I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are minor time registration systems or automated vacation-payouts. I said estimated because a day-care institution is free (though advices not to) buy it-systems without talking with any part of the centralised organisation.
Microsoft has been one of our better partners in all of this. They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something. We have a direct line to Seattle, and parts of what we ring up at tickets have made it into the global 365 infrastructure. Stuff like making it easier to hide teams-emails from the company-wide outlook address-book.
More than that though, our tech-team is trained and certified in Microsoft technologies. The combination of in-house staff and a 30+ year long good business relationship makes Azure such an obvious choice for cloud. Some of the co-municipal systems we buy through a joint-owned organisation called KOMBIT operate in AWS (support and operations is handled by private sector companies), and it’s not like we’re religious about not using AWS or something other, but we’d need to build a relationship and retrain staff to do so.
> We have a direct line to Seattle, and parts of what we ring up at tickets have made it into the global 365 infrastructure.
This is great for one business, but bad for the whole of businesses IMHO. Microsoft shoehorns every little thing into their products, never asking themselves if they should. As long as they think they can they will. This leads to stupid things like Durable (aka stateful) Azure Functions. Durable functions is a product of a business either not knowing how to use FaaS properly, or they were misusing FaaS for something where they should have chosen a different tech. But Microsoft being Microsoft will try to accommodate any stupidity they can as long as it will please some big customer. In the beginning they get away with it, but over the years that's how they always end up with half baked, slow and buggy products which are inconsistent, incoherent and just awful to use. Azure is certainly on that trajectory from everything I've seen so far and I use Azure every day at a client at the moment so I know what I'm speaking of.
Microsoft is here to stay mainly because once you got your foot in the door at the big companies you will stay forever. The reasoning is indeed since we already have Microsoft guys Azure will fit us well but in practice none of these Microsoft guys will be able to help you on any Azure issue. So when Azure is involved in a big corp, accenture is usually not far behind. The experience with the solutions this doom duo comes up with are absolute hell to deal with.
In upfront cost Azure looks better but in general that's rarely the case. All the azure API's seem half baked. Once you're doing anything more advanced you will run into issues, just look at the terraform azure provider issue tracker for a bunch of issues that people run into because it's not clear until you actually try out the apis.
Here's another example if you want to use shared storage on kubernetes with any reasonable iops, the azurefile premium storage increases IOPS per Gigabyte allocated. So if you want any kind of reasonable experience/price you have to easier spin up your own nfs server, use azure netapp or allocate 10TB shared premium filesystem per share, which is something like 70k a year.
I like AWS, but AWS EFS has the same problem. They've improved it a bit through some recent changes, but it's not much better.
The way it would work: they gave you absolutely pitiful base IOPS credits for EFS and everything else was related to disk space used. So more disk space used (and paid), more IOPS. After that they'd completely detroy your IOPS if you used up all the credits. By destroy I mean IOPS at the level of a HDD from 1995.
I set up a Jenkins using EFS and initially it went well. It barely had any activity and after about 2 weeks it used up all the credits. After that even the login page would take 20 seconds to load.
I think it's throughput credits that EFS gives you (e.g r/w MiB/s), not IOPS. AFAIK they don't document the IOPS available at all.
In my experience the latency for an individual i/o operation on EFS is always at the "HDD from 1995" level regardless of available burst credits. Something that does lots of small random I/O like checking out got repos on Jenkins workers is basically worst case for EFS.
It's NFS, so the bad latency isn't surprising. The problem is that they don't have anything faster -- it tops out at 2GBy/s or something, even with hundreds of TB, even with multiple clients. You have to share your data over multiple EFS volumes, or build your own virtual gluster, which are extremely shit options. Also makes any kind of bug data HPC impractical.
Bezos, if you're listening, fire someone. You should have next generation pNFS or lustre like protocols by 2016.
But also, how does the pricing work? It seems to be half the price of EFS? It almost seems like that are assuing S3 read or Direct Connect to populate the FSx volume.
The agents were in ECS with no persistent storage, so that wasn't the problem. I was just running the Jenkins master off of EFS, for the persistent configuration storage.
And I don't think it's the latency that's killing EFS usage, it's the throughput. While the credits were there, everything went smoothly, once the credits ran out, the base throughput was fit for IO meant for the 90s.
We had the same issue with a pgsql server. Started out fine, but to get decent performance you pay out the nose for higher disk throughput.
It looks competitive when your pricing things out and don't know you need to pay for that. When you find out it's a classic sunk cost fallacy and most companies just eat the cost.
To be fair, Microsoft has only decided on Kubernetes within the last year. Before that there was heated debate on whether to support K8 or ServiceFabric, their "competing" standard. Now that all efforts are on K8 we'll see it improve pretty quickly.
> Microsoft shoehorns every little thing into their products
That's just how enterprise software works. It's not a Microsoft thing. It's an enterprise thing.
Consumer software often benefits from simplicity and elegance.
But for enterprise software, clients have hard requirements, so you provide the solutions they request.
There really isn't any choice to it. If you don't build it, they'll go with a competitor who will.
There truly isn't any other solution, unfortunately.
At best, you can spend more money trying to improve UX and interfaces. But when you have a set number of employees, and have to choose between improving the interface or building the features that will land another client, it's easy to see which choice gets made.
I agree, but I think that’s on Microsoft. I’m not sure they’ve ever adopted any suggestions from us that weren’t universally wanted. When teams first became available in 365, it was automatically enabled for everyone. Today it’s not, we requested this change, but I really doubt we were alone in that.
That’s not really what’s important to us, but I should have made that more clear. What is important is the direct line, so that we can call Microsoft and get updates directly from the techs working on the issue when something breaks. Amazon also has genuinely great support, they were even quicker to resolve the GDPR issues that made sure no one outside of the EU will ever access any of our data, not even through logs. But other companies let you talk to automated scripts, and take days to get back to you. So that’s why we like the direct line to Seattle, because it’s better support than most of their competition.
Microsoft also has one of the best and most effective sales machines in the world.
Those direct lines help with customer retention and expansion of services just as well as it provides technical assistance.
Even if AWS has some tech or price superiority, good luck prying those sales teams away from the big orgs and convincing them to go elsewhere - especially after significant ecosystem lock in. Which is another thing Microsoft is better at.
Microsoft simply has the enterprise sales machine completely dominanting and optimized.
It was fascinating watching them role out Azure with the full force of their developer and CTO focused marketing machine which kept hitting me even though I’d never use Microsoft, their ability to penetrate markets was fascinating to watch as an outsider.
This is something Google will never be able to catch up with. And a very important part of these cloud wars which get overlooked while we debate the merits of Microsoft’s engineering yes-to-everything the managers ask approach.
At this scale, why not invest in your own datacenter, since you already have a lot of servers to maintain? I understand you have to use Office 365, but what is the value prop of Azure to you beyond that ?
Our setup is mixed, all our own servers are virtual on rented space at a local server rental shop. I’m not a hardware tech, so I’m afraid that’s as technical I can get.
So our SQL cluster, and most of our web applications run on our own iron. Anything external as well as a lot of managed services run in Azure where the added security and operations dev-tools are invaluable compared to what we had when we self-hosted.
We do make a conscious choice about everything that moves to the cloud. We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out if buying new rental space for our SQL cluster would be cheaper than moving it to Azure. With the current political climate, we’re also a little more hesitant about moving things to clouds operated by American companies, because there is risk attached, in that we may have to move it back rather suddenly. Not something we expect will ever happen, but we don’t like risk in the public sector.
So my post wasn’t so much a “we run everything in Azure” as it was “well Azure is the obvious choice for the things we do operate in the cloud”. The relationship Microsoft has with enterprise, and the expertise staff has with their products means they become the best choice for a lot of enterprise. Unless Microsoft solutions are radically more expensive than their competitors, they simply have an advantage by already being a big, and typically well liked, player in most large organisation.
I say this as someone who used to firmly agree with this position, but in the last year my mind has been changed without reservation.
The time where this was a good idea has genuinely passed. There is no earthly way that any reasonable organization will be able to provide even the security that is present by relying on a large-scale cloud provider.
There is no way they will come out on top money-wise either. The big cloud players have a _absurd_ number of servers that _teams_ of some of the best CA talent the globe has to offer stressing to improve KPIs for.
10k employees in a municipality is small potatoes to what azure / AWS / GCP have dedicated to their products.
I have literally never seen a setup where cloud came out less than ~twice the cost of dedicated hosting. I have seen instances where dedicated hosting comes out cheaper than putting your own equipment in a colo, but even that depends on being in a location where energy and property prices (and so colo rental costs) are high.
And this does factor in devops - when doing consulting I earned consistently more (because of more hours) from clients that went for cloud setups; often they'd end up spending more times solving problems that generally didn't exist in the first place in a dedicated setup.
I do see lots of people that keep assuming that the cloud players must be cheap because they're so big, but I just have never seen that bear out in practice - in part because of that attitude, the margins they can charge are far higher.
Cloud providers are great for ease and for the number of services they provide, but they are generally an expensive step up.
I suspect you’re doing it wrong, or there’s some niche type of computing you specialize in.
In general purpose IT, looking across an enterprise portfolio of applications, we consistently see customers of Tidal Migrations replatform their applications to cloud and save 95+% in OpEx vs dedicated on-premise hosting.
IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently.
Yes, cloud spend can grow as you open up access to more developers, but that’s why we have a plethora of tools and governance people to help make that manageable. I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill... especially if you’re in a competitive industry & don’t want to get left behind.
> IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently.
I see you've never setup or had to deal with setting up SAP. There are a ton of legacy line of business applications which, won't be close to "cloud" any time in the near future. And are all run on if you're lucky, vm clusters, if you're unlucky on bare iron due to silly crap like per cpu licensing on where it "might" be run. Or if virtualized, a sum of all the physical hardware cpu's.
"Enterprise" software running on premises is... problematic at best. Good luck replatforming something like this. They ask for your arm, leg, first unborn child, and your great grandkids children for the opportunity to run their software.
I'm avoiding talking about the vendors that require up to or over a month to have a contractor on site helping you "integrate and install" their application on your systems. That crap is so far removed from instant and decentralized resource provisioning its like being in another universe. God help you if you need to change anything.
Parent is probably comparing the cost of on prem to running VMs 24x7. Most IT departments are running software they did not write and don’t have the luxury of even getting access to the source code. If these customers want to do cloud they have to do it ‘wrong’
I did not say on-premise for a reason. Most people are not well placed to host on-premise. For starters it tends to require ops staff on site, which in many countries means a minimum of 3 shifts of a minimum of 2 people. On-premise deployments rarely makes sense.
I said dedicated hosting, which implies renting servers from providers like e.g. Hetzner.
But that said, you can replatform to anything from anything and save money in most organizations, because most organizations tends to be very bad at optimizing cost, so this to me says very little.
Most of the systems I've moved over the years were on the other hand carefully architected to be "cloud friendly" to start with. Some of them started out on cloud platforms and were migrated off to save money.
When you on the other hand start comparing the amount of compute and bandwidth you can get for the same prices, it becomes very clear how overpriced they are.
You can easily find bandwidth at less than 1/10th the price of AWS for example, and in fact I've had clients where their bandwidth bill alone at AWS was bigger than the total hosting bill after I'd moved them elsewhere. No amount of architectural change of their systems will change that - at a minimum you need to reduce the data transfer from their AWS setup. Now, you don't need to move everything out of AWS to fix that - often the savings you can achieve by cutting the AWS bandwidth bill can pay for an entire CDN....
Dedicated hosting also tends to give you far more flexibility in the precise hardware configuration to the point where savings can be similarly huge by substantially reducing the number of instances.
> I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill...
Nothing prevents you from spinning up cloud instances when needed. Most dedicated hosting providers today also offers cloud instances, so you can typically do that even with a single provider. In practice, the cost difference between dedicated and cloud typically allows a substantial overprovisioning and still saving money, but if you're prepared to use cloud to handle spikes, you can save even more by using dedicated by going closer to the wire, because you know you can spin up cloud instances to take the peaks.
I've set up and operated systems like that which balanced loads over both colo's, dedicated hosting and cloud instances seamlessly several times.
I used to provide devops consulting services exactly because nobody but large organizations "hires the builders full-time for continued maintenance" for dedicated servers any more than for cloud, because it takes really large systems before you need hardware intervention very often.
Even when working clients that had multiple racks of hardware they owned, I spent on average a couple of days a year dealing with that.
On the contrary, clients with cloud setups "hired the builder" for far more hours on average than those with dedicated setups. For my billable hours it'd have been far more beneficial if more people went to cloud setups.
Hiring the builders full-time is only the equivalent of building a private data center if building a private data center means buying the entire companies of Intel and Supermicro.
I think this will always be the case when looking at the base cost of infrastructure itself (price of a compute/GB of storage in the cloud vs on prem)
However, the cost of cloud pays off so dramatically (in my past experience across companies) when you can see what new things the company can do with IaaS/PaaS and how quickly its done.
I've been at a large bank and a small startup that was forced to use an external datacenter, but the result was the same until we went to AWS/GCP: Infra needs were highly manual and often required purchase orders to scale that took months. As soon as we moved to the cloud and embraced infra as code things started to move 5x faster and we could focus on building software and products, not fighting legacy IT teams
Nothing stops you from doing infra as code on dedicated hosting. All of my setups for the last decade or so have been built around VMs and/or containers with deployment systems where we spun up containers across multiple datacenters on servers we had full control over.
Many dedicated hosting providers now provide APIs for deploying servers, as well, so you can handle even deployment of the underlying servers in an automated way.
Several have combined cloud deployments with deployments to dedicated servers from the same container images, bound together in a single virtual network. E.g. I had client that hosted across AWS, GCP and Hetzner, and migrated services between them zero-downtime. Eventually they moved everything to Hetzner because it cost them about 1/10th of AWS and GCP given their bandwidth use (at the time outbound bandwidth at AWS cost 50x what it cost at Hetzner).
If organizational dysfunction means you're not allowed to order the resources you need, then that is of course a problem, but a very different one.
Maybe not own dc, but colocation could still make sense? You don't need to be more efficient than Azure & Co. They have pretty solid profit margins, even being 30% less efficient should still be cheaper for you. And beyond a few thousand servers, I'm not even sure if scale matters that much (for server virtualization only).
This varies by case - Office365 phishing breakins have been a bad epidemic for a long time now and the anti-phishing measures have not kept up well enough. I think MS still doesn't support any phishing resistant 2FA method there...
FIDO is supported, which is cred phishing resistant - but Oauth permissions phishing obviously can't be prevented if it's all 'legitimate' traffic to a bad app.
An potential problem is that now half of your IT recruits go to reinventing this stuff instead of working on domain problems. There aren't that many it staff per 10k municipal employees.
(Of course this is assuming Azure specific hassles take much less staff time than running your own infra, not a given...)
One point(though I will admit this is the cynical part of my brain speaking) immediately jumps to mind.
If the server goes down, you can blame Microsoft. Even the least technical person can’t blame you for that. If you create your own data center however, if it goes down, you may potentially be on the chopping block if service is interrupted.
Self preservation is a strong motivator, perhaps the strongest in a business environment.
> Self preservation is a strong motivator, perhaps the strongest in a business environment.
And it's the most bullshit one. Outsourcing the risk does not mean avoiding it, it means however putting it out of control.
This is a typical manager bullshit attitude "nobody got fired to buy IBM" that generally lead to adopt unadapted, bloated, overpriced solutions to trivial problems. Just because they do not have the balls to do things properly.
Running out of its responsibilities should be a criteria to get fired when things go badly wrong.
The outsource of the 737 MAX MCAS code to India today is a perfect example of that
Agreed that outsourcing risk does not free you from the responsibilities. However, for many many services you have to rely on others to provide the service better than you could do yourself, as you are limited in time, money and other resources. For running production grade databases at startups, it's much more cost-efficient to run on AWS RDS than to hire a systems engineering team with 24/7 standby. For more trivial systems you might be right and managers might be cowards. However, you have to realize it's a spectrum.
Whether you're running it yourself or you outsource it, things will go wrong at some time. When this happens, and you run it yourself, you also have to explain why it went wrong in a post-mortem or RCA. The problem is that your customers have no point of reference for your explanation (how likely is it that this occurs again?). In my experience, the following message goes down a lot smoother: "This is an Azure/AWS/GCP outage which affected not just us, but 1000s of other companies. We rely on {provider} to continuously learn from their mistakes and improve their service and they've shown this in the past. Here's their post-mortem report about this outage.". Note that not all cloud providers fit this bill.
> However, for many many services you have to rely on others to provide the service better than you could do yourself, as you are limited in time, money and other resources.
I do not criticized the fact of outsourcing when an outsourced service does a better job. This is normal and should be like that.
What I am criticizing however, is outsourcing even when local/home made/OSS solutions are a better and cheaper fit even considering SLA.... just to avoid responsibilities.
This is in my experience common, especially if the management has no technical background, no trust in his team and fear its upper layer.
Yes, surprisingly enough, people look out for their own self interests.
What makes outsourcing hardware different from the dozens of other software as a service vendors that most companies depend on?
Why spend the time developing competency in managing servers if that doesn’t give you a competitive advantage.
But, going with the biggest most stable vendor is usually good. If you bought IBM hardware in the 70s you can still buy new hardware that supports your software. If you went with their competitors - not so much.
> But, going with the biggest most stable vendor is usually good. If you bought IBM hardware in the 70s you can still buy new hardware that supports your software. If you went with their competitors - not so much.
For 20 times the cost of commodities x86 that you should have bought by doing the right thing.
And this 20 times the cost will very likely also please your own competitors because you will yourself be less competitive.
That's how you finish with entire airline industry or bank still running on COBOL with no possibility of migration.
How much will it cost to rewrite everything? What were they suppose to choose in the 70s? Do you think that all of the people still using IBM and running legacy code are dumb or just maybe they did a cost benefit analysis and decided they didn’t need to rewrite everything in Node and React?
Maybe you should ask why some sector that "fear" failures more than anything else (banks, aviations) are still trapped into these systems while everyone else is not.
This is exactly related to what I was saying before.
Bullshit means something is not true. People choosing to go with a vendor to avoid the risk of being blamed for failure, thereby reducing their chances of being fired, is a true phenomenon. And one that works. So how is it bullshit?
My experience with home-rolled solutions suggests there are plenty of hidden costs. Got a new project, and want to spin up some experimental servers? Gotta wade through a bunch of IT guys. Documentation and training around Azure, etc is also going to be better than homegrown alternatives, most likely. Things like that.
It’s hard to put a monetary figure on the frictions costs, but they are there.
You're comparing one extreme (public cloud) to another extreme (sysadmin-managed infrastructure). The alternative, today, is either a private or a hybrid cloud, which have all the advantages of short-circuiting sysadmins that public clouds have.
Public institutions usually have a lot of systems but not a lot of traffic (if we compare to tech companies), so it makes sense for them to put things in the cloud instead of building everything themselves. Also public institutions rarely get top talent and instead do everything via contractors, do you really think it is cheaper to get government contractors to build and run infrastructure instead of letting Microsoft do it?
It would be a tremendous hassle for little to no payoff as they probably don’t have the skill set to actually run a data center, and probably their size is actually not that large, they just run a lot of software I suppose (that’s usually the case in the public administration). It would be rampant malpractice to open your own data center for something like that.
As someone who worked in the very same municipality... one word; bureaucracy.
More specific reasons were. Legal boundaries between ownership and taxpayer money separation. Of cause GDPR is also a big obstacle in joining forces on this scale.
I worked on a project which tried to make a joined venture between several municipalities. I'm not sure if that partnership has ended yet, but overall you could only progress if there were people on both sides collaborating with a "better ask forgiveness, than permission" mindset. As soon as the municipality lawyers or their security officers got involved, all progress stopped immediately.
I worked at a corporate with (at one point) 1891 systems; we had several ways of counting them... Some ways said 44 ( business platforms) But count them we could!
If I was your CIO counting would be my number one mission!
The m not sure why this was downvoted. I think it’s correct and I think we could save a lot of money by collecting this knowledge. I say this, because I’ve witnessed departments where the managers of two teams in the same building had bought two different info-screen display systems. You could literally walk twenty meters and see two different info-displays. Both with hefty expenses, and both completely unnecessary because we have a centralised into system they can use for free, that they just didn’t know about.
Gathering this information and centralising the decision making to make sure things like duplicates don’t happen isn’t on our political agenda however. In fact the political agenda is quite the opposite, favouring even more decentralisation. At least right now. I mean, you say CIO like that’s something we should have, we don’t. We’re 10 techies to run those 300-500 systems, develop our own, navigate the national strategies, implement and manage our national it architecture Rammearkitekturen and support those 10,000 employees. ;)
Perhaps they are part of one team in a larger org, perhaps the org has terrible asset management, perhaps "systems" means "applications" that can be counted different ways and this post wasn't a report to the CIO.
"Stuff like making it easier to hide teams-emails from the company-wide outlook address-book" is not this an implementation thing instead of infrastructure? Say you use LDAP to manage user and permissions etc and it is up to you how you want to set it up. I am curious to find out if you are using some out of box solutions form AZURE for this.
I'm not managing anything near what you, and many people on here, do in your job. But from the perspective of a developer who has worked with several cloud platforms, Azure and Devops make the barrier for entry very easy, and the functionality available keeps growing.
For personal stuff I like using Firebase, but that's just because it's free. I just feel like you get what you pay for with Azure, and even for a small team like mine, someone at MS has always gotten back to us quickly when we need them.
> They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something
Yet amazingly their interfaces and quality is incredibly horrible. Azure like most other things Microsoft makes feels like a half baked and over fitted platform with serious quality issues.
I completely disagree - I find the Azure interface, delightful to work with. And best of all, it's consistent, which can't be said for AWS' UI, which mostly looks very dated and differs from service to service.
Years ago the Azure UI was a bit slow (but still beautiful to look at), but those issues were solved long ago.
Having functionality splattered all through the god-awful, inexplicably horizontally-scrolling interface is not my idea of “delightful”. Parts of it are URL-stateful, other parts aren’t, and there’s no rhyme or reason for the difference.
AWS might look “dated”, but I can’t imagine the mindset that cares about that. If a console is how you’re evaluating your cloud provider you are several steps behind where you need to be. And, great news: in addition to having a really dire console, Azure’s APIs are just no good, particularly if you have to step into the shitshow that is Azure AD (and paying even more for Microsoft Graph, which should just be included) or IAM, and they don’t step to either AWS or GCP to a degree that I just won’t work for an Azure company again. Trying to get anything done in those environments makes me feel stupid and personally bad for having the temerity to try, between inscrutable errors where the Microsoft support is barely English-literate even when you’re paying for it and the aforementioned API barf, and that’s a bad way to live one’s life.
I haven't found functionality to be "splattered" at all. In general, you have a menu on the left for top-level functions, and a button-bar at the top for other things - the layout feels really consistent to me, with the only exception I've noticed being Function Apps.
> inexplicably horizontally-scrolling
At least from a culture with left-right written language, it makes perfect sense to me. Alternatives would be several layers of dialog boxes, or expanding vertically, but I like the Azure portal's way
> AWS might look “dated”, but I can’t imagine the mindset that cares about that
It just feels ugly to work with it. But the bigger issue is the inconsistency - some parts have small variations, others are completely different; it feels very fragmented.
> If a console is how you’re evaluating your cloud provider you are several steps behind where you need to be
Again I'm afraid I disagree. You can work with Azure from a console using cross-platform Powershell Core, or the cross-platform Azure CLI (my preference). There are a host of REST APIs too. I've worked with numerous different Azure services, and I really haven't had any issues here.
> Microsoft support is barely English-literate even when you’re paying for it
On the (free) Microsoft forums, yes, they are complete and utter shit, and I don't know why Microsoft even still hosts them. But I've found the paid-for support at Azure to be very good, and there certainly haven't been any English language issues.
I have had to personally re-document setting up a basic Azure AD connection 4 times in a 18 month period. Each time I go back to it, the UI has changed and key pieces of functionality are just 'elsewhere'.
The EC2 console is old and outdated, its been the same since I started with it like 7 years ago. They are rolling out a new dashboard right now, a complete overhaul.
The difference - I don't have to re-document the EC2 Console for internal training.
The AWS Cli is a simple tool that just keeps working and its documentation is pretty much all you need to look at.
The Powershell interface with AzureAD was absolutely opaque, no documentation, took hours to figure out how to configure claims and when I did, it didn't even work due to hidden limitations that the paid for support could not explain.
I think that your experiences have been quite different to others, certainly mine.
Thanks for replying, because I like knowing I'm not crazy!
A lot of Azure fans like to play "hide the ball" on whether Azure AD "counts" in a lot of ways because it functionally requires Office/Graph and that's not "really" Azure. (Never mind that it doesn't play nice with any IdP, you have to basically pass an act of Congress to let it defer in any meaningful way to Okta...)
We have built a desktop app to manage AWS, and we will be rollin gout some of the main Azure serverless pieces over the next few months. I think you might found our GUI much more user friendly than what is out there now. https://getcommandeer.com
Glad you could find a place to shove in a plug for a piece of software that, if we're being frank, doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd recommend to any user of a cloud environment. GUIs are failure modes for cloud operations. Using APIs first and last is the only way I've found to build a successful cloud team at any scale.
(And I have even less use for highly bloggable serverless stuff than I do baseline-working tools and systems. A "Dynamo tester" is less valuable in aggregate than, say, something that made Cloudmapper easier to deploy.)
You are being frank, I don't think we are. This tool is getting great usage to actually be able to view your cloud data such as S3 and Dynamo in a meaningful way. The testing suite is still in its infancy, but if you are doing serverless development, and want to test out your lambda firing, and see the console logs from a dynamo stream, or an s3 file getting created, it is a great way to do so. Lastly, our tools for IAC are starting to roll out, so it enables you to run your serverless, ansible, or terraform files against any account and region at the click of a button and see the results, rather than having to fiddle with the command line. API's are very important, but enabling your developers to actually see the cloud infrastructure is also equally important. Monolith systems are still popular because people can see the entire system. Serverless and event-driven systems are not easy in this regard, and we are solving the problem right now of great tools being out there, but just trying to get insight into your system is difficult.
The change over from the "old" Azure portal to the new one was a bit painful at the time - but that was a while ago now and the current one is, I think, pretty good .
If your screen isn't big enough the Azure portal scrolls in 4(!) directions, and even worse, it uses horizontal scrolling for navigating between related objects! It's completely impossible to use if your screen isn't huge and the window maximized.
I don’t really like the admin interfaces or CLIs of either AWS or Azure. I’ve had an easier time with Azure than AWS for my personal projects, but maybe that’s just from being used to the Microsoft way.
I’m not sure why they are so much harder to use than the smaller services like heroku or digital ocean. You’d think the big guys would have the best and easiest services, but they sure don’t.
I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too).
No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies.
MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Even when they did start competing (such as with the Surface line) it was done in a way that has not really hurt the partners and has probably helped them by raising the Windows brand in the premium space vis a vis a Mac.
You're mistaken if you think Microsoft doesn't compete directly with its partners.
If anything, they are very sneaky how they do it, every ISV knows and yet still collaborates with them.
SharePoint improvements have been built and incorporated out of the box because/thanks to ISV's, Flow (now PowerAutomate) is a direct inspiration and competition from one of MS historical partners in the SharePoint space called Nintex.
They absolutely compete, they absolutely steal ideas and they do so by getting their partners to willingly show them what they are working on.
For any ISV worth their salt in the MS world, they know this and hopefully they have a plan for when that ultimately happens.
The one thing that Microsoft keeps focusing on is IT related stuff, whether it's software or hardware, it's still in the IT realm 90% of the time.
On the other hand as you pointed out yourself, Amazon does everything and doesn't think twice to enter a new market if it thinks it can aggressively compete and gain a significant market share.
Similarly, both Amazon and Google do not have an engrained culture of working with partners the same way that Microsoft does, they do work with some don't get me wrong, but it's nowhere near what Microsoft does and how it behaves.
It's no surprise that the Co-Sell program at Microsoft is so successful, it's pushed by the Higher ups and all the way down to the field sales people live and breathe it.
Google is trying to do something similar but you can tell (if you work or have worked with both sides) that the google side doesn't care as much as Microsoft.
That's not what they mean, Amazon will compete with companies on non-technical grounds.
You can craft artisanal hand napkins; tomorrow morning 365 Everyday launches their new premium hand napkins with free same-day shipping.
So now every dollar you spend hosting your e-commerce site is directly funding your competitor, which is able to out perform you on the back of insane profits from things like... AWS
This is so true. I've sat at tables in Redmond where they've managed to get their competition to take turns explaining what is and is not working for their products.
I don’t think this is true at all. I see a couple of very obvious reason that large organisations go with Azure.
1) Most large orgs already have Exchange/AD/SharePoint infrastructure. Move that into the cloud and boom, you’re already an Azure customer whether you noticed it or not. Want to take some more IaaS services on? Want a cloud SCM?... Don’t worry about procurement, you’re already a customer.
2) Procurement decisions in large organisations have to satisfy a lot of different stakeholders. A big, reputable vendor, that can solve a huge number of your problems all at once is remarkably attractive to such an organisation. Azure doesn’t have the same features as AWS, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the decision makers don’t care, and the technical teams aren’t likely to use the fancy AWS services anyhow. Forklifting their infrastructure into the cloud was a enough effort to begin with.
This model is very common in enterprise software/services. Symantec and Cisco are other examples of a companies exploiting the same dynamics. Their products are mostly garbage, they go around acquiring other products, and then poorly incorporating them into their portfolio. But they have a large market share to sell new things into, and when they’re talking to their customers they can pitch “just buy all of our products, and that’s like 80% of your compliance worries solved. No need to deal with 10 vendors”.
Microsoft are actively telling their customers (Enterprise) to stop paying for SQL licensing and instead, pay for Azure costings and they've waive their licensing fees.
It's a genius move considering their customers who are already embedded in SQL and Microsoft Server.
Source: we're a heavy MS SQL shop, but are on AWS and are regularly approached by MS with their offers.
I don’t disagree with #1. But #2 is not really valid IMO. In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure.
> In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure. Procurement decisions usually start with AWS.
This perspective isn’t shared by a lot of big companies. For most smaller, younger, technically oriented organisations, this is true. But large enterprises have a complete different set of values, priorities, and ways of doing things. The kind of organisations that are used to running huge Exchange, AD, SharePoint infrastructure often don’t see things that way, and often won’t be able to get much value out of AWS’s feature advantages over Azure anyway.
Of course you’ll find examples of large enterprise that love AWS, or GCP, but having witnessed how a lot of procurement decisions play out in these kinds of organisations, it’s absolutely not surprising to me to see Azure doing well I’m this segment. Especially for organisations that have invested heavily in GPO over the decades, I think a lot of them see AD alone as a killer feature.
> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies.
This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think.
I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.
When Amazon started expanding in retail beyond books, they signed supplier agreements to source inventory, the same way department stores have for decades.
Then Amazon used the retail sales information they gathered from these relationships to structure their Marketplace and Fulfilled by Amazon products, breaking the exclusivity clauses in their existing supplier agreements. Amazon lost lawsuits over this.
Kinda hard to call it a conspiracy theory when Amazon is upfront and out loud about their intention to use customer data to enter new markets whenever they see fit.
You don't have to look that deep to see the example.
Walmart categorically refuses to buy anything that runs on Amazon simply because amazon competes with walmart directly in retail.
having said that, i'm sure there are exceptions and some examples where they do have some stuff they use hosted on aws but that's the exception not the norm.
But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists.
Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.
They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples.
However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.
How many software companies have refused to run Windows because MS competes with them? How many OEMs went all in on Linux when MS started selling Surface computers?
They don't need to look at customer data to get valuable insights. Information on bandwidth, used services, accounts and billing alone will probably get you good insight into non-public information on the business. And Amazon is very well allowed to look at this data.
I can't comment on whether Amazon would access utilize internal information for competitive purposes--I hope they don't--but it's definitely not smart to reveal sensitive product information in discussions. At one point the AWS non-disclosure agreement essentially said that they could use any information they remembered from the conversation to develop products. Unfortunately it came up a couple of companies ago so I don't have the exact text any more. It was surprising to say the least.
I love Amazon's cloud services and use them every day. Even so, you can't lose site of the fact they are a formidable competitor.
Microsoft first got onto my shitlist radar by putting a series of application vendors out of business by making bad knockoffs and leveraging bulk sales. EE&E has its roots in those stories.
With a leopard this old, it’s hard to tell if it has changed its spots or it’s just covered with old dirt. What I do know is if you get bit I don’t want to hear about it. I’ll just laugh and laugh in your face.
I’d say it’s safe to say if MS has the market dominance Amazon does now, they would absolutely be doing the same things. They used to, and would again, despite their “underdog” current PR campaign.
I’m bringing up MS’ very real history of competing within its own ecosystem in a conversation about Amazon doing the same. The big three are all snakes in the grass. Don’t fool yourself about lesser evils.
Microsoft has line-of-business software titles at different market-tiers - so you could be referring to any one of them.
At the low-end, Office 365 now includes web-based invoices, bookings (a la hairdresser appointments), and the like.
Middle-tier would be using something from their former Great Plains titles (now under the Dynamics brand). And at the high-end, that’d be a partner-customised build of MS Dynamics.
Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!
> Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!
They call it Excel.
Which is sadly not as facetious as it sounds. Microsoft's smaller finance tools had to compete not just externally with Intuit's and Peachtree/Sage's products but internally with Excel, and Excel has long held steady somewhere in the second or third most commonly used personal and small business finance tool.
(Source/disclaimer: I was a college intern for what for most of my time there was called Microsoft Small Business Accounting, briefly in my experience there was called Microsoft Office Accounting, and sadly didn't survive as a product during the time it took me to finish my degrees. IMNSHO it was a really good product, and I'm sad it never had the chance it deserved, because it sadly wasn't possible to beat Excel for market penetration, even bundled right next to Excel.)
I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients.
These are all tool makers and basically competitors.
And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.
They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...).
Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history.
Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course.
They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).
IIRC Skype peer-to-peer architecture was a very bad fit for smartphones. For instance text messages in Skype were sent directly from client to client, requiring the two PCs to be up and running at the same time for the communication to happen. It was brilliant for PCs running 10 hours a day, making Skype infrastructure very light.
