BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon giving away one year of the free tier is not shady?

That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.

You don't have to use the software licenses to make use of the Azure credits in BizSpark, and Azure will run any Linux distro containing a kernel with Hyper-V support.

Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that?

What's so shitty about Azure again?

Sorry, Azure is still garbage

Why?

and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available.

Unfortunately, staying in AWS's free tier means never seeing any of that performance.

AWS have wiped over $2000 in excess charges incurred by one of our instances' data transfer - we set up an alert after that - they've been awesome to us and we trust them and are now spending more and more every month.

In general, Amazon's infrastructure offerings are explicitly trying to be commodity, and compete as such. E.g. lower cost, minimal lock in. If you configure servers using chef or other configuration system, and if you wrap all your service calls, it's not challenging to move between vendors on the infrastructure level. Check out fog which helps you do just this: https://github.com/fog/fog

Amazon's platform offerings are pretty explicitly trying to build lock in -- explicit in that they're often free (Beanstalk) and really just trying to sell more infrastructure.

Microsoft, and specifically Windows, pursue a platform strategy. Them offering Linux is actually very novel for them, but it's still called WINDOWS Azure, and the word "Windows" has traditionally been synonymous with platform lock in. You write a program for Windows, it runs only on Windows, and you have to pay for Windows.

I'm excited for MS to get fully into the infrastructure business, but I see their offerings as reactionary to Amazon. Big corporate, windows-based companies are needing to do things in the cloud, and have been going to Amazon. I see Microsoft as trying to offer services to prevent them from leaving by letting them buy what they need from MS.

It's hard for me to imagine good reasons to actually start on Azure, though. They're not a price leader (dropping prices always seems reactionary to AWS price drops), they have limited selection of services (vs. AWS), limited people using them (weaker community support), and always seem clueless about the internet (SSL cert outage, anyone?). Unless you're a Windows only developer and can't work on Linux, I really don't know why I would choose them.

PS. Amazon has a startup program you can get in to. When we started on AWS, they gave us $10K in free services. I know $1K is pretty standard, but if you can get validation (investor? incubator?), they'll go higher.

I use both AWS and Azure, and they're both fantastic and terrible:

- Azure has better, more polished web management, AWS is more flexible

- Azure gives 500s, 404s and 403s occasionally, AWS has outage IDs that don't appear in their status page and has useless support even when you pay for it.

Either way, I don't feel locked into Windows or Visual Studio when using Azure, which is good, as I don't use any of those products.

The most 'Windows' I get is nodes process module returning some more Windowsy values when I use Azure Web Sites. Otherwise I don't care.

Oh yeah and Azure Web Sites doesn't support gulp (or even grunt) yet so I commit generated assets.

PS: is this really the #1 comment on Hacker News?

- If you've used Azure, you know it doesn't require MS languages or tools

- If you haven't used Azure, why are you upvoting this guy's conspiracy theory?

I use Azure to run assorted Ubuntu machines. They run well, the interface is nice and I have no complaints. I also have a few EC2 VMs (and some DigitalCloud VMs and some Rackspace VMs and in the past have had HP Cloud VMs and Linode VMs).

Amazon is good, too. But I signed up for EC2 before the free micro-tier came in, so I got nothing from them.

So what I want to know is why I should feel scared, running Ubuntu on Azure?

And what is wrong with giving Microsoft credit for offering good programs like Bizspark? (And read that first sentence again, BTW. That's a real thing, and no other company does that)

you can also evaluate where lock in is acceptable for you/your project... the important thing is knowing it I guess :)

Can Amazon beat that?

...and seriously - you're worried about pricing three years from now with a startup?

Did you ever try reaching out ? I'm way too small for them to be answering org questions !

I love AWS to bits but their support is basically non-existent.

Second, you act as if entrepreneurs are idiots who don't read terms/considerations of agreements and aren't capable of evaluating costs/benefits.

Everything about the BizSpark program is transparent. If you fail to understand the terms and to consider the ramifications (and if necessary hedge against risks by making your technology portable to other clouds), that is your fault. No one is forced into the program.

Conclusion: I don't think it's terrible, but their tactics aren't always clear. AND, I'm consistently getting a bill for $2/m and I have no idea why.

And if you click "Download usage details", you get a csv of daily per-service usage data.

Can you tell me which of the ~1000 VM images they provide as listed in the below site are proprietary? All? None? Some?

http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index

Also, Azure charges you less for Linux VMs compared Windows VMs with the same hardware specs. A medium instance costs 12cents/hour with Linux and 18c/hr with Windows Server. That's 50% higher! If anything, it looks like they're trying to lock you into Linux. I don't have any beef with Amazon, but it looks like you haven't really looked at Azure before making such sweeping assertions with zero details, except some handwaving which makes it sad that this is the top comment on this story.