That might be the case if Azure was not literally a tire-fire. I have been using Azure for work and it's the most frustrating, inconsistent, often-broken, confusing and stress-inducing cloud service that my teammates and I have ever been subjected to. It left such a bad taste that I am quite certain I would flat-out refuse to use it again in the future, or work somewhere that uses it.
Take my advice: just don't use it. It's not worth it. Use AWS, use GCP, use Digital Ocean. Use some random cloud provider. Just don't use Azure.
If you do the Microsoft way. But i find their batteries included approach to be broken more often than not. Tried deploying a docker image with cors on azure. Literally could not do it because of bugs and the gsc that they were intercepting cors packets. Opened up 3 bugs took Months to fix one. It's a tire fire.
Front door, firewalls, LB’s, AKS, Azure Functions, Azure Disk (in AKS), scale sets and file-share storage accounts.
All of it was painful. There docs were lacking or sent you in circles. The documentation for their firewall product is three-quarters known issues and errors.
Azure functions were painful to run locally, good forbid you’re not using Windows.
Azure would take ages to attach a node on K8’s. Like, over an hour. It consistently had issues moving Azure disks between nodes in K8s: “can’t mount disk, attached to another host” in comparison AWS will speedily and happily re-attach an EBS disk to a new machine.
Permissions were opaque and distributed across the whole interface.
It silently deprecated keys underneath us, broke a number of services (couldn’t write to attached disks in K8s, couldn’t move them), didn’t inform us that this happened, we only figured it out by trawling through GitHub issues.
Storage Account explorer application breaks/stops consistently.
“Alert but permit” mode on firewalls doesn’t do what it’s supposed to: it will permit, but totally fails to alert you.
Scale sets operate weirdly, I didn’t personally deal with this too much, but my teammates had consistent issues with strange caching issues and more or less machines being spun up than should have.
Until we fixed it, every Azure PoP was health-checking our web app 2-3 times a minute: our logs and servers were being flooded with literally thousands of pointless requests.
If you have an AKS cluster with n machines currently in it, with a minimum and maximum of (n, m) machines, and you want to say, increase the minimum number, you cannot: it will refuse and tell you “the minimum number of nodes must include the current number”, so rather than just automatically adding a new node (a la AWS, and I presume GCP), you have to force the cluster to scale up to the new number of machines by throwing workload at it, then make the change.
AWS has a single Python package called “Boto3”, from which you can do pretty much everything. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has a separate Python package for every service, and sometimes subset of service. Do you know whether you need the package for Storage Accounts, File Share, Share Accounts, Object Store or whatever else they had? Also, authenticating against these was a pain: sometimes you need a key provided by the service (let’s hope your permissions let you see that), sometimes you need to generate a service principal for your app (unless there is already one? In which case it’s listed in the UI, but nowhere you’ll find it, and certainly not under “service principals”, and you probably won’t have the permissions to see the information you need anyways) and then sometimes you need both!
Azure let us spin up a K8s cluster on a version of 1.18, but then didn’t let us scale the cluster a few weeks later, because apparently that version just didn’t exist, so we should either use 1.17, or update to a newer version of 1.18, but you can’t skip point-releases, so you’re going to have to update everything in your cluster before you can have another node.
Gee.. Sounds like you have had an awful time of it. Any chance you could speak more of some of the issues you encountered? We are looking at cloud providers and was kinda leaning towards Azure.
For what it is worth, I have been migrating from AWS to Azure for a few projects over the past year and have had nothing but good things to say about Azure. Documentation is superb, as is support and experience consistency.
AWS is still great, I just happen to like Azure more.
My advice, stay the f*ck away from Azure as far as you can. It’s the biggest clusterfuck I have ever had to deal with. Unless you are a Microsoft Gold Partner and you simply buy every shit which your Microsoft Account Manager tells you then you have no reason to use Azure. Unlike the Google Cloud or AWS, Azure has not a single service which is unique or good in any particular way. On the other side, they have many services which are uniquely so bad that they are unusable in Azure.
Example of unique services in the GCloud: Spanner, Firestore, BigQuery,...
AWS: Face recognition service and other neat things
Uniquely fucked up in Azure: Functions, Web Apps, Storage, Application Insights (FML!), ... many many more
Oh my god Azure functions. What a pain they were, nevermind getting them running locally.
AWS Lambda: run the code, because it’s easy to write code to be fully independent of lambda specifics.
Azure functions: oh no you need to run this thing to simulate stuff. Oh you’re not on Windows? Uhhhh too bad, that doesn’t work. You’ll have to use this other, random beta software. Oh it failed to run now, because you didn’t provide it with some arcane set of azure credentials which are inexplicably required to run it locally.
Storage-especially on Kubernetes is Alpha quality at best. The amount of pain we had was wild considering it is a fairly basic requirement.
I had no trouble developing Azure Functions with VS Code on my ThinkPad running Ubuntu.
Getting them to run locally [0] or in your Kubernetes Cluster [1] isn't too difficult. With AWS Lambdas that isn't possible at all.
Regarding the storage for Kubernetes, as long as you don't provide details it looks like just another rant. I get that you like AWS more than Azure but your opinion may not reflect the actual experience someone else will have.
What kind of workloads are you looking to run in the cloud? Chances are you won't have major issues despite the rants on here making Azure sound like a dumpster fire.
Honestly our stuff is pretty pedestrian. We have a front end website and API service, a couple of application servers for our telemetry IoT outstations and of course a backend database server.
I think you'll be fine with Azure then. You should use the pricing calculator beforehand to not be surprised by the costs and figure out how to reduce them but this applies to any cloud provider.
Going to have to disagree here.
That might be the case if Azure was not literally a tire-fire. I have been using Azure for work and it's the most frustrating, inconsistent, often-broken, confusing and stress-inducing cloud service that my teammates and I have ever been subjected to. It left such a bad taste that I am quite certain I would flat-out refuse to use it again in the future, or work somewhere that uses it.
Take my advice: just don't use it. It's not worth it. Use AWS, use GCP, use Digital Ocean. Use some random cloud provider. Just don't use Azure.