IaaS providers.

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

John

Hardcore MB Enthusiast
SUPPORTER
Joined
Mar 3, 2011
Messages
13,625
Location
UK
Car
Skateboard
Anyone have any experience with regard to IaaS providers specifically MS Azure and Rackspace (not including RS offering Azure)?

The consensus seems to be Azure is better but I know sometimes what you find on the Internet is not 'real life' if you know what I mean!
 
AWS is incredible - you have to try it.
Look up Infrastructure as CODE - amazing - you can generate your infrastructure as JSON statements.
I've been in IT 33 years, and this is the most exciting thing I've seen in that time.

Currently involved in lots of stuff so ask away.
 
AWS works well (and cheap) but it is not straightforward to use for anyone who is not in IT due to the need for code or third-party applications.

But this does not answer the OP's other question re hands-on experience with Azure....

Interesting read here:

Azure vs. AWS: Cloud Platform Comparison - Tom's IT Pro
 
Anyone have any experience with regard to IaaS providers specifically MS Azure and Rackspace (not including RS offering Azure)?

The consensus seems to be Azure is better but I know sometimes what you find on the Internet is not 'real life' if you know what I mean!

We've been using Azure for a few years now, initially for virtual machines, but more recently for Active Directory and Web App infrastructure (web, logic, glue, events, cloud pipes etc).

Azure has matured considerably over this period and whereas 2 years ago we were constantly evaluating the price and performance of AWS, these days we are fully committed to Azure having reached the conclusion that, warts and all, Azure is now so far ahead of the pack that it’s a bit of a one horse race. I’d go so far as to say we couldn’t consider operating our broadcast services business without Azure and this very week we’ve decided to launch a new venture that wouldn’t be financially viable without the range of bolt on, easily accessible, mostly non code, cloud to cloud services that Azure has to offer.

A few words on costs. We use developer and commercial accounts, the difference being with developer accounts you can apply to join programmes which offer free credits but these are to be used strictly for non commercial work. Even with the credits you do need to keep an eye on costs. What seems very reasonably priced for a small traditional 3 server web app, suddenly becomes very costly when you add resilience. Note, that although SQL and DocumentDB can be purchased as a service, other MS Enterprise apps such as standalone SharePoint (which Azure can automatically deploy in a fully configured farm in less than a day!!) and CRM are still purchased on a licensed server basis, plus individual client access licenses for users - meaning although you can PAYG with infrastructure, software is still purchased on a capital basis! Mind you, there's nothing to stop you using MS's cloud versions of SP, CRM etc which are available on a PAYG basis (min 1 year) and interfacing with them using app logic (see screen grabs below)

Even at the smaller non enterprise end, Azure has much to offer. You can deploy a Wordpress install in minutes and upsize and downsize the machine spec as often as you like and even schedule these changes to happen automatically. I do believe also, but haven’t had reason to try it, that you can use Azure’s cache fabric as a CDN for Wordpress, or any other web app you might want to install. Again, these things all come at a cost and there is a risk of fumbling around in the dark as we did once, setting things up, piping stuff here and there, only to realise at the end of the billing cycle that we’d been burning cash needlessly with an ill considered setup.

I’ve attached a couple of Azure screen grabs - the first showing the range of Apps available under Web & Mobile, and the second showing how you’d go about configuring a logic app to poll Twitter every minute for tweets that you’d later save away to Salesforce. Note, Azure is almost totally integrated with VS these days, so it’s pretty easy to add custom code to any of the above, or indeed develop an entire web front end off line before deploying it directly into a previously configured, cached, Web App.

Hope this is useful.

Chris




 
Thanks for that - much appreciated!

:thumb:
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom