I had an apparent MS employee reply to one of my comments complaining about azure's portal saying the engineers know the interface is awful but can't do anything about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773022

I'd assumed it was a design by programmer fail, especially because of the terrible modular design, but it doesn't look like it.

I was wondering, poor performance wise, a client of mine is consistently seeing a 3-5ms lag between the SQL boxes and the website on azure. This seems incredibly high to me, but my experience is generally with SQL server on the same box or on the local network. I've never had a problem like this before, but this site can generate hundreds of queries per request because of legacy code.

That basically adds 500ms to a request just going up and down to SQL.

Am I being crazy for thinking a 5ms latency on stuff that's supposed to be in the same data centre is incredibly bad?

We're also getting random "The wait operation timed out" on DB connections between azure SQL dbs and Azure websites, basically a complete DB hang that I've never seen on a dedicated server setup, the client upgraded to premium, they're getting them even more. That means random users are getting complete failures every now and again. Unbelievable.

I honestly can't understand why anyone would pay for azure, in my experience the performance is an order of magnitude worse than dedicated servers that are half the price. The only good thing about it is easy deployment, which is something that's a complete PITA on dedicated servers until you've spent a bunch of time setting it up.

You aren't crazy. I'd recommend testing from your app with a simple speed-of-light test (e.g., SELECT 1;) just in case your queries are slow.

Perhaps Azure SQL did the same thing we sadly did with the first version of Cloud SQL: run it in a totally different environment that requires you to go through several hops to reach the actual (MySQL in our case) server. But even then Cloud SQL First Generation was "only" 1ms away. Second Generation which runs in a VM but managed by Google (like RDS at AWS) is basically equivalent to running it on your own VM, and is thus about 100 microseconds away.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

PS. We recently launched SQL server images on GCE (https://cloud.google.com/sql-server/) though it's not a managed service (yet?).

Yeah, that's how I figured out the cause of the problem. Had fixed a load of performance problems on a page, but couldn't get rid of 500ms compared to my laptop and realised it must be query latency and was surprised to see 100 "SELECT 1"s using the same connection consistently took 300-600ms (and it jumps around all the time in that range). The ridiculous thing is that the test server running on S1 has better performance (but still has a 200ms query lag for those 100).

And that's leaving aside that heavier queries take 6 times as long on a so called "Premium" instance compared to my 2 year old laptop. Part of me suspects one of my cheap VMs running SQL Express could do better than azure's "premium" db performance.

I also know it's not because of DTUs (MS's database usage metric), my client's site is seasonal and is just ramping up to prime-time, it had the same crappy latency in July when it was handling 1/10th the traffic as it has now.

SQL Express has several performance limits and goes idle when not used.

I can understand the comment "UI by designers", it looks pretty when you first logon, but then you try and use it then it feels slow, and quite an effort to get around.

I think there are actually three types of UI designs.

1) "UI by programmers". Very low use of graphics and animations. Everything looks very standardized. Usually has advanced options panels that let you tweak small parts of the algorithm. Gives a high level of control as there is little abstraction between the functional and presentation layers.

2) "UI by designers". Use of graphics and animations where necessary to make the UI more understandable, such as animations to show the result of user actions. Code is usually abstracted away and the interface is set up with the user in mind. Steps to perform common actions are very quick with the minimal amount of user input.

3) "UI by artists". Excessive use of graphics and animations. Animations that serve no functional purpose. High use of art with large images used for theme rather than function. Often no real link between what you expect buttons to do and what they really do. Steps to perform common actions are usually convoluted with multiple menus. Some even use hidden menus that must be invoked through arcane gestures in an effort to make screenshots look more appealing.

I think the UI being described here is actually the "UI by artists" rather than a well designed UI by a designer and not an artist.

I agree, although on first glance the UI of azure's portal seems to be a 1 type UI.

I think a programmer UI would be fast, with a lot shortcuts and easy get around ONCE you know it. But awful for non technical people.

If one has free credit for cloud resources, why can't they use the free money to just spin up some resources for non-critical work? Say log processing, run public tests etc.... I know I would if I were running a company and MS comes up to me with this.

What if the hassle simply does not outweigh the cost of the flaky VMs?

There are several reasons the hassles might not be worthwhile even if the free VM is 100% reliable. Most other VM hosts offer mostly Linux solutions and Linux skill is not always transferable to windows. If your organization has those skills then the wasted time cost might than a familiar VM would have cost.

You can run linux on azure.

I've chatted with people who've gone through Microsoft Accelerator, and that's exactly what they're doing.

Yep. Also I can confirm that for at least some accounting, MS treats the free credits as revenue. They will give discounts and consideration based on your spend even when the spend is just credit another dept gave out. Clients have told me of very happy calls from MS reps when their projected spend for the year exceeded 50K even though it was nearly 100% credits.

If you're going to do log processing, it means you've got data to process. And I haven't worked with AWS since 3 years ago, but in general external bandwidth is expensive, which is why you want to keep everything in the same data center where bandwidth is free and where you have no latency.

Good point. Agreed.

But, don't the free credit cover the bill incurred from bandwidth as well?