You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding.
Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.
You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral here? That you're unable to reach out to a company when you feel like you were taken advantage of? Sorry, Azure is still garbage and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Amazon still has the best support of any company in the consumer products and web services industry.
Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later.
BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon giving away one year of the free tier is not shady?
That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.
You don't have to use the software licenses to make use of the Azure credits in BizSpark, and Azure will run any Linux distro containing a kernel with Hyper-V support.
Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that?
What's so shitty about Azure again?
Sorry, Azure is still garbage
Why?
and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available.
Unfortunately, staying in AWS's free tier means never seeing any of that performance.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Justified or not, Microsoft's history makes it hard for me to trust them.
AWS have wiped over $2000 in excess charges incurred by one of our instances' data transfer - we set up an alert after that - they've been awesome to us and we trust them and are now spending more and more every month.
There are 2 classes of services on AWS: infrastructure and platform. It's important not to confuse them. Infrastructure includes EC2, S3, ELB, and things of that nature. Platform includes Beanstalk, Dynamo, EMR, and things of that nature.
In general, Amazon's infrastructure offerings are explicitly trying to be commodity, and compete as such. E.g. lower cost, minimal lock in. If you configure servers using chef or other configuration system, and if you wrap all your service calls, it's not challenging to move between vendors on the infrastructure level. Check out fog which helps you do just this: https://github.com/fog/fog
Amazon's platform offerings are pretty explicitly trying to build lock in -- explicit in that they're often free (Beanstalk) and really just trying to sell more infrastructure.
Microsoft, and specifically Windows, pursue a platform strategy. Them offering Linux is actually very novel for them, but it's still called WINDOWS Azure, and the word "Windows" has traditionally been synonymous with platform lock in. You write a program for Windows, it runs only on Windows, and you have to pay for Windows.
I'm excited for MS to get fully into the infrastructure business, but I see their offerings as reactionary to Amazon. Big corporate, windows-based companies are needing to do things in the cloud, and have been going to Amazon. I see Microsoft as trying to offer services to prevent them from leaving by letting them buy what they need from MS.
It's hard for me to imagine good reasons to actually start on Azure, though. They're not a price leader (dropping prices always seems reactionary to AWS price drops), they have limited selection of services (vs. AWS), limited people using them (weaker community support), and always seem clueless about the internet (SSL cert outage, anyone?). Unless you're a Windows only developer and can't work on Linux, I really don't know why I would choose them.
PS. Amazon has a startup program you can get in to. When we started on AWS, they gave us $10K in free services. I know $1K is pretty standard, but if you can get validation (investor? incubator?), they'll go higher.
I use both AWS and Azure, and they're both fantastic and terrible:
- Azure has better, more polished web management, AWS is more flexible
- Azure gives 500s, 404s and 403s occasionally, AWS has outage IDs that don't appear in their status page and has useless support even when you pay for it.
Either way, I don't feel locked into Windows or Visual Studio when using Azure, which is good, as I don't use any of those products.
The most 'Windows' I get is nodes process module returning some more Windowsy values when I use Azure Web Sites. Otherwise I don't care.
Oh yeah and Azure Web Sites doesn't support gulp (or even grunt) yet so I commit generated assets.
PS: is this really the #1 comment on Hacker News?
- If you've used Azure, you know it doesn't require MS languages or tools
- If you haven't used Azure, why are you upvoting this guy's conspiracy theory?
I'm an Apache committer, and because of that Microsoft gives me a free MSDN subscription (which includes Azure credits).
I use Azure to run assorted Ubuntu machines. They run well, the interface is nice and I have no complaints. I also have a few EC2 VMs (and some DigitalCloud VMs and some Rackspace VMs and in the past have had HP Cloud VMs and Linode VMs).
Amazon is good, too. But I signed up for EC2 before the free micro-tier came in, so I got nothing from them.
So what I want to know is why I should feel scared, running Ubuntu on Azure?
And what is wrong with giving Microsoft credit for offering good programs like Bizspark? (And read that first sentence again, BTW. That's a real thing, and no other company does that)
Amazon billed me ~$40 for debugging their service (problem: micro instances become completely unreachable after a few minutes, suggested course of action: spin up a few instances, tell us which ones they are, and we'll have a look). This does not seem like good support.
Two last paid support cases were closed after they identified a bug in their code and we found a more elegant fix than the hack suggested by them. We still had to pay for both.
I'm not impressed with aws support so far. Especially Elastic Beanstalk. Looking into OpsWork to take matters in my own hands.
Another thing. BizSpark gives me a small instance- with two cores and 3.5 GB memory. And I can start another instance with half of that capability under the $150 per month I get. That is given to every small startup which enrolls in BizSpark. For 3 years!
Yes, we all read the article. The question is not how does Microsoft's free giveaway compare to that of AWS' -- it's, how much will that cost you in three years, once you've committed yourself to using those resources. What are you going to do after that, sign up again with a different email address?
Azure is completely price-competitive with AWS. In fact, AWS and Azure seem to be in a pricing war, lowering their prices anytime the other one does. They're both far cheaper than Rackspace.
...and seriously - you're worried about pricing three years from now with a startup?
You see, 3 years is a long time to grow and a startup where the co founders are developers, I hope we can get enough revenue at least to pay the server bills!
I did reach out to them, but they wiped only my current usage- I still had to pay the old bill in full. I contacted some people in Amazon who had helped others I know with free credits, but no one came forward to help me when I needed them the most. I had no choice.
Actually, I would say the best cloud support comes from Rackspace. You actually get a phone call welcoming you and walking through the product, they have Cloud Advisors who will talk you through optimizing performance and if you pay 100$/month extra, someone who will configure and maintain nginx/mysql/haproxy/rails/django/etc.
As long as we're on the subject: anyone here use their managed tier of hosting (VPS or dedicated)? I'm on their standard Cloud Servers (VPS) after having been force-migrated when they bought Slicehost. My experience with their support at that level has been... uneven. If managed means I get their best guys touching my nginx config files, I'd buy that today. If it gets me someone drawn from the pool at random, I'd run screaming.
That's my experience with Rackspace. They're fairly inflexible in what they offer, and it's a bit of a pain to go outside of their standard offerings, but if you can work within their limits then they offer truly unparalleled service even for tiny 'insignificant' customers.
I tried Rackspace but there's no equivalent of AWS's elastic IP, so if you stop the instance you lose the IP address. It's ok if you go through load balancers, but no good for a single site with a single IP.
Sure because you don't have any lock-in by using Amazon RBS, SQS, SBF, SNS and 90% of the remaining Amazon Web Services Products
And you don't have to pay for them at the end of the free tier period, sure not.
I signed up for the Azure trial program a while back, and I found the interface quite nice. About a week later I received a call from the Azure sales team asking if I would like to provision another MS SQL server -- I guess they looked into my billings. Anyways, I told the sales rep no thank you, and how I normally use linux machines for my startup. I asked if there were any promos for someone in my position, and the sales rep quoted me prices on developer network subscriptions, or something like that.
Conclusion: I don't think it's terrible, but their tactics aren't always clear. AND, I'm consistently getting a bill for $2/m and I have no idea why.
"Bait"? Oh geez. First, they have Linux images all available under BizSpark.
Second, you act as if entrepreneurs are idiots who don't read terms/considerations of agreements and aren't capable of evaluating costs/benefits.
Everything about the BizSpark program is transparent. If you fail to understand the terms and to consider the ramifications (and if necessary hedge against risks by making your technology portable to other clouds), that is your fault. No one is forced into the program.
I smell an amazon fan boy hatin on other services. Did you even read his article? You don't have to use microsoft products on Azure. Get that weak shit outta here, son.
I had a similar incident where my free tier went over some restriction and charged me. Amazon wiped it out after one single email from me. And I got some free credits. Amazon's support is second to none, in any area. I have no experience with azure to make a comment but anything that uses microsoft tech is just not going to work for me, free or paid.
It's not Microsoft tech though. I run two python/django apps and a node.js app, back by a mongodb and two riak db's. They are running on CentOS5 and Ubuntu 13.04. How is any of that MS tech?
Also, Azure charges you less for Linux VMs compared Windows VMs with the same hardware specs. A medium instance costs 12cents/hour with Linux and 18c/hr with Windows Server. That's 50% higher! If anything, it looks like they're trying to lock you into Linux. I don't have any beef with Amazon, but it looks like you haven't really looked at Azure before making such sweeping assertions with zero details, except some handwaving which makes it sad that this is the top comment on this story.
What? The comment has blatant falsehoods in it. Microsoft made some serious mistakes in the past but Azure really is a different product than they have ever offered. I don't care if people like it or not but at least be honest about it.
Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.
You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral here? That you're unable to reach out to a company when you feel like you were taken advantage of? Sorry, Azure is still garbage and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Amazon still has the best support of any company in the consumer products and web services industry.