Ask HN: Who uses Azure ML?

Re:Ask HN: Who uses Azure ML? by hcrisp on Friday February 03, 2017 @07:35AM (#13559334)

To my knowledge, it only works with dataframes, has limited algorithms, and results in non-portable models due to vendor lock-in. That said, it makes ML easier for the non-programmer, is seeing fast growth due to MS investment, and can be well integrated to custom R and Python code.

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Re:Ask HN: Who uses Azure ML? by Avalaxy on Friday February 03, 2017 @08:06AM (#13559503)

> and results in non-portable models due to vendor lock-in

Yea, I was wondering about this. The free tier (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/machine-le...) says that publishing it as a production API is not available. I wonder how you can get data out of it without the API.

I'm also wondering how the costs in a real life scenario would compare to running your own software on bare metal. Maybe it would be a good trade off to experiment with Azure ML to find the winning algo combination and then implement it yourself and host it on your own server.

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Re:Ask HN: Who uses Azure ML? by conjectures on Friday February 03, 2017 @10:28AM (#13560401)

Not MS Azure, but AWS - alot of their more advanced APIs seem to rack up bills quite quickly.

Their prediction API is $0.0001 per hit. So if you get r requests per second cost per hour is r0.000160^2. Cost to rent an EC2 server is x per hour.

So if x<r(0.0001)(60^2) it's cheaper to rent. Say you need an r3.large that's x=$0.166. So it's cheaper if you get more than 0.46 requests per second, which sounds like quite a light load.

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