Now take two iOS smartphones, where Skype will only run when the user is focused on the app. The peer-to-peer link was simply not going to happen. Skype brilliant peer-to-peer architecture simply didn't work anymore. This is why Skype was so late to the party.
Skype went from peer-to-peer to centralised right after Microsoft bought them out - this was before modern smartphones got popular - and to my knowledge the smartphone apps were always centralised.
I'm not sure this is true? I know Azure/MS was way better with sending someone to contact my team (as well as other larger corporations I got to talk to) to figure out a type of partnership with us and determine the level of support we'd need. I don't think Amazon being a competitor is really considered for most cos, either.
I don't think there's some latent distrust of AWS or that people really equate Windows being good means Azure is good - I think it's known Amazon has top tier support, really great reliability and security (like Azure), as well as seemingly the best selection.
GCP for example isn't even in the running for most people even though I'd say Google is probably considered the 'brainiest' tech co.
Source: talked to folks at banks, a handful of startups, and manufacturers who've gone with Azure or AWS when deciding for our biz.
will use AWS data and information against those companies.
Aren't there laws to prevent this? Say I am a big retailer - target, aldi or some company at that scale using AWS. Are you saying Amazon can look into my database/code etc and learn from it and use that knowledge to compete with me? Shouldn't such a thing be illegal, though it would super hard to prove?
I did some strategy work for a global retailer a few years ago and this kept coming up, they even have a policy that SaaS tools they acquire "can't be hosted in AWS".
Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then AWS would change their terms and conditions to allow them to look at/share data 'legally' and the retailer would be so in the hole in terms of investment/technology they couldn't leave/stop them without losing millions. They saw it as risk mitigation.
I think it's _incredibly_ unlikely this would ever happen, but if you combine that with "I don't want to give one of our biggest competitors a cent" it ends up with policies like this
Amazon absolutely looks at whatever data they legally can, because, well, they’re Amazon. Leveraging their market position to the maximum effect is not only what they do, it’s basically guaranteed.
My comment is sitting at -3 and I'm genuinely curious what people find disagreeable about it? Its a maybe cynical position but I think well earned by Amazon?
It’s a conspiracy theory. I doubt very seriously that
Amazon is going to the AWS department to look at competitors data and that’s assuming a company concerned about security is not doing encryption at rest.
They don’t need to look into your data to get valuable information.
Simple stuff that shows up on your bill, such as the amount of data transfer, the sizes of your databases and how they change, etc is enough.
I doubt there are laws that prevent them from doing deep dives into your data but that’s not really the concern. I don’t expect them to do that.
However, when it comes to trying to solve problems, create bespoke apps, as a retailer you will probably be far more comfortable sharing the information about your data with a Microsoft rep than an AWS rep helping you build that bespoke solution.
Potentially yes but when have big tech ever played by the rules though. Its hard to name a single FAANG company that hasn't used terrible/outright illegal practises to get to the top.
The implications of Amazon illegally sniffing data from partners to use for its retail business are apocalyptic.
They are risking 1 Trillion dollars in lawsuits, for what?
I don't think that this is happening in any detail, however, maybe some high level things, such as account size, configuration etc. - that information could be leaked. But some category manager at Amazon.com husting the logs from Nodrstrom on AWS ... I don't think so.
> MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners.
MS claim to fame was by providing tools to a partner and directly competing with their partner.
"In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2."
There's so much more to the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 story than the quote you posted. In fact, there have been books written about it. I'm not sure your quote accurately captures what actually happened over those 5 or so years.
These results are misleading for the same reasons why Microsoft’s market share claims are misleading.
Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” If you look at people truly using their cloud products in terms of things that pair off against AWS offerings the picture looks vastly different.
I’ve worked with many companies recently that are broadly “all in” on AWS but still use O365 and AD as core to their infrastructure. All these surveys and studies count such companies as Azure users but in practice they’re really not. Equally the companies that are still mostly not in the cloud but use O365 and maybe Azure AD for some 3rd party app auth are also counted as Microsoft Cloud users when they’re really not.
MS has established business relationships with large corps to a much greater degree than Amazon. They're already entrenched as nobody's moving away from Windows desktops or Office anytime soon, so the upsell to cloud for them is trivial.
This is the real key. The only notable thing is that Azure was built well enough to play ball against AWS so that the sales team could really work.
For developers it seems that Azure tends to settle at a clear #3 behind AWS/GCP for most. It only makes sense that Microsoft would look to carve out an enterprise niche. They seem to have done a decent job keeping their enterprise stuff fresh, I'm honestly surprised they didn't go the way of IBM/Oracle.
I don't think Azure is behind GCP - from what I've not only read but personally found in their offerings and support teams, Azure and AWS are really comparable for most, and GCP lags behind both.
It's comparable to WorkMail/WorkDocs. Sure, O365 is a little more complete, and, sure, MS has more of their cloud revenue in that area than AWS has in its comparable services, but almost any time you are comparing business in a category where each has multiple services there’ll be differences like that.
That's the key reason. It's the same reason why Microsoft Teams is becoming popular. Because it's included in support packages that businesses already have from using Office 365, or the business already has a relationship with Microsoft.
I would assume it’s due to a lot of the banks running windows and having large AD rollouts means it’s a bit of a gateway to the rest of their cloud services.
You have to use Azure ADFS for things like office 365/teams, so would make sense for people to keep all their eggs in one basket.
Unfortunately, Enterprise deals are more based on sales skills than technology. Companies like Microsoft tend to have multiple ongoing points of contact with their Enterprise customers such as account managers, technical account managers, professional services consultants etc. These points of contact are (hopefully) doing whatever it is the customer wants them to but are also feeding back intel to their (Microsoft's) sales team(s) all sorts of details about what they see and hear from the customer. Microsoft has had a couple of decades (or more) to burrow deep inside customer organizations that Amazon hasn't.
I don't really get this feeling, they implement what some corporate monkey a couple of levels removed from anybody that ever works with Azure wants in out case.
Nothing... I was just making the point that Microsoft has a number of people on the inside at Enterprise customers (which Amazon typically won't have) who help their sales team. This, rather than technical or service offering differences, is likely a significant factor as to why they appear to be more successful at winning contracts against Amazon.
The 'unfortunately' part of my comment was only referring to the fact that technical differences often don't play a significant factor in these deals.
Lock-in is basically a footnote at this point. No one is planning to buy major cloud resources and also planning an exit plan. It was more relevant 5-10 years ago when things were less certain
I don't think people worry about about lock in for either when deciding cloud providers, considering cloud agnostic solutions exist when it is a concern.
I'm a retired programmer and now Uber driver in Silicon Valley so I often talk shop with my riders. I was giving a guy a ride to make a pitch for his product to a Japanese company. He related that his biggest challenge so far was when Walmart licensed his product and they insisted it absolutely could not be hosted on AWS so he had to transfer over to Azure. Obviously Amazon and Walmart are competitors and that might apply in many other situations.
I feel like you should start a YouTube channel. In that area I'm sure you have a lot of interesting conversations with technical people, and entrepreneurs trying to make it
Some passengers use the ride as a confessional or just to vent. I feel it would be wrong to share too much about what they say. It seems like an unwritten rule. I don't have a front/rear view dash cam like a lot of drivers advise because I appreciate these conversations and don't want to inhibit them.
Work for a company that provides software for Walmart among many others, AWS was a no go from day 1. It was between GCP & Azure and Google has a way of not listening to customers so that experiment ended quickly and we're on Azure now.
I think this article is comparing apple and pears to some extend. My company is solely cloud based and are using Azure, AWS and GCP, although 98% of our bespoke infrastructure runs on AWS. We could migrate this infrastructure to GCP, as Google has been catching up with AWS on cloud infrastructure, however, I would dread to migrate it all to Azure. We mostly use Azure for Azure AD (and Office 365), and AWS to build out APIs.
Basically we are using Microsoft for out of the box services and AWS for anything else.
My experience with Azure support has been dreadful, to say the least. Insanely long response times, being bounced from agent to agent, people just misreading the ticket. I really don't want to deal with Azure at this point because I don't trust the support.
Most of our company infra is on AWS, and while they aren't without fault, I can say that every time we needed to talk to a human being from their side, it was quick and on-point.
To chime in with another single data point, my experience with Azure support has actually been pretty good. Tickets take anywhere between 2h and 72h to get a response, which I'll grant is not ideal, but the ticket handlers I've dealt with have all been knowledgeable and helpful.
I work for enterprise-level companies though, so I don't know if support varies for smaller ones depending on spend.
I agree. I work for a company who is a top 100 globally customer of Azure. In case where we have needed support, depending on how severe we define the issue, we are contacted within minutes. Well within the defined contact times stated as when creating support tickets. In several other cases, Microsoft has brought in people from around the world to help workout various issues. However, I don't know if the response times and help offered would be the the same if we were a different scale organization.
I'm just a private individual hosting his blog on Azure, and I've had a stellar experience. I made a post about some gripes I had setting up my website, and a person from the developer outreach program reached out to me and put me in touch with the engineering team directly. Turns out my main complaint (lack of support for managed SSL cert for root domains) was already in the pipeline. They even sent a bunch of MS/Azure gear to my doorstep as a thanks for my feedback.
That's on point, I used the Azure platform for around two weeks to see if it would be worth for our company to move to it and my account got randomly banned, no answer from support except that they don't want to say why. I'd not trust Azure to put anything important on it based on my past experience.
I work in a SaaS company, and we run "a lot of Azure". We open around a dozen tickets annually. The response is a mixed bag. The response times are pretty good, but it depends what will you get as a response. Sometimes you get asked a bunch of irrelevant questions just to get a simple answer (which actually helps). Sometimes you just can't get them on the same page. There are support engineers that just do not know what are you talking about. Typical example: snapshots. It took me once like 10 emails to clarify that I'm having issues with managed disk snapshots, not with blob snapshots. At the end I'm not even sure he was still aware what am I asking, the guy was completely oblivious. He finally sent me some screenshot of his own control panel (where he sees much more info than the user does), to show me something, where I actually noticed something else that unstuck me. But if he didn't we would still be sending mails back and forward.
Not OP but, your global outages freak me out. I moved companies close to a year ago and with that platforms that I develop on (from Azure to AWS). Your global outages of which I can't engineer around at all don't give me faith in your platform.
Whereas AWS, sure, service outages occur but they're often region specific which I can build around.
Not OP, but in a similar boat. Basically, having everything in one cloud provider's hardware is a risk to uptime guarantees is the biggest reason. There are other, less good reasons too, but that is the one that can't be changed by adding features to Azure (or any other).
AWS has better open source managed solutions than Azure and GCP right now, but Azure also has things like a billing console that can integrate with AWS - which is a great feature albeit not being so powerful yet.
Azure is still catching up in many areas. For example low-priority VMs is a recent addition to Azure, whereas AWS has had these instances since 2009. I also find the Azure interface really clunky compared to AWS and I am definitely not a fan of the AWS console either.
Azure and GCP had either comparable or worse UIs for a lot of services compared to AWS, but region specific UIs were a notable unintuitive design compared to others.
Very different, at least between Azure and AWS. The Azure one is very "manual", you must do a bunch of operations separately which are abstracted as a one-click-thing in the portal. Also, when working through the API, you get a sense of how unreliable some processes are. Of course you should have circuit breakers, failovers, rollbacks and stuff. But with Azure API, they are a MUST.
We also work with the GCP API and it's somewhat closer to Azure, AFAIK (haven't worked with it directly).
The coup at AWS was programmable infrastructure. It's building blocks that fit together in the way that software engineers know and love: APIs. Sure there's a sales bro for the pointy haired boss and a console for the IT technician, but the thing is the API. It's going to be used primarily at engineering-driven companies, where "holy shit this is cool" is actually a factor in the decision. Most of those will be startups that flare out, but some will grow up to be tech companies that run very large, very locked-in, very expensive workloads. But an IT manager's only real interest in AWS is trend-following.
Microsoft thrives in a different world. IT managers are dealing with lots of different vendors (MS, VMWare, Dell, local HVAC and security contractors) to run their Windows Server workloads. It's pretty attractive to instead just pay Microsoft. But the nature of the workloads will not change, at least in the short term. It's still about technicians clicking in GUI consoles. I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero. Every business with a traditional IT department will end up with an Azure account, and the Fortune 500 is no exception. But the size of those workloads will scale with the number of enterprise apps they're running (each one its own VM). That won't necessarily grow with those businesses. It may even decline, as shrink-wrapped software for Windows Server is displaced by SaaS companies running on AWS.
> I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero.
I can't speak for anyone else, but we make sure extensive use of the Azure API, both via the 'az' command line tool and through terraform. From what I've heard, read, and had conference calls about, Microsoft treats the API as a first-class citizen.
Same here. Not to derail OP's point on how the use cases are different, but us developers are all trained on using APIs with our cloud backends by now. Obviously Azure produced something of similar quality to the awscli.
It provides roughly thee same APIs, but the cultural context it sits in is different. The APIs are there for parity with AWS, not as the key value proposition.
It is true, many of the companies I have worked for the last few years is using Azure and only the UI. No one uses the API/SDK. They hire devops cloud consultants to click on the UI, not to use the API to tie everything together.
The equivalent of “AWS Consultants” who are just a bunch of old school netops people who passed one multiple choice certification. All they can do is duplicate an on prem infrastructure on AWS doing a lift and shift and costing their client more for the privilege.
That doesn’t mean the APIs aren’t first class citizens.
If you go watch Channel 9 (Official MS) training videos, outside of the let’s get setup videos, the devs and presenters are almost always using the APIs to interact with Azure either through Powershell or Visual Studio.
The twist is a lot big companies(Global 2000) are the least cloud savvy, being dragged kicking and screaming out of their data centers.
