client who had every one of their 10 developers on SQL Server Express (free, with 10GB db limit) and Visual Studio 2013 Express (also free) which is good enough for doing basically anything in the MS universe. The computers they bought came with Windows.

My current client has me working at home where I use my own copy of Windows 2012 R2 + Visual Studio 2013 Pro and SQL Server Web edition which I got all for free via a free WebSpark membership that I signed up for 2 years ago.

"However, ultimately I shifted away and I am glad I did, even though C# is awesome and I absolutely love Visual Studio, I moved away for a number of compelling reasons."

Really curious: what did you move to (both language and IDE-wise)?

I'm no major fan of the Microsoft stack but this is false.

1. You don't have to buy every version. We just got rid of Windows Server 2008 and moved to 2012 R2. We have 5 Windows 2003 Servers that are still supported hanging on until next year.

2. You can hire Visual Studio per month so scaling the team up and down is cheap and easy. Also 100% honestly, VS is pretty cheap compared to the cost of staff and kit. In fact we use VL (renting software) so we get any version we want of any dev tool, server platform etc.

3. It's fairly easy managing 100+ (well 154 but close enough) Windows machines. We do it fine with two guys and a network monkey. Powershell DSC and they are quite scriptable and easy to deploy these days. We build WIM files.

4. You shouldn't plan to add RAM or cores on the fly. Stick a duff RAM stick in and what happens? Scale up/down in/out: depends who you host with.

P.S.: i forgot:

Jeff Atwood made a GREAT comparison on up-vs-out-scaling some years ago:

http://blog.codinghorror.com/scaling-up-vs-scaling-out-hidde...

I would add that (i) the pricing you can see on the details page http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-mac... are already inclusive of Windows Server licensing, and (ii) depending on the nature of one's shop, it might make sense to get a MSDN subscription instead - and that's probably why people are talking about recurring costs to use the platform.

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