Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud
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We just shut down some Azure systems that a client had left running because they forgot to tell us that they were not in use for more than a year. Oops. We've been bugging them to decom it but they thought that they were using it.
While shutting it down, we just figured out the cost that was involved here. Two ridiculously tiny Windows VMs, one running a .NET application and one running Spiceworks.
Annual cost? Roughly $5,000 USD. (Was actually $4,998.27) Holy cow. That's $2,500 per year, per workload, for systems that proved to not be very stable. That's enough money to have easily bought physical servers for each workload, and paid for colocation for each! These were tiny VMs, just enough to run their workloads.
This is why both Azure and Windows are just so ridiculously expensive to have in this era. Had these been Linux systems on Vultr, we easily could have done all of this same hosting for under $500/year. Possibly way less than that, that's being exceptionally generous.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
We just shut down some Azure systems that a client had left running because they forgot to tell us that they were not in use for more than a year. Oops. We've been bugging them to decom it but they thought that they were using it.
While shutting it down, we just figured out the cost that was involved here. Two ridiculously tiny Windows VMs, one running a .NET application and one running Spiceworks.
Annual cost? Roughly $5,000 USD. (Was actually $4,998.27) Holy cow. That's $2,500 per year, per workload, for systems that proved to not be very stable. That's enough money to have easily bought physical servers for each workload, and paid for colocation for each! These were tiny VMs, just enough to run their workloads.
This is why both Azure and Windows are just so ridiculously expensive to have in this era. Had these been Linux systems on Vultr, we easily could have done all of this same hosting for under $500/year. Possibly way less than that, that's being exceptionally generous.
What about Amazon though? Would it have been the same?
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@dbeato said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
We just shut down some Azure systems that a client had left running because they forgot to tell us that they were not in use for more than a year. Oops. We've been bugging them to decom it but they thought that they were using it.
While shutting it down, we just figured out the cost that was involved here. Two ridiculously tiny Windows VMs, one running a .NET application and one running Spiceworks.
Annual cost? Roughly $5,000 USD. (Was actually $4,998.27) Holy cow. That's $2,500 per year, per workload, for systems that proved to not be very stable. That's enough money to have easily bought physical servers for each workload, and paid for colocation for each! These were tiny VMs, just enough to run their workloads.
This is why both Azure and Windows are just so ridiculously expensive to have in this era. Had these been Linux systems on Vultr, we easily could have done all of this same hosting for under $500/year. Possibly way less than that, that's being exceptionally generous.
What about Amazon though? Would it have been the same?
Less, but similar. Azure is part of the problem, and Windows is part of the problem. Change either and things improve.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@dbeato said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
We just shut down some Azure systems that a client had left running because they forgot to tell us that they were not in use for more than a year. Oops. We've been bugging them to decom it but they thought that they were using it.
While shutting it down, we just figured out the cost that was involved here. Two ridiculously tiny Windows VMs, one running a .NET application and one running Spiceworks.
Annual cost? Roughly $5,000 USD. (Was actually $4,998.27) Holy cow. That's $2,500 per year, per workload, for systems that proved to not be very stable. That's enough money to have easily bought physical servers for each workload, and paid for colocation for each! These were tiny VMs, just enough to run their workloads.
This is why both Azure and Windows are just so ridiculously expensive to have in this era. Had these been Linux systems on Vultr, we easily could have done all of this same hosting for under $500/year. Possibly way less than that, that's being exceptionally generous.
What about Amazon though? Would it have been the same?
Less, but similar. Azure is part of the problem, and Windows is part of the problem. Change either and things improve.
Amazon Quote for 2 VMs
Totaling about 1762.68 a year. -
Same setup with Azure is $2452.8 a year with minimal 2 VMs
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Yeah, and Azure doesn't perform as well, so you need even more resources for the same workloads!
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@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
Yeah, and Azure doesn't perform as well, so you need even more resources for the same workloads!
Bah, that sucks.
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@dbeato said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
Yeah, and Azure doesn't perform as well, so you need even more resources for the same workloads!
Bah, that sucks.
And I don't think either is up to Vultr and Linode speeds, either
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Google Cloud Compute is even more for Windows Licensing
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Wow! Only reason I use Azure at all to run any workload is because of the monthly credit I have.
