In the past couple of months I’ve had the joy/pain/challenge of working with Windows Azure on a few different projects and I’ve managed to rack up both experience and bills for nearly every service. While Microsoft’s cloud might look bright and fluffy from safe in your on-premise data center, when flying around up here at 30,000 feet the ride can be a bit bumpy. So here are my Top 5 Windows Azure annoyances.
- Free doesn’t mean freedom. Microsoft has been great about offering trials of their cloud services to developers via MSDN, conference participation, or just clicking on the right link at the right times. But that free 3-month trial doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to chalk up a 25% reduction in your datacenter costs. There are limits to the service usage, such as only being able to create small VMs to bandwidth restrictions. Most of these limits are spelled out fairly clearly when you sign up, while others you may just find by stumbling across them. The problem with this method of reaching your limit is that once its hit, you’re basically done. One of my Azure VM based projects hit a bandwidth limit on the free account and so the account got disabled the night before the demo to our customers. We created a Pay-as-you-go account but found that we couldn’t move the VMs to that subscription. Instead we had to download the VHD blobs from the Azure Storage account on the free subscription, upload them to the PAYG subscription and then rebuild the disks and VMs. To Microsoft’s credit, once the VHD images were uploaded, the VMs and networks were rebuilt in about an hour. But those uploads took more than 8 hours for 120G. Continue reading
