Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads
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@Mario-Jakovina said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
My company uses on on prem servers because of both, unreliable internet, and calculations similar tou yours in this thread.
At NTG, we use colo for the majority of our needs and cloud for more specialized needs. But we are always looking at how to pull back from cloud for workloads as there is almost always a big cost savings getting from cloud to colo. But there are definitely cloud advantages for some use cases. We have zero on premises, we are a very modern company and are physical disparate, so we are ideally situated to have nothing on premises. Our design is LANless from the ground up and without good Internet we can't do anything, so that works out for us that we know that that will always be there.
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Applying legacy thinking to cloud and cloud migrations almost always results in increased costs.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
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Azure: $175.80 / year
Vultr: $60 / year
On Prem: $40 / yearVultr and Azure are nowhere near the same. Vultr compares more to AWS lightsail. Which essentially gives you the same VPS functionality without the entire infrastructure benefits in the cloud.
You don't talk about autoscaling or building a multi tiered application so of course you would use something like Vultr or Lightsail.
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I would recommend taking a professional level AWS or Azure course when you get a chance. If it's not something you've done before, it can be eye opening for the multitude of options and capabilities that you get. Even if you've done a course more than 2 years ago, a bunch has changed.
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I work in a cloud only environment and there is so much. I've done 100 hours of so training and I'm still learning.
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All of these scenarios sound like "hobby businesses".
Purchasing a piece of software and then not updating anything for 12 years....
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Disclaimer: Cloud is actually a no-go for Avimark, or nearly any program like it, from the get go.
Elasticity has nothing to do with the clients internet connection. Hopefully you mean hosted here...
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Scott where are you getting the AAD pricing from? Does AAD have some cloud computing non user based pricing? I’m only aware of the $4/u/m option ( or more)
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@Dashrender said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Scott where are you getting the AAD pricing from? Does AAD have some cloud computing non user based pricing? I’m only aware of the $4/u/m option ( or more)
He was referring to AAD DS, which was correct pricing for just that.
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@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
All of these scenarios sound like "hobby businesses".
Purchasing a piece of software and then not updating anything for 12 years....
It's the real world, though. Just look at discussions on here, it's how nearly everyone works.
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@Dashrender said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Scott where are you getting the AAD pricing from? Does AAD have some cloud computing non user based pricing? I’m only aware of the $4/u/m option ( or more)
I linked the pricing page when I stated it.
$4u/m would be massively more expensive.
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@IRJ said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
I would recommend taking a professional level AWS or Azure course when you get a chance. If it's not something you've done before, it can be eye opening for the multitude of options and capabilities that you get. Even if you've done a course more than 2 years ago, a bunch has changed.
Oh it's great knowledge to have, for sure. And even businesses that "mostly" need to be on premises, will often need to know how to use cloud for special workloads.
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@IRJ said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
**
Azure: $175.80 / year
Vultr: $60 / year
On Prem: $40 / yearVultr and Azure are nowhere near the same. Vultr compares more to AWS lightsail. Which essentially gives you the same VPS functionality without the entire infrastructure benefits in the cloud.
You don't talk about autoscaling or building a multi tiered application so of course you would use something like Vultr or Lightsail.
Normal businesses, the 99%, don't have scaling, and often all tiering goes in a single "container". That's the thing, when we discuss real world workloads, cloud's tooling applies to almost nothing that they do. Even on Wall St. the number of workloads that would actually leverage cloud was only around 20% at best, and that's an environment that is really conduscive to that.
Obviously hosting environments are the primary customers of cloud, where 80% or more of their workloads can autoscale and are tiered. I think this is why cloud gets the attention that it does - because Silicon Valley specifically makes cloud, makes products that are primarily hosted, and do most of the talking about the industry. But customers like Google, Change, Facebook are the exception, not the norm, and even the big SI players only get advantages from cloud heavily for their customer facing products (operations) not their internal IT infrastructure (IT).
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
All of these scenarios sound like "hobby businesses".
Purchasing a piece of software and then not updating anything for 12 years....
It's the real world, though. Just look at discussions on here, it's how nearly everyone works.
And yet you've told people not to deal with businesses that are "hobbies" because they are running their business poorly. So why are you making excuses in this case?
