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Why do Azure in Canada for any public consumption?

Unanswered Why do Azure in Canada for any public consumption?

  • Tuesday, February 01, 2011 2:41 PM
     
     
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    Ever since Bell Canada has enforced last mile charges for Usage Based Billing  (now effective March 1st, 2011), they will be charging an exorbitant amount for excess GB ($1.9/GB) over their lines. The limit for excess has also been cut to 1/10 th the original limits (from 200GB down to 25GB) as the 'cap' that they can start extra billing at.

    With this in mind, why bother with Azure? It will be too costly to call your services and data stored online and no customer base will want to assume the cost of running their business over the web with these type of price structures.

     

    Sad.

     

    Robert.

    .Net thingy maker type guy.
     

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  • Tuesday, February 01, 2011 4:39 PM
     
     
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    What does this have to do with Windows Azure?  Couldn't I replace "Azure" with "the internet" in your post?
     
  • Tuesday, February 01, 2011 5:59 PM
     
     
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    There are costs to productionalize Azure, in terms of data transfer, that Microsoft wants to charge per Gigabyte. It seems fairly reasonable for North America at about $0.10 per GB. Bell, here in Canada, now wishes to charge $1.9 per Gigabyte, over 25GB to the end user.

    What does this have to do with Azure? I'm not sure. Let's all live in a fantasy world and pretend that this won't affect us, and see where we'll end up.

    Could you replace Azure with Internet? Yeah sure, but this an Azure forum, no? Oh, I'm sorry, I must be in the wrong group. I'll go find some people who live with the realities of the technology they work in.

    Honestly, sorry for the sour notes, but I'm pretty angry that the monopoly companies can affect the end user to such a great extent. I'm sure every other 'last mile' provider, even in the USA, will want to [j|h]ump that cash cow as well.

    What does this have to do with Azure...you're not serious are you?

    Man, March 1, 2011 is gonna be a downer. Wake up world.

    R

     

     

    .Net thingy maker type guy.
     
  • Tuesday, February 01, 2011 6:23 PM
    Answerer
     
     
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    What does this have to do with Azure? I'm not sure. Let's all live in a fantasy world and pretend that this won't affect us, and see where we'll end up.

    As Steve points out this is no more about Azure than it is about the wider Internet. Obviously, end-user costs do affect utiization of internet services including those hosted in Azure. But your beef here should really be with Bell Canada not Microsoft or other companies using Azure to provide internet-based services to you.

     
  • Wednesday, February 02, 2011 8:40 PM
     
     
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    Um...my beef IS with Bell and CRTC. But this is an Azure forum, no??? I brought this up for general discussion about Azure platform development - but about the big picture.

    Will you force end users to swallow over 200x the cost of data? ($0.10/GB up to now $2.10/GB)

    I guess no one cares about, or wants to discuss, the long term effect on how they will provide the services they either are providing, or hope to provide, through Azure.

    Wow. This world is getting stranger all the time. As long as you can develop in a merry little bubble all is ok? Is that your business model?

    Sorry if this unsettles you from your quaint cube in the corner of your office. That happens when the real world encroaches on project plans.

    .Net thingy maker type guy.
     
  • Wednesday, February 02, 2011 10:00 PM
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    *just trying to calm things back down*

    Bell Canada's actions have the same potential impact as "net neutrality" discussions here in the US. They could cause a significant change in the way we access and utilize the internet. What irritates me about both of these practices is that its really about the company's double-dipping. They charge the service provider for bandwidth, and now they are charging the consumers. I don't like it, not one bit.

    As for the impact on cloud, if anything this will drive home even a greater desire to minimize the bandwidth being used. In a training course recently I had one person that realized they never think about bandwdith now. But in this new world they need to consider it. Not just for total transfer time, but for cost impacts.

    Now to answer the root question... how does this impact Azure application architectures? I think it will have several impacts. First off, more folks will realize that they don't want to put everything in the cloud. Its a common misconception that EVERYTHING should live there. Additionally, its going to make folks think more about how they move data in and out. An example I can think of is that instead of just uploading an XML document, you run an transform on it to JSON, then put the JSON into a compressed file and upload that to blob storage. Once uploaded, a cloud process can then extra, re-hydrate, and insert the data into Azure storage. This can dramatically speed up the transfer of huge amounts of data, but also significantly reduce the bandwidth required.

    But that's just one example. I'm sure others can come up with different options. :)

     
  • Thursday, February 03, 2011 1:59 PM
     
     
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    Thanks.

    I've seen some crazy things in wireless communications. Beyond hardware compression on the wire, the actual xml message was decomposed to 'token placeholders' surrounding raw data. In that manner 10 MB Excel sheets could be delivered to a hand-held device in a few seconds. the tokens decomposed commonly seen patterns in xml with 2 or 3 characters. If needed, a primer would be sent for newly identified primers. You get 10x+ data transfer.

    Beyond not having everything in the cloud, I'm wondering if, with what we see in the pricing structures we now have to deal with, this type of 'decomposition' should happen, perhaps, as low as at the IIS/BizTalk/Azure server service level? That way the server would do this sort of compression for the happy developer, alleviating the customer of higher costs.

    Also, the servers should be smarter about collecting requests and sorting them prior to going over the web. This will take a lot of AI to predict activity. This is probably the hardest thing to do, but may provide better server response times...

     

    .Net thingy maker type guy.
     
  • Friday, February 04, 2011 12:35 AM
     
     
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    I'm currently paying $20 per GB for International traffic on a business grade connection. It is normal in New Zealand (and Australia) that ISP connections have a data cap and you are paying for additional traffic above that. Consumer connections are much cheaper ($2 per GB) but generally charge for both National and International traffic. For us the fact that our Azure applications are hosted in Asia means that both ourselves and our customers are getting charged for the data on our ISP connections (as well as the Azure data charge). For a lot of web based LOB apps, this charge is not significant and the overwhelming benefits of cloud computing outwiegh these costs. However for apps doing file transfer / storage / video / audio these costs are likely to be significant and we have not currently deployed some of the modules we offer on premise to our cloud based solution for this reason.

    I can understand your frustration, it's just that it's always been like this for us so we've got to consider this as a cost of doing business. It doesn't negate the benefits of cloud computing and we are actively moving most of our offerings to Azure, but there are some specific apps which may be uneconomic and it does provide an additional barrier to adoption.