Let me explain what recently happened while testing Azure RemoteApp.<p>I was put in charge in comparing RemoteApp to our Citrix cluster, feature compatibility, and cost. Now, I'm part of a university so that's "negotiated". We're also part of I2, so data ingress/egress should be free as per our site contract. (Yeah, it amounted to $5, but we were billed for it against our current enterprise agreement).<p>I worked with a MS Engineer to set everything up. I set cost limits to kill service if we go over $200 (past the free trial).... Well guess what? They only give emails, not kill service. Your account will still accrue no matter what. The engineer said that it could kill service. So, I had limits set to 'alert me'.<p>Until 2 months ago. They switched what was the Beta Portal to the main portal. Doing this eliminated even my alerts I had. The account accrued around $2800, with NO emails, No alerts, and NO questionable billing calls regarding 'non-normal computing practices'.<p>I'm finishing up a paper and a post-mortem regarding this incident. Obviously my university can absorb this, but the points stand:<p>1. There is no adequate way of controlling your bill<p>2. Billing calculations are done with many hours of lag-time. You don't know the zinger you just got until later.<p>3. There is <i></i>NO<i></i> fraud policy... Unless you count "Too Fucking Bad" as the policy.
Blog post from yesterday about the release: <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/" rel="nofollow">https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available...</a>
I am always a bit surprised by comments that give Microsoft a bad reputation no matter what it does.<p>The computer science field has always been "ruled" by ideas and philosophies, but in the end a company is a company, and the ultimate goal of a company is to make money.<p>It isn't weird or evil that Microsoft is trying to make money using whatever mean it can use.<p>By the way, it's crystal clear that a considerable Microsoft is pivoting to become a cloud provider and in that sense the most obvious thing to do is to provide developers with all of the tools they might need.<p>Kudos to Microsoft for being able to perform such a direction change.<p>Plus consider that competition usually means lower prices for customers.. We should be happy that new players are diving into the cloud business.