Grr tulip Microsoft Azure

[eek]

Just a warning if anyone uses Microsoft Azure and decides to use the recommended approach for deployments and creating a staging environment to avoid down time when deploying a new release. Unless you delete the staging environment immediately after everything is deployed Microsoft will charge you for it.

If anyone from Microsoft is listening I'm not impressed by the £70 bill I've just received on what I believed was a free trial because your documentation is crap and doesn't make this explicitly clear. I will be paying it because my time is more valuable then the bill however I won't be using you again and have written the environment off plan b's business model. Granted I have issues with database sizes and insert speeds that means that azure is totally unsuitable anyway but even when they are solved I will still only be offering AWS and rackspace as options down the line.

[yasockie]

Welcome to the Cloud where you are being charged for everything and vendors hold you hostage.
Do you think AWS cares what the node is for, the will meter it charge you for the bw, electricity node size and so on.

I just don't get why people get so excited about this cloud thing - usually you still have to set up everything yourself, so why not own the server you're doing it on?

[eek]

Welcome to the Cloud where you are being charged for everything and vendors hold you hostage.
Do you think AWS cares what the node is for, the will meter it charge you for the bw, electricity node size and so on.

I just don't get why people get so excited about this cloud thing - usually you still have to set up everything yourself, so why not own the server you're doing it on?

I have no problem with AWS. My costs there are clear cut, obvious and I have no problems with them. Plus careful architecture design seems to be allowing me to be doing an awful lot for peanuts. AWS micro instances when used for a single dedicated task handles far more then people say they do.

Azure has ended up costing me money because the deployment routine requires running multiple instances to minimise downtime. Its tulip because the documentation doesn't make it clear explicit that MS charge for non running standby instances.

As for buying hardware myself, I don't have time to do everything myself so offloading areas I have 0 interest in is part of the business plan. Also as all plan b's income is based on monthly fees forking out monthly fees for services provided keeps everything in step.

[Joeman]

Have you considered Google App Engine?? granted it probably means a re-write, but IMO its the only "trouble free" cloud solution out there at the moment where you really dont need to do anything to keep the service running (unlike AWS where you still need to admin the servers)