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Question of the Day: What's the most interesting small town you've visited in South Africa?
Windows Azure
- Thread starter Ipwn 4
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GoofySmurf
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Everyone is trying to move away due to their pricing ....
Arthur
Honorary Master
No they're not. Lots of companies actually buying in.
GoofySmurf
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Oh so there is still some suckers out there, you should check out openstack .... Im helping quite a few corporates moving away ... One of them will make over R4000000 in savings a month by moving away to other providers or doing it in house. They unfortunately fully embraced Azure when it came out and now they are spending a crap load to move everything away again due to the insane pricing models they introduced.
You are accessing the internet from a data center it will always be that fast even from South African data centers.
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Had a look now, that is pretty rough.
It's a bottomless pit.
At first it was a neat little experiment so some companies started to use it for some basic stuff. Then they noticed that it works pretty well and bought in big time.
Once M$ got some decent market share they started to squeeeeeeeeeze while twisting slowly :twisted:
Anyone surprised by that should be slapped with a piece of rotten snoek.
At first it was a neat little experiment so some companies started to use it for some basic stuff. Then they noticed that it works pretty well and bought in big time.
Once M$ got some decent market share they started to squeeeeeeeeeze while twisting slowly :twisted:
Anyone surprised by that should be slapped with a piece of rotten snoek.
Azure is quite expensive most definitely. It's a great idea though but if technical enough rather setup your own dedicated server with other opensource options out there that exist.
You can't compare a dedi with a true cloud solution.
Having a dedicated server means you can wait for a full reload in the event of a complete failure (data is lost so you need to get hold of and restore your data while reconfiguring the server) and you won't go out of business because you have no SLA. I'd say minimum 24-48 hours if you have basic DR. If advanced, 12 hours will be average. How many clients will be happy with 24 hours of email downtime? How will the ecommerce clients feel when their stores are down for a day?
Now lets compare that to our private cloud, when a server fails it takes is around 48 hours to realize that a node is down and get someone to investigate. We then on the 3rd/4th day order new hardware which takes around 3 business days for config and delivery... Maybe on the 7th working day config will begin and the server will be installed in the DC (assuming this is a JHB node, if cpt/durban add a week).
Through the above we have maintained a 99.999% availability SLA (Dynamic DNS is responsible for the 0.001% downtime). The keyword here is availability and that is what cloud is all about. Azure is supposedly constructed in a redundant environment which means 1 node of the cluster may only be up for 10% of a month but another will be up for 100%, that gives you 100% availability. 100% availability is what you want if you are hosting mission critical data/applications (not email, Office 365/Google Apps covers that element just fine).
So to recap : dedi running open source software to create VMs != cloud.
VMs spanned across multiple servers and/or data centers (a single dc can still fail) with intelligent DNS for auto failover = cloud.
Azure = cloud but also expensive and useless due to the way it works at this stage.
Haven't played with AWS yet, will definitely take a look. Was just interested in Azure and the general experience due my internal usage rights.
Well Azure have dropped their prices recently to match AWS. Comparing the two, there's no real difference any more. They've done this to capture market share. Last year Azure was a billion $ revenue generator (Azure actually hosts the iCloud as well if i'm not mistaken). They're expecting it to climb to a $20 billion industry over the next few years.
I've been using azure now for the last few months (have a VM and a few other services that i'm testing), and have been solidly impressed. We're moving all our (and our clients) online presence over to them in phases starting this month.
As Ipwn 4 said... you can't compare it with a dedicated machine, the availability is a key point. Let's take a storage drive that I spin up (virtual drive.. takes a few seconds to allocate another drive and I can choose the exact size I need). The data on there is actually stored across 3 different drives in separate locations in the data center (locally redundant). If I check a box, then it is replicated to another data center guaranteed to be at least 400 miles away (globally redundant option). Compare that with a dedicated machine where I need to worry about hard drive failures and have to replicate databases to mitigate that fact, and cloud hosting becomes a no brainer. Elastic computing is another. I can deploy my web services as cloud services. Most of the time I can have it idling along with a few resources assigned, and when it gets busy, I can let it ramp up or assign new resources (billed by the minute) and just pay for the temporary increase in computing resources. After the busy weekend, I can happily wind it down again.
Cloud hosting really is a whole new beast. The latest toy i'm playing with are their Media Services. I can write a snippet of code that uploads a video, then with a few commands, Azure will transcode it to a bunch of different formats and have it available to play in a number of different formats for different devices. Cannot be easier. It allows smooth streaming and plug in ads as well. Super impressed so far.
On the cost side, we've got a dedicated server with Hetzner Germany, but if I add up all out usage, our costs will actually decrease substantially by moving the rest of our services to azure (which i'm doing this month). Dedicated machines may cost less per unit of compute power, but then you actually need a second one for redundancy, so that pushes the costs way up. Not to mention the human resources of managing all of this. On azure, you are paying for the redundancy, but only for exactly what you use. Also, if you end up spending more than $500 per month, you get a discount of up to 32% depending on what services you use. Making it a very attractive proposition.
You can also run it as a hybrid cloud if you really want (package up that VM image in your office and ship it to the MS data centers, or the other way around). That's a huge plus if you want to change the load split between internal and external resources.
No one can tell me that Azure is crap. After playing with it hands on for a few months, I am extremely impressed with this service. It's the pricing is very good for what you are getting. The prices will only continue to drop as well. Cloud services are going to kill the traditional hosting market, and Microsoft have done one hell of a job in making this a compelling platform. (Azure is doubling in size every 6 months at the moment).
I've been using azure now for the last few months (have a VM and a few other services that i'm testing), and have been solidly impressed. We're moving all our (and our clients) online presence over to them in phases starting this month.
As Ipwn 4 said... you can't compare it with a dedicated machine, the availability is a key point. Let's take a storage drive that I spin up (virtual drive.. takes a few seconds to allocate another drive and I can choose the exact size I need). The data on there is actually stored across 3 different drives in separate locations in the data center (locally redundant). If I check a box, then it is replicated to another data center guaranteed to be at least 400 miles away (globally redundant option). Compare that with a dedicated machine where I need to worry about hard drive failures and have to replicate databases to mitigate that fact, and cloud hosting becomes a no brainer. Elastic computing is another. I can deploy my web services as cloud services. Most of the time I can have it idling along with a few resources assigned, and when it gets busy, I can let it ramp up or assign new resources (billed by the minute) and just pay for the temporary increase in computing resources. After the busy weekend, I can happily wind it down again.
Cloud hosting really is a whole new beast. The latest toy i'm playing with are their Media Services. I can write a snippet of code that uploads a video, then with a few commands, Azure will transcode it to a bunch of different formats and have it available to play in a number of different formats for different devices. Cannot be easier. It allows smooth streaming and plug in ads as well. Super impressed so far.
On the cost side, we've got a dedicated server with Hetzner Germany, but if I add up all out usage, our costs will actually decrease substantially by moving the rest of our services to azure (which i'm doing this month). Dedicated machines may cost less per unit of compute power, but then you actually need a second one for redundancy, so that pushes the costs way up. Not to mention the human resources of managing all of this. On azure, you are paying for the redundancy, but only for exactly what you use. Also, if you end up spending more than $500 per month, you get a discount of up to 32% depending on what services you use. Making it a very attractive proposition.
You can also run it as a hybrid cloud if you really want (package up that VM image in your office and ship it to the MS data centers, or the other way around). That's a huge plus if you want to change the load split between internal and external resources.
No one can tell me that Azure is crap. After playing with it hands on for a few months, I am extremely impressed with this service. It's the pricing is very good for what you are getting. The prices will only continue to drop as well. Cloud services are going to kill the traditional hosting market, and Microsoft have done one hell of a job in making this a compelling platform. (Azure is doubling in size every 6 months at the moment).
Hi,
This is the first post for Rackspace on the board, I am glad we can start supporting the South African market and the forum they use!
Yes Cloud Computing is not equal to dedicated hosting, Cloud Computing requires a change of developers and operational mindset. You look at your solution and application as compute, storage, etc resources. Shogun seems to get it.
As Rackspace was one of the founders of Openstack(with NASA), I have to agree with
GoofySmurf, that a open standard cloud platform is the way to go! We are adding cloud services to the stack every few months.
If you need any cloud computing advice or general hosting advice, feel free to pm or open a thread.
This is the first post for Rackspace on the board, I am glad we can start supporting the South African market and the forum they use!
Yes Cloud Computing is not equal to dedicated hosting, Cloud Computing requires a change of developers and operational mindset. You look at your solution and application as compute, storage, etc resources. Shogun seems to get it.
As Rackspace was one of the founders of Openstack(with NASA), I have to agree with
GoofySmurf, that a open standard cloud platform is the way to go! We are adding cloud services to the stack every few months.
If you need any cloud computing advice or general hosting advice, feel free to pm or open a thread.