As kyledrake so eloquently said before: "The bandwidth is the soda."<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129</a><p>AWS and Azure overcharge on bandwidth about 10 to 20 times the prevailing rate. Something to keep in mind for high bandwidth applications.
What I don't understand about Azure pricing is how much more expensive a Windows VM is compared to an equivalent Linux machine. A D1v2 costs $54 with Linux and $104 with Windows (per month). This extends to larger instances: Windows costs twice the price of Linux on the same instance. The only difference is the Windows licence, and $50 per month for the smallest machine (and hundreds for bigger instances) seems very unreasonable.<p>The only explanation I can think of for this is that they probably want to compete on price with AWS, while keeping profits from their traditional customers high.
Cloud Pricing is ridiculous ... made the comparison between a dedicated server and cloud offerings of microsoft, google, amazon ... rackspace (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times in the cloud for the same.
For me the compute pricing isn't the main issue. The cutthroat bandwith prices from 9 to 18 cents per GB are the main cost drivers and should be at least mentioned in a blog post about price reduction.
Does anyone know about Azure auto-scaling? It says "most [VM's] include load-balancing and auto-scaling free of charge", is that true and is it any more friendly to hobbyists than the other two?<p>It was very disappointing to see the auto-scaling services for GCP and AWS basically require a $20/mo load balancer right off the bat. I have an app that is quietly puttering away on a single Digital Ocean droplet, but could at any moment, uh, make it big and I want to be ready. But I can't really stomach the $20 just to turn on auto-scaling somewhere.
Slightly off-topic: why does practially every Microsoft website render text in a really crappy fashion on any non-Windows OS? Chromium on Linux or Safari on macOS, both cases pretty much all the text on MS sites look like they are blurred and just a PITA to read.
Their calculator still seems to have the old prices in case you're like me and don't remember how much it used to cost, but want to see how much you are saving: <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines" rel="nofollow">https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?servic...</a>
seems like mostly updating to the newest models and making the entry level sku's much cheaper to attract more people kicking the wheels and lower the bar for dev's wanting to try out Azure. I would love to see they take this to an extreme and either make the A0 or A1 free like AWS.
I have a few hobby projects stored on github and it's easy to get linux VMs so that when I commit something it gets checked out and built and packaged automatically. It's easy to find a VM for a reasonable monthly price. But it seems to be much harder to find reasonable windows options to do the same there?<p>I currently make it build on my machine at home, but that't not very scalable or reliable.<p>I don't really want a full windows machine. I want a decent windows machine for doing builds that only runs for a few hours in total each month and is cheap.<p>Is there such a thing?
Cloud providers should make their smallest instances basically free. Bottom end instances/pricing is the drug through which developers become addicted to a platform.
Things like this pricing difference between VM and App Service which run on the same dedicated hardware, not sure why its still 2x the price? <a href="http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/KgNotp6.png</a>