Self provisioning some Azure VMs for your daily job

Today I have verified the value of the cloud and Azure. Rendering 24 videos (that is the result of rearranging mp4 videos, cut&paste with some other media...that I have already did last days) on my PC (i7 gen3 16Gb RAM) with Camtasia it would take an average of one hour per video, so 24 hour.

I have used my Azure account: chosen a VM (for example a D64s, that is about 4K/month - but I have tried also NV and NC VMs, D64s is the most expensive), created three instances. Time? About 5hours, more or less. Expense? 3.920€/month is about 5.4€/hour, that is 81 (5.4x3x5)€ for the work. Sure, I have my MVP Azure account, but think this as the expense of a company. How much an employee costs for 24/8=3 days of work (and you say: you can do something else while you are waiting rendering...really sure?) and think about having the same job for less than a third of the time+81€?

Companies does not understand what does self service and self provisioning means: they are using Azure just as an extension of their datacenter. Or think about other companies that buy Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions that contains 150$ of Azure credit and that make no culture about using that credit in a productive way.

Another thing to remember is that as you have all your files are on a Azure Storage File Share, connected to your VM, it is not a local disk. To to make processing faster, copy all your files on the them D: drive, that is really local, SSD, and fast! Your processing will be faster. Just remember to copy back your files back on the storage, else you loose all your work because after shutting down a VM, temp drive is not persisted :)

There is still a lot of work that has to be done...