Item — HN Reader

This is nothing new, Azure has been having capacity problem for over a year now[1]. Germany is not the only region affected at all, it's the case for a number of instance types in some of their larger US regions as well. In the meantime you can still commit to reserved instances, there is just not a guarantee of getting those instances when you need them.

The biggest advice I can give is 1. keep trying and grabbing capacity continuously, then run with more than what you need. 2. Explore migrating to another Azure region that runs less constrained. You mention a new region would be complicated, but it is likely much easier than another cloud.

1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/azures-capacity-limitations-ar...

2 comments

>Azure has been having capacity problem for over a year now

This is also a problem internally for Microsoft. GitHub and LinkedIn still operate in private datacenters due to Azure capacity issues

> In the meantime you can still commit to reserved instances, there is just not a guarantee of getting those instances when you need them.

... wait, what? How are they defining 'reserved'?

RI are a billing concept (discounted rates for long term commitment).

Dedicated capacity exists, but it’s different (compute reservation groups or dedicated hosts).

You can combine CRG/DH with RI for the desired effect, although IMO it’s a bit confusing.

(Azure employee)

It's a billing mechanism. You pay less if you guarantee use. Sadly, they don't guarantee availability of things to use :)

Yup, I'm aware of reserved instances (from an AWS PoV) but I always assumed they were, at least theoretically, well, reserved!

Reminds me of the classic Seinfeld car reservation bit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2GmGSNvaM

Great bit! Same with airline overbooking ;)

On AWS instances are only reserved if you reserve a specific instance type in a specific zone. Reservations across multiple zones or savings plans don't reserve capacity.

In the AWS context, they are, in fact. That's the original point of them - so during big AZ failures your reserved instances had first dibs on the available capacity.

The billing thing became more of the point as big AZ failures are so rare.

Non-zonal instance reservations do not reserve capacity. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-capa...

Well, yeah. But the zonal ones still do.

With dedicated tenancy AWS Reserved Instances are physically reserved for you.