If you want an apples to apples comparison do hosted on a provider with fully updated and patched local systems.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@IRJ said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
**
Azure: $175.80 / year
Vultr: $60 / year
On Prem: $40 / yearVultr and Azure are nowhere near the same. Vultr compares more to AWS lightsail. Which essentially gives you the same VPS functionality without the entire infrastructure benefits in the cloud.
You don't talk about autoscaling or building a multi tiered application so of course you would use something like Vultr or Lightsail.
Normal businesses, the 99%, don't have scaling, and often all tiering goes in a single "container". That's the thing, when we discuss real world workloads, cloud's tooling applies to almost nothing that they do. Even on Wall St. the number of workloads that would actually leverage cloud was only around 20% at best, and that's an environment that is really conduscive to that.
Obviously hosting environments are the primary customers of cloud, where 80% or more of their workloads can autoscale and are tiered. I think this is why cloud gets the attention that it does - because Silicon Valley specifically makes cloud, makes products that are primarily hosted, and do most of the talking about the industry. But customers like Google, Change, Facebook are the exception, not the norm, and even the big SI players only get advantages from cloud heavily for their customer facing products (operations) not their internal IT infrastructure (IT).
I don't believe this at all. When youre using containerized workloads scaling is almost a requirement.
We definitely benefit internal from scaling and anyone who deals with retail or is in any way affected by holidays definitely benefits from scaling. Not just the customer facing but the back office infrastructure as well.
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@Obsolesce said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Applying legacy thinking to cloud and cloud migrations almost always results in increased costs.
Sure. But it's not "legacy thinking" that is the problem, it is "real world workloads." Look at file storage, email, instant messaging, ERP, and other workloads that IT manages for a business. Legacy or modern, those workloads just don't have a useful way to leverage cloud computing. Both cloud computing as well as publicly hosted environments typically present challenges for standard workloads and offer no real benefits.
I think that there is a temptation to associate "modern workloads" with "provider workloads". We think of Google, Facebook, etc. as modern and our SAP ERP as legacy. BUt that's not correct. It's really that one is a SaaS from a SaaS provider and the other is infrastructure for an individual company. Cloud has (or would have been) beneficial for hosting providers basically for forever. It would have been useful long before it existed. But traditional non-cloud still makes absolute sense for tons of workloads, even really modern onces.
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@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@IRJ said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
**
Azure: $175.80 / year
Vultr: $60 / year
On Prem: $40 / yearVultr and Azure are nowhere near the same. Vultr compares more to AWS lightsail. Which essentially gives you the same VPS functionality without the entire infrastructure benefits in the cloud.
You don't talk about autoscaling or building a multi tiered application so of course you would use something like Vultr or Lightsail.
Normal businesses, the 99%, don't have scaling, and often all tiering goes in a single "container". That's the thing, when we discuss real world workloads, cloud's tooling applies to almost nothing that they do. Even on Wall St. the number of workloads that would actually leverage cloud was only around 20% at best, and that's an environment that is really conduscive to that.
Obviously hosting environments are the primary customers of cloud, where 80% or more of their workloads can autoscale and are tiered. I think this is why cloud gets the attention that it does - because Silicon Valley specifically makes cloud, makes products that are primarily hosted, and do most of the talking about the industry. But customers like Google, Change, Facebook are the exception, not the norm, and even the big SI players only get advantages from cloud heavily for their customer facing products (operations) not their internal IT infrastructure (IT).
I don't believe this at all. When youre using containerized workloads scaling is almost a requirement.
We definitely benefit internal from scaling and anyone who deals with retail or is in any way affected by holidays definitely benefits from scaling. Not just the customer facing but the back office infrastructure as well.
The challenge there is that there is a cost of scaling and for it to be beneficial that cost to scale has to be offset by the benefits of scaling. The problem that we see in most cases is that when you actually look at how much it costs to be able to scale is higher than the cost of providing the capacity all of the time. That's what we consistently see from Azure, it's a rare workload that is going to scale enough to justify the cost to build everything to scale, and the cost to purchase the premium priced scalable infrastructure.
Especially when you can use some more traditional old school methods like containers and process management that already provide a lot of scalability naturally. It's not like without cloud that we don't get scaling. It's different scaling mechanisms, but they exist. They don't have the ability to scale anywhere near as powerfully as cloud does, obviously. But they are cheap, really cheap.
