Will it still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google
Wonder if it'll still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google, with restrictions on the number of VHDs (Azure's data format) per underlying VM.
Microsoft has released a preview of Azure Container Instances, a new way to deploy containers which emphasises speed and ease of use above scalability and orchestration. A web application running in an Azure Container Instance A web application running in an Azure Container Instance The company already offers an Azure …
" with restrictions on the number of VHDs (Azure's data format) per underlying VM."
That's to force you to size your desired storage and IO performance correctly versus the target VM type. Usually you can attach double the number of CPU cores # disks.
As the largest VM can handle over 260TB per VM across 65 disks delivering ~ 500K IOPS I really don't think it's a limiting factor for most use cases...
"with restrictions on the number of VHDs (Azure's data format) per underlying VM."
FYI - AWS has LOWER # disk volume limits per VM than Azure which supports up to 64:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/volume_limits.html
"What would you run on a container in Azure that couldn't be provided by one of their existing services?"
Something where you didn't want to have to care about creating the underlying VMs and orchestration layer? Just load it and go.... Or something where the per second billing makes more sense?
App service lets you deploy code and everything else is managed for you but you're limited to supported languages and libraries.
VMs give you complete flexibility but you have to manage them yourself.
Containers are in between, you manage your app and its software stack (including patching libraries) but MS make sure the resources you've asked for are available, even if that means provisioning more VMs and moving load around.
I, personally, wouldn't host persistent storage in a container and would use something managed like SQL Azure / DynamoDB / Spanner but some do.
Containers only work well if you can manage their resources, especially disk IO. chroot is essentially all a container is without those controls.
It's funny for me, we started with bare metal, then we moved to containers (FreeBSD jails), which we eventually abandoned for VMs because of the lack of IO resource control in jails, and now we're moving everything to Docker (which does have these controls).
"the higher they profit the more they are screwing us."
Or the more attractive a service they are providing to drive that business in a very competitive market?
There is plenty of choice in cloud, but only two really big horses to put your money on....
I prefer Azure both technically and because of the lack of lock-in compared to AWS. For instance if you write something for Dynamo DB, how are you ever going to run it anywhere else? If you write for SQL server you can still choose to run it on premise or in most other clouds...
"There is plenty of choice in cloud, but only two really big horses to put your money on...."
Yes, and that's absolutely not a good thing.
"I prefer Azure both technically and because of the lack of lock-in compared to AWS. For instance if you write something for Dynamo DB, how are you ever going to run it anywhere else? If you write for SQL server you can still choose to run it on premise or in most other clouds..."
They are both terrible for lock-in. A rock and a hard place.
SQL Server is okay but not good value unless you run huge workloads, limited to running on Windows (for now) and has ridiculously complex on prem. licensing (yes Oracle is worse, but not by much).