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@nashbrydges said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
Wow! Only reason I use Azure at all to run any workload is because of the monthly credit I have.
That's why they give that out, they get people addicted to it and then they just add on extra workloads often. And they charge so much that even a single VM might completely pay for the free systems that they give out. Their margins are so ridiculously high.
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I tried everything I could to justify the cost of Azure, MS SQL and TS server. No matter, Amazon, Microsoft, or others it was just way to expensive compare to on-prem.
Would love to move to Linux and Postgresql but main business app is Windows only. Hopefully, I will be able to convince the vendor to move in the future.
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I consider Azure and AWS a niche market, TBH. If you've developed an application that all of a sudden explodes on the market and now requires you to expand rapidly, there's a need. If your business then takes a swift down turn, you can contract that workload rapidly.
I get that. But zero of all of our clients would benefit from any of that infrastructure. Healthcare, public schools, law offices, all can use just static instances on a VPS. Maybe financial... maybe. But not at the small scale our financial clients are at.
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@bbigford said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
I consider Azure and AWS a niche market, TBH. If you've developed an application that all of a sudden explodes on the market and now requires you to expand rapidly, there's a need. If your business then takes a swift down turn, you can contract that workload rapidly.
I get that. But zero of all of our clients would benefit from any of that infrastructure. Healthcare, public schools, law offices, all can use just static instances on a VPS. Maybe financial... maybe. But not at the small scale our financial clients are at.
It really doesn't take much to be able to benefit from the rapid expansion capabilities. What it does take, though, is moving to a DevOps style system design. Once you do that, it's amazing how many companies will benefit from that.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@bbigford said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
I consider Azure and AWS a niche market, TBH. If you've developed an application that all of a sudden explodes on the market and now requires you to expand rapidly, there's a need. If your business then takes a swift down turn, you can contract that workload rapidly.
I get that. But zero of all of our clients would benefit from any of that infrastructure. Healthcare, public schools, law offices, all can use just static instances on a VPS. Maybe financial... maybe. But not at the small scale our financial clients are at.
It really doesn't take much to be able to benefit from the rapid expansion capabilities. What it does take, though, is moving to a DevOps style system design. Once you do that, it's amazing how many companies will benefit from that.
The capabilities I see... but the cost is just so far up there I can't convince myself that it is worth it.
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@bbigford said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@bbigford said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
I consider Azure and AWS a niche market, TBH. If you've developed an application that all of a sudden explodes on the market and now requires you to expand rapidly, there's a need. If your business then takes a swift down turn, you can contract that workload rapidly.
I get that. But zero of all of our clients would benefit from any of that infrastructure. Healthcare, public schools, law offices, all can use just static instances on a VPS. Maybe financial... maybe. But not at the small scale our financial clients are at.
It really doesn't take much to be able to benefit from the rapid expansion capabilities. What it does take, though, is moving to a DevOps style system design. Once you do that, it's amazing how many companies will benefit from that.
The capabilities I see... but the cost is just so far up there I can't convince myself that it is worth it.
Azure is silly expensive. Amazon a bit less, with loads more power. Vultr and DO even less. They are really what make more sense for most businesses.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@bbigford said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
@bbigford said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
I consider Azure and AWS a niche market, TBH. If you've developed an application that all of a sudden explodes on the market and now requires you to expand rapidly, there's a need. If your business then takes a swift down turn, you can contract that workload rapidly.
I get that. But zero of all of our clients would benefit from any of that infrastructure. Healthcare, public schools, law offices, all can use just static instances on a VPS. Maybe financial... maybe. But not at the small scale our financial clients are at.
It really doesn't take much to be able to benefit from the rapid expansion capabilities. What it does take, though, is moving to a DevOps style system design. Once you do that, it's amazing how many companies will benefit from that.
The capabilities I see... but the cost is just so far up there I can't convince myself that it is worth it.
Azure is silly expensive. Amazon a bit less, with loads more power. Vultr and DO even less. They are really what make more sense for most businesses.
They are the most sense for SMB that are not going to leverage the elasticity and such of a full cloud solution like AWS. Pretty much no SMB needs azure or AWS
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I've heard that GitLab uses Azure in order to test their resiliency
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@flaxking said in Staggering Cost of Azure and Windows on Cloud:
I've heard that GitLab uses Azure in order to test their resiliency
They do, it's caused a bit of outages there.