When you get big, of course, then the challenge isn't "is cloud right", but then it becomes "is Azure cheap enough cloud." Because you can either look at alternative cloud providers (Amazon, whoever) or build your own. Once you have those skills in house, it only takes so much before Azure becomes so expensive from just Microsoft's profit overhead that building your own becomes sensible.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@IRJ said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
**
Azure: $175.80 / year
Vultr: $60 / year
On Prem: $40 / yearVultr and Azure are nowhere near the same. Vultr compares more to AWS lightsail. Which essentially gives you the same VPS functionality without the entire infrastructure benefits in the cloud.
You don't talk about autoscaling or building a multi tiered application so of course you would use something like Vultr or Lightsail.
Normal businesses, the 99%, don't have scaling, and often all tiering goes in a single "container". That's the thing, when we discuss real world workloads, cloud's tooling applies to almost nothing that they do. Even on Wall St. the number of workloads that would actually leverage cloud was only around 20% at best, and that's an environment that is really conduscive to that.
Obviously hosting environments are the primary customers of cloud, where 80% or more of their workloads can autoscale and are tiered. I think this is why cloud gets the attention that it does - because Silicon Valley specifically makes cloud, makes products that are primarily hosted, and do most of the talking about the industry. But customers like Google, Change, Facebook are the exception, not the norm, and even the big SI players only get advantages from cloud heavily for their customer facing products (operations) not their internal IT infrastructure (IT).
I don't believe this at all. When youre using containerized workloads scaling is almost a requirement.
We definitely benefit internal from scaling and anyone who deals with retail or is in any way affected by holidays definitely benefits from scaling. Not just the customer facing but the back office infrastructure as well.
The challenge there is that there is a cost of scaling and for it to be beneficial that cost to scale has to be offset by the benefits of scaling. The problem that we see in most cases is that when you actually look at how much it costs to be able to scale is higher than the cost of providing the capacity all of the time. That's what we consistently see from Azure, it's a rare workload that is going to scale enough to justify the cost to build everything to scale, and the cost to purchase the premium priced scalable infrastructure.
Especially when you can use some more traditional old school methods like containers and process management that already provide a lot of scalability naturally. It's not like without cloud that we don't get scaling. It's different scaling mechanisms, but they exist. They don't have the ability to scale anywhere near as powerfully as cloud does, obviously. But they are cheap, really cheap.
When you get big, of course, then the challenge isn't "is cloud right", but then it becomes "is Azure cheap enough cloud." Because you can either look at alternative cloud providers (Amazon, whoever) or build your own. Once you have those skills in house, it only takes so much before Azure becomes so expensive from just Microsoft's profit overhead that building your own becomes sensible.
I've never argued that Azure is the cheapest or best. I'm not sure why this thread isn't comparing other providers and only Azure because it's the most expensive of all of them. But statements like this
The problem that we see in most cases is that when you actually look at how much it costs to be able to scale is higher than the cost of providing the capacity all of the time.
are blatantly false.
If I can run a k8s instance with 3 nodes 99% of the time and then use spot instances to spin up when necessary to add to my cluster to increase capacity it's clearly not true that it costs more to run all of the time.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Sure. But it's not "legacy thinking" that is the problem, it is "real world workloads." Look at file storage, email, instant messaging, ERP, and other workloads that IT manages for a business.
It most certainly is legacy thinking. You shouldn't be running any of those listed things in house (except maybe file storage and you even said that's lgeacy thinking in 2015). Whether you run it in your own infra in a hosted environment or just pay a SaaS you shouldn't be using that in house.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Disclaimer: Cloud is actually a no-go for Avimark, or nearly any program like it, from the get go. Its customers have no physical choices on location and so rarely can get affordable, fast, or reliable Internet. And AviMark requires a Gigabit or faster wired connection for acceptable use. Solid 100Mb/s isn't good enough, it is noticeably slow, and Wifi is out of the question. It's highly chatty database communications over SMB makes it latency sensitive to an incredibly degree.
Sometimes in cases where the clients need high speed connection to the server, moving both the clients and the server can be an option. Basically a VDI solution where the user runs the application remotely. RDP usually have much lower bandwidth demand than application's client to server connection.
It might not make sense financially though.
Anyway, if you have enough workloads it's pretty clear to my that a hybrid approach is the best - some workloads in the cloud, some things SaaS, some stuff in a datacenter somewhere and some stuff on-prem. You just pick whatever is best for each case.
If you try to force one solution (like cloud) on everything, you just end up with either dissatisfied end users or higher costs.
