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First Impressions of Microsoft Azure
breganasher
Member
Because of the feedback I received on my review of Google Compute last September, I decided to jot down my first impressions of Microsoft Azure. For many people who regularly read LowEndTalk, Google Compute and Microsoft Azure may not be considered as providers because of an assumption that they are too expensive. But, depending on what you need to do, that may not be true. Google and Microsoft do offer machines starting at about $4/month and $12/month respectively.
My evaluation of Azure was part of a 30 day $250 free trial and, though I am not a Microsoft fan, I started the trial with an open mind. The main Azure portal was a slick interface that was clearly designed to impress, but unfortunately this was one of the few positive attributes I have to share. The system itself was inferior to any other provider I have used in the past. In a nutshell, Azure suffers from an overly complex management process, poor documentation, inconsistent support of basic functionality and slow instance creation. Price-wise it was much more expensive than Google Compute. In my case, it was about three times more expensive.
I simply can't imagine Azure being of interest to anyone who wants to use a Linux Virtual Machine. There are so many better providers out there. I suspect Microsoft is simply counting on large Microsoft-centric shops to use Azure in order to remain within the same ecosystem.
For now I will stick with my preferred providers: Vultr (ref), Digital Ocean (ref) and, for bigger machines, Google Compute. You can find more about Vultr (ref) and Digital Ocean (ref) in my earlier review here.
My full review of Microsoft Azure is available on my blog at blog.breganasher.com.
Comments
You can't really say much after 30 days, sorry. And those referral links make this look a bit shady!
Added referral disclaimers.
I've tried out azure since I have an azure sub via dreamspark. I thought it's free so I might as well try it.
The only thing I could do was deploy webapplications on some subdomain, so I thought, okay, let's try a database php search engine(sphider).
Creating the database was a major pain.
Trying to connect and figure out how their db worked, even pasting in their provided details was just a final thing for me to say good bye. It's just didn't work and wasn't accepting my credentials.
I got ftp storage, so uploaded the application file there, but without db, it didn't work.
It's a nightmare panel and clearly overpriced, much like aws is. Despite aws giving out credits, it's still overpriced and not more reliable than your standard unmanaged dedicated provider.
P.S Google Compute application hosting is amazing even just for stuff in PHP, it scales up so well even on the free tier.
Thanks for your comment, but I have to disagree. I have evaluated many providers and, if there is one thing I've learned, it doesn't take long to evaluate the overall quality of the platform. It may be true that you can misjudge a platform if you only try it for a few hours; all platforms have intermittent issues. But, from my experience, several days is all that is required to get a sense of whether the platform is a good fit.
As for the referral links, I only use them for platforms I currently use and pay for. Those are the providers that provide me with the best value.
Thanks Ishaq! If I had thought of it, I would have done it myself
I use Linux VMs on Azure every single day for at last ~3 years.
However, I admit it's only because they come with MSDN.
And some day when that work-paid-for subscription goes away, I'll leave Azure immediately. Until then, they're great backup boxes. Outbound bw is way too expensive (same price as AWS) but as a secondary backup and for monitoring, I love Azure.
The Azure control panel is horrible. It's VERY pretty - blows away anything else I've seen in terms of visual appeal. But it's very hard to use. For example, you can create disks but they end up with names that are long strings of numbers, and you put them in containers inside storage accounts and it is all godawful complex. I suppose it's very powerful but I found the AWS console to be a lot easier to use.
I believe the Azure CP is a skin over the API, which is what they really want you to use. People who are doing big things in Azure write their own toolkits doing API calls and never touch the panel. I used to do some backup-this-tarball-to-a-blob stuff with their API and python bindings.
I've had numerous cases of disks being stuck with leases, and having to go hunt down some powershell script to kill the lease so I can delete it. When I use the Azure CP I'm always hunting for something...is that disk in VM->Disk or in the Storage section (and in that case which one), etc.
It IS very slow to do operations as @breganasher points out. Rebooting a VM is a 10-minute process. No idea why.
I also don't like the unadvertised storage limitations. Disks can only be a certain size (I forget) and you can only have so many depending on the size of your VM. I think at the lower end, if you want > max size, you are doing your own sw raid.
My VMs there perform fine. Great network, too. I like their firewall/load balancing, and a lot of their add-on services are awesome. Internal networks are handy. There is a template community now and people are even running FreeBSD on Azure :-)
Periodically I see a failure/restart but it's pretty rare.
I maintain a reasonable sized infrastructure within Azure, its expensive but it stays up when you use up time groups and that's what the CEO cares about. We have an agreement for a few years so we get a discount, when it ends, I would choose not to stay....
I'm on the verge of getting into Azure big time, so interesting to see the opinions - I've heard the thing about the API being the right way to go before so I'm not surprised the panel's a bit wonky, things like stupid reboot times concern me though.
Still trying to get hold of an MSDN subscription because I know we have a ton, I just can't find out who's authorised to give me one.
Where does your workplace get those from other than bizspark and paying for it?
Also I've never seen so much cloud on 1 sales page.
I imagine we're paying for them, but we're such a big MS customer they may be comped, who knows.