Anyone doing anything with Azure?

[#Chri5#]

If so, how accurate do you find the Azure calculator to work out how much your resources cost before setting them up?

I've fired up a Basic A1 VM in UK South and, via our MS CSP distributor, the compute costs are double what the calculator predicts

I've logged a query through our distributor but thought I'd investigate in case I'm being stupid!

 

[kitkat9933]

Azure like AWS, never come up to the price the calculator says which is also why it's really difficult to budget on these platforms for certain areas.

I wish they added an option that perhaps was more costly, but just gave you a server with x hardware for £y and that's it. For cloud driven scalable app, I find it easier to calculate, but if you want to replace an on prem VM in either platform as a standalone box, if becomes difficult..

 

[Caged]

@kitkat9933 - there are a lot of VPC providers that will bill you more and get you closer to a set price each month - places like RackSpace, Softlayer, various private cloud offerings that your ISP can do, anyone crazy enough to use vCloud Air etc etc. Public cloud isn't that service, it's billed per-minute and every resource has a cost.

@#Chri5# - your compute costs shouldn't be that wildly different. Are you absolutely sure you've picked the same VM versions? There are often basic/standard tiers that are called the same thing, you could have deployed your storage on SSD in error when the VM pricing only included scratch disk pricing, data transfer out of Azure has a charge that isn't reflected in the base VM pricing etc. UK Azure pricing for VMs recently had a fairly large price drop, so if your CSP partner hasn't updated their pricing yet that might account for the difference.

 

[#Chri5#]

This is my VM instance (created 13th Feb)



The Azure Calc says £0.026/hour for the compute:



Yet the billing portal (we subscribe via the MS CSP reseller scheme, so our billing apears on our CSP distributor portal) charges me £0.048/hour



I know it's pence but over a longer term the difference stacks up, especially if you fire up the bigger instances.

Edit to say I have raised the issue via regular channels but wanted to check I'm not being stupid!

 

[teaboy5]

Starting to use to for a POC for a number of months and have found the biggest cost at the moment being the VPN. Looking the VM's pricing seems fine.

 

[Stelly]

Company I work for spends around £50k a month on Azure and £90k a month on AWS

Stelly