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My post from the other day about slow instance starts on Azure caused some commentary (mainly on reddit) that prompted me to think more about all this. In the end, there were a few more experiments I wanted to run to see if I could squeeze more performance out of Azure. First off, looking at the logs from my initial testing it looks like resource groups are slow. The original terraform creates a resource group as part of the test and then cleans it up at the end. What if instead we had a single permanent resource group and created instances within that? Here is a series of instance starts and deletes using the terraform from the last post: You'll notice that there's no delete value for the last instance. That's because terraform crashed and never deleted the instance. You can also see that instance starts are somewhat consistent, except for being slower in the second half of the test than the first, and occasionally spiking out to very very slow. Oh, and deletes are almost always really slow. What happens if we use a permanent resource group and network? This means that all the "instance start terraform" is doing…

I've been playing with terraform recently, and decided to see how different the terraform for launching a simple Ubuntu instance in various clouds is. There are two big questions there for me -- how big is the variation between OpenStack derived clouds; and how painful is it to move between the proprietary clouds? Part of this is because terraform doesn't present a standardised layer of cloud functionality, it has a provider per cloud. (Although, I suspect there's nothing stopping someone from writing a libcloud provider or something like that. It is an interesting idea which requires some additional thought.) My terraform implementations for each cloud are on github if you're interested. I don't want to spend a lot of analysis on the actual terraform, because I think the really interesting thing I found isn't where I expected it to be (there's a hint in the title for this post). That said, the OpenStack clouds vary mostly by capabilities. vexxhost for example seems to only offer flavors that require boot-from-volume. The proprietary clouds are complete re-writes, but are generally relatively simple and well documented. However, that interesting accidental thing -- as best as I can tell, Microsoft Azure is really really slow to…