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This could also be titled "how to enslave your MVP to increasing costs in the future". Azure isn't cheap by any means when you need to scale up our out.
by pling 12y ago
This could also be titled "how to enslave your MVP to increasing costs in the future".
Azure isn't cheap by any means when you need to scale up our out.
- cpard 12y agopling sure, but if you avoid using azure specific technologies it's quite easy to move somewhere else.
- ssiddharth 12y agoSimply decouple yourself from Azure specific tech and you're good to go, no?
- pling 12y agoIt is very hard to decouple yourself from the tooling and the platform specific features. The PaaS offering literally requires half of the additional services ad the basic deployment is simple and the IaaS offering is expensive and you need the latter to decouple effectively. Either way you also hang yourself with a vendor tied product and the ball and chain of licensing. The latter of which escalates pretty quick when your business grows. Our 8 man startup in 2005 now spends £200k a year on licensing because we're that tied to the damn platform.
- cpard 12y agopling, any chance to post/share how you are using the azure platform and what makes the migration hard? that would be really useful.
- pling 12y agoWe're not using it other than for internal failovers. We tried to build version two of our product on it. The costs increased rapidly until it was cheaper to buy a 42U and stuff it with HP kit and pay for a fat pipe. The storage was expensive, the per transaction costs are expensive, the bandwidth is expensive, the IaaS machines are expensive and the support is expensive when it goes wrong which it does occasionally and violently. This was all financial data aggregation and archival stuff. In test it was 23% more expensive than our own kit over 3 years.
- cpard 12y agothat's some nice info, thanks for sharing pling. It makes me curious to try and compare costs with other IaaS platforms.
- pling 12y agoI would do. There's a sweet spot somewhere and Azure isn't it.
- chton 12y agoDon't forget to also compare the costs to doing in-house hosting. The cost effectiveness of any platform is dependent on how you use it, and (as pling discovered) a cloud host isn't necessarily the best option.
- cpard 12y agoI agree with that, although I believe that it heavily depends on where on your product roadmap you are. For early stage MVPs where you care for quick validation, I believe that in-house hosting is not a very good option, maybe a PaaS environment is more suitable for these cases, e.g. Heroku. But in any case, I think that everything is related to the product, the team and what you are trying to achieve. Of course in every iteration you should re-evaluate your strategies.
- chton 12y agoI agree completely. It's important to weigh all the options, and include issues like vender lock-in, SLA and future requirements.
- kenjackson 12y agoCan you break down that 200k in cost? That seems pretty high unless you are a fairly popular.
- pling 12y agoIn order of cost: SQL Server, MSDN, Windows Server, Office. We got utterly raped by the SQL 2012 upgrade with the core licensing changes as we have a few 48 core machines. (enough to make us consider PostgreSQL as a serious option now) We're not public facing either.
- kenjackson 12y agoThat makes sense -- although now I'm more interested in what a non-public facing 8 person startup with a few 48 core machines that can afford 200k in licenses is doing!!!
- pling 12y agoWe're a chunk of glue that aggregates and monitors financial data. Not related to trading and not real time. We're basically the people who say 'it was him' when someone fucks up.
- jdub 12y agoPlease don't use the R word, which is so deeply emotive and meaningful, in such an inappropriate context.
- pling 12y agoI think it was appropriate. We were violated forcibly without consent or warning.
- cpard 12y agoyes, this is always a possible approach and personnaly preferable. But you should also look for "hidden" costs and mainly your effort/time to setup and manage things. At the end part of the value of using a cloud service is convenience. Again, everything depends on the context of your application.
- pling 12y agoWe have two people who handle all our infrastructure. We still needed two people available to handle all our Azure infrastructure even though they'd spend less time doing things (N+1 failover). Also Microsoft doesn't give a shit if you're down past a status page and profuse apologising and perhaps a pro-rata refund if you complain like a bitch and wave a big "fuck you, AWS next time" at your licensing contact. That's not how to do business. Our guys actually get up at 2AM and drive to the DC and fix shit if it goes wrong, which it inevitably does (less often than Azure I will say). Downtime costs you more in reputation than you can gain from the cost savings of not having your whole world under your control.
- chton 12y agoYou should read up on the SLA. If you need more assurance than Azure can offer (or any cloud host, since statistically Azure has one of the best uptimes), you shouldn't have tried it in the first place. I don't know who sold you Azure as a solution to your hosting, but whoever did it didn't take enough time to investigate your case. This comment and your others show that your requirements and architecture aren't a good match for a cloud host.
- walshemj 12y agoAs is AWS but I suspect is easier to migrate from AWS
- pling 12y agoI would agree there. There are plenty of API compatible alternatives to AWS services.