My Experience Using VMs in Azure

Disclaimer — This is not an enterprise-level postmortem. I am but a single fellow with a gaming community and a half-dozen game servers that mostly run in Docker containers.

Also, if you’re expecting charts and graphs, prepare to be disappointed. All you’ll find here are anecdotes of my experience with a month of Azure. This postmortem is more-or-less specific to the cost of running a small cluster of Azure Virtual Machines. Let’s dig in.

Why Azure?

I have a few years of experience working with AWS and I’ve always wanted to get my hands dirty with Azure so that I could compare the two. I’ve also been interested in seeing what the cost would be if I moved the Egee.io game servers up onto a cloud provider.

The time was right and an opportunity presented itself so, up to Azure I went.

Initial Thoughts

Compared to AWS, the Azure UI is absolutely delightful. I’m not going to drone on about how terribly outdated AWS’s various UI’s are; Azure was a massive breath of fresh air.

Despite the glorious UI, I found the discovery of services somewhat arduous. Microsoft really likes to promote featured services and subscriptions and that makes general discovery rather difficult.

The UI is also very heavy on the JavaScript side, which is bad for folks with poor connections or hardware. Even on my hardware, the interface became sluggish and times.

How about the services?

Because the scope of my use case was rather limited, I only sampled a handful of services. No SQL databases, no Functions, no advanced monitoring, etc.

Creating a new VM is a good experience once you find what you’re looking for. If you don’t already have a resource group (Networks, Storage, Security Groups, etc), Azure will happily set one up for you so you can focus on creating your VM. AWS does something similar but it’s nowhere near this streamlined.

I had to modify the networking and security groups for my VM’s and it was great; very intuitive and smooth. Though I will say adding my SSH key to the VM is a little clunky. I’m surprised Azure doesn’t store you public key and auto-load it.

Virtual Machine Tiers

This is where Azure disappointed me in a big way. Their pricing is simply not competitive for my use case. The Egee.io community has:

• 2 game servers with 99% up time
• At least 2 game servers with 75% up time
• at least 3 game servers with 40% up time

Game servers vary greatly in system requirements, however the two servers with 99% up time (Rust & Minecraft) demand a great deal of CPU and a decent amount of Memory.

For starters, the VM’s on offer are all overpriced (at the time of writing) when compared to the likes of AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode. The cheapest two core CPU was $31.25 a month and it requires premium storage. Compare that with the Linode 4GB which is $20/mo with 2 Cores and 4gb.

Next, let’s talk about the premium storage thing. It’s basically SSD storage (which is quickly becoming the standard in cloud platforms) with some added perks and it is expensive. During a 1 week game server test, my storage costs exceeded my VM costs which is mind-blowing because I was the only one playing on the server at the time (so the I/O was basically sitting the whole time).

Too Expensive?

For me, yes. I also found the performance sub-par. During my aforementioned 1 week server test, I had my VM lock up twice. Granted, Rust is kind of a juggernaut and it runs the Unity3D engine which is also kind of a beast, however my current on-premises game server is a puny Intel dual-core with 8gb of ram and it handles all 5 of our game servers just fine.

You can watch how I provisioned the game server by watching this video on my YouTube channel

Summary

Based on my one month usage, I found Azure to be uncompetitive when compared to other offerings, specifically Digital Ocean and Linode. The VMs on both of these services are cheaper than Azure and the specs appear to promise better performance than what Azure offers.

However — it is worth pointing out that Azure has a ton of services and features that the other providers don’t provide, such as managed SQL databases, Azure Functions, various types of storages, and the list goes on.

My test of Azure was very limited but for folks like me who are looking for an cloud service without requiring those extra services, I recommend trying out other providers before Azure.