Azure is quite scary good but the main problem is that people really don't understand what it is. If they actually work through that, I fully believe it will win.
We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it is.
We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it is.
http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-istheserv...
The current Hetzner server is looking good over 176 days uptime having processed more than 9.7M+ commands: http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/
There have multiple Azure outages within the same time-frame my Linux servers have been happily chugging along.
It's trivial to setup PostgreSQL/MySql on Linux. I personally don't deploy my own stuff on expensive SqlServer instances.
In our case, a trial with Hetzner found their support to be somewhat lacking if something went wrong.
The azure outages didn't affect us at all.
Out load characteristics are somewhat higher than that. We can shift 10 million http hits an hour quite happily.
This.
This reminds me of the article about Heroku's "intelligent routing" and a discussion about scaling/scalability and performance.
We pay more for mitigating and reducing risks. Cloud services, particularly Iaas and Paas, such as Azure, AWS, GAE reduce (or are at least suppose to) the downtime when crap hits the fan and also enable more flexibility, speed, and agility in building out solutions.
The interesting part about the Heroku discussion pertained to the following:
Assume we have a straight forward, minimum layered architecture and that the average response time is 1.45 seconds. Using average responses times is a bad idea for determining true performance but let's continue for purposes of illustration. To get this average lets say 19 out of 20 requests return in 1 second, 1 out of 20 takes 10 seconds (Please correct me if my math is off/wrong). If we could add a layer that would shorten our long tailed curve that would be an improvement. However, adding a layer will incur some overheard. Lets assume for illustration purposes this layer will add 500ms to every request but will reduce the worst case from 10 seconds to 5 secords. So, 1 out of 19 take 1.5 sec, 1 our of 20 takes 5 for an average of 1.675 seconds. The average time is worse! However, the worst case scenario is much better. We've mitigated the costs of the worst case.
Using cloud services and vendors that have expertise and the ability to quickly address hardware issues is suppose to reduce the risk and cost when things go bad. Yeah you might have hiccups here and there that put you down for a few hours. But that is better than being down for days! It's really all about risk mitigation.
Why do you believe this? Just because it's from Microsoft?
NB Not being snarky - really curious as to why people would think this.
I've been burned by AWS and GAE support which is sometimes non existent. If you're running your business off it, you can't afford that risk.
I'm not concerned who it comes from.