Microsoft to stop taking reservations for 17 Azure VM flavours, kill 13 in 2028

Microsoft will stop offering long-term rentals for 17 Azure instance types – most of them powered by CPUs Intel released in the 2010s – again showing that cloud computing isn’t always a seamless and easy choice. The fun starts on July 1st when Microsoft will stop taking orders for one-year reservations for 13 instance types – …

[Pascal Monett]

Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

Borkzilla doesn't care that you are actually working.

Those equipment obsolescence excuses are all very nice and, to be true, cannot be attacked. They are an iron-clad reason to go and shit on your day's work.

But that does not mean that Borkzilla shouldn't be trying to extend the usage of those VM flavors for the companies who prefer using old kit instead of, once again, spending the next two years uprooting their existing (working) environment to force-march towards a shiny new future where they can re-invent the wheel (again) and try to continue to actually run a fucking business.

What Borkzilla should have done is simply alert all existing users that there is a new platform they can migrate to while keeping their existing environment and that they should do it because the existing platform is getting old and becoming obsolete.

The difference in that approach is that Redmond did the work to ensure that its existing customers could keep on working and that the choice is up to the customer.

After all, the customer is always right, eh ?

Yeah, not in The Cloud^TM he ain't. In The Cloud^TM, you take what you're given, you pay top dollar for it and you kiss the feet that take your money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

Intel stopped manufacturing skylake processors in 2019. Why the f*** didn't they keep making them so they could support all the end users of these processors?!?!?

I mean, if you're looking to rage at someone for this fairly straightforward, non-controversial and well announced deprecation of processors which haven't been manufactured for years then let's start with raging at Intel. It's gonna be difficult for anyone to guarantee uptime using these ancient processors if they can't be replaced.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

"Intel stopped manufacturing skylake processors in 2019."

OTOH those they made and MS installed are still there so that's no excuse to terminate the services already running. And in any case, wasn't the cloud supposed to be a seamless service, failing over gracefully from one server to another as needed? If it were cheaper or otherwise more convenient for MS to run on more modern H/W then that shouldn't trouble the users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

> The fun starts on July 1st when Microsoft will stop taking orders for one-year reservations for 13 instance types

Perhaps The Reg can correct the record on this. The fun started a year ago for some SKUs when the ability to buy 3 year reservations was disallowed. This was the first phase of the deprecation.

That said... Nothing in the announcement said people's services would be "terminated". It merely said the ability to guarantee access to a particularly quantity of these processors is going away. For some the ability to buy 3 year reservations has already been restricted, and the next milestone of disallowing 1 year reservations is about to happen. They'll still be available as unreserved on-demand for a while, but with diminishing capacity.

> wasn't the cloud supposed to be a seamless service, failing over gracefully from one server to another as needed?

It does if you want it to, and you're comfortable with the limitations associated with enabling that capability. Hyper-V live migration is available.

Apart from that you can always roll something custom - like with any cloud provider.

Many reasons to dislike MS, but this is such a stupid and trivial excuse to get wound up about.

[jlturriff]

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

Of course, if you outsource your data and processing to systems owned and controlled by a third party, you ought to contract with them in such a way that you aren't surprised when they pull the rug from under you.

It's very much like giving all of your recipes to another country and firing all of your chefs, then being surprised when said country eats your lunch.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

"those they made and MS installed are still there"

Not if they fail, which I assume was the OP's point about being unable to replace components. And while you can migrate a VM to a different server, that doesn't help much if the pool of "different servers" is steadily shrinking over time. If someone has an application running on a Haswell CPU, they aren't going to thank you for transparently moving them over to (say) a Comet Lake.

[MatthewSt]

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

> What Borkzilla should have done is simply alert all existing users that there is a new platform they can migrate to while keeping their existing environment and that they should do it because the existing platform is getting old and becoming obsolete.

You mean by giving you 4 years warning like they did a couple of years ago, and 2 years warning today?

And changing instance types is a scriptable operation (until you get to v6) so you can do it in a scheduled maintenance window.

What would be nice if they had an option (like container instances) for "I don't care which CPU I run on". Then they could take care of it for us.

[druck]

Pay the AI-geld

It would just be co-incidence that the new flavours are all more expensive?

[TVU]

Re: Pay the AI-geld

I believe the relevant term there is "price gouging".

[Gavsky]

As the ancient proverb has it, "You may have purchased a lake; but another retains the plug".

[jlturriff]

Not to mention...

"Microsoft will certainly like the move because newer CPUs offer more cores and almost certainly consume less energy than Intel’s oldies, meaning Redmond can pack more VMs into fewer servers while incurring lower operating costs."

And of course, it's useful as a way to jack up the price of their Asure services.

[Roland6]

“ but none of them explain why it’s decided to retire these instance types.”

“The Register thinks it’s because they run old Xeon CPUs from Intel’s Haswell, Skylake and Cascade Lake generations”

I suggest MS will have intimate knowledge of these VM’s and probably want companies to migrate away from versions of Windows prior to 11 and 2022/2025…