They don't even know what they don't know, and when Azure shows up offering AD which they already use to manage their juggernaut of a domain it feels like home. They haven't even considered lock in yet.
The teams that end up managing Azure infrastructure come from a more IT/Networking background. Azure supported UDP load balancing before AWS, and has more intuitive and easier to build internal load balancers.
AWS tends to appeal to more cloud native companies that just want to build and tend to be younger. Azure appeals to the familiarity and ease of transition for the 20 year IT squad that is trying to stay relevant.
Transition from premises to hybrid or cloud-only is difficult and costly for big com. Additionally when they're already attached to MS Exchange and AD, Azure is logical decision. UDP loadbalacing is like icing on the cake.
The bank I'm working for recently decided to switch to Azure despite the vast majority of developers preferring AWS. From what I've heard, it's probably related to the company switching to Office 365. Sounds to me like Microsoft is leveraging its dominance in one market to also dominate another market.
As a hobby I thoroughly enjoy, I help my father’s company catch up with the 2020’s through creation of various online services for their products (which are in the agricultural tech sector).
They already use Microsoft stacks internally so Azure was a natural extension.
The combination of C#, Visual Studio and Azure Functions to create serverless cloud systems (together with Azure SQL Server, Azure Redis, Azure IoT and more) is mind blowingly, unreasonably effective.
Azure Data Studio is also a pleasure to work with and such a fresh take in terms of UX.
I simply enjoy every minute of working in that environment with those tools. I don’t have experience with GCP or AWS, but I can’t see how they provide something that debuggable and intuitive without the Visual Studio core.
Another benefit - perhaps wholly psychological and imagined - is that I know Microsoft understands and lives on enterprise customers. Azure is not a side business like AWS (to e-commerce) or GCP (to advertising) is.
It’s really not about IDE with these cloud environments, but production workloads.
The difference with aws is that it’s actually used to run Amazon’s core business and so it’s super stable for production workloads (or at least has enough of workarounds to get it to a very stable environment).
Azure is more of a prototype environment, and gcp is something in between.
I think Azure is so relatively popular because Microsoft is the only consultant company who owns a cloud.
Generally speaking, for any piece of software -- cloud infrastructure, (managed) database, CRM system, operating system, office suite -- Microsoft has it and has consultants you can hire to help implement it in your company.
That's why Microsoft is doing well, as car as I can tell.
Two other reasons:
1) They have the consultants and more than likely an existing business relationship for Windows, Exchange, etc.
2) They are not likely to compete with you - Amazon is trying to compete with everyone and nobody wants to fund their own demise.
They'll need to fix their IAM features. Especially cross account role based access management. Most of their other offerings are pretty close to the competition though.
Where does GCP stand in all this? Are they still an alternative or back-up cloud?
I believe GCP is trying hard to match AWS and Azure in terms of capabilities but not sure how GCP handles non-technical aspects.
It's quite possible this data correlates with data about popularity of enterprise database technologies.
Microsoft SQL Server/Active Directory "kill it" in ye olde enterprise settings - and for good reasons too. For example, their software has been affordable for smaller, evolving departments (I know they were cheapest about a decade ago among the proprietary DBMS stacks before they revised SQL Server licence fees post 2008R2 etc), but most importantly they have the most cohesive development, deployment and cloud integration tools for the typical enterprise. Visual Studio and SQL Server tooling have let veteran Microsoft users experience the same tools for Azure as though nothing has changed! This was a killer move from Satya Nadela's team.
Balmer's "Developers, developers, developers ... " strategy is still paying dividends for this company.
I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac.
> I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac.
I'd love to hear what mac-based GPU cloud computing system you are using.
Apple badly needs a cloud compute system. If you ever need to do a lot of iOS/Xcode builds (say, a build server for mobile apps at a large company) you'll find that it's just about impossible to get a good, scalable system from Apple.
Apple don't allow VMs (not in a scalable way anyway) so every instance needs to run on its own Apple hardware. This led to us having to buy huge numbers of "trashcan" macs to do our builds - they didn't even have a good rackmount solution for high end mac-based servers.
FWIW, the process of spinning up an Ubuntu Data Science Virtual Machine on a GPU resource type has gone without a hitch over here. Last I checked it's only available in some areas, though, so YMMV.
Yeah not surprising, MS is pushing azure as hard as it can, to the point of given heavy office 365 discounts so on the short term it doesn't make business sense to move out of azure anymore.
Although claiming companies should build their applications on azure infrastructure because they already use office 365 is an argument that will only be bought by non technical boards. They get the cloud they deserve!
Pears to apples absolutely. It is an interesting observation, but for most of cases, which I am aware of, big companies are using Office365 and, probably, Dynamics, which automatically makes them the Azure customer and ticks the "Migrate to cloud" box at IT presentations to the boards. AWS, on the other hand, is being used primarily for either proprietary AWS technology, or just simple EC2s, which are very slow to be moved over to the clouds by the big companies.
Yet I have the feeling GCP is the one which has been improving the most the quality of its offering.
It's interesting to monitor what's happening with data-warehouses for instance.
It almost feels AWS is having its "Kodak moment" with Redshift: a very remunerative but old technology in which they are deeply invested in.
It prevents them to put more effort behind solutions that decouple compute from storage (see Athena) and as a result they are offering a subpar competitor to BigQuery.
As in not phasing out products? That's more of a problem with Google than GCP itself.
GCP has its problems (heard bad things about CloudSQL support for Postgres), but it does seem to be willing to innovate when it sees an opportunity for it.
My point is about AWS being reluctant to embrace new technologies that could damage the ones it's deeply invested in.
See Athena vs Redshift or Kubernetes vs ECS (the latter having much better support). That's what I meant by "Kodak moment".
It's almost a crime that Azure is winning against GCP, like an old jalopy out-selling a Tesla. Yet this article touches upon why, with inferior tech, Microsoft is killing it. Good on them for their business relationship management.
Maybe AD, but honestly it feels more due to strong marketing and relationships with enterprise companies.
My three most recent projects were all Azure based, no one could justify why Azure other than "that's what the customer wants".
Do you really understand your customers' needs? Because they probably have TONS of really good reasons why they would like to remain with MS instead of migrating their entire infrastructure to AWS.
In my experience yes. between 2012 and 2015 i did an on prem to office 365 migration every couple of weeks on average working for an MSP.
The pitch is just so insanely easy when speaking to management/finance types. You can remove so much financial ambiguity which comes with maintaining servers or expanding a business.
Every Finance director i spoke with loves being able to model costs years in advance.
Could also be due to the fact that Amazon might become a competitor in the future. Take the banking/finance sector, it might not expect competition from Microsoft, while Amazon could decide to enter the market, having a much more 'entrepreneurial' spirit.
Azure sales are very good at offering big discounts and incentives for getting people to migrate, I have seen many enterprises suddenly switch to azure because of big discounts but have never seen any enterprise suddenly switch to aws or gcp.
Microsoft doesn't sell Azure on its technical capabilities or reliability or quality of documentation.
MS sells Azure by leveraging its position within existing enterprise clients to shill it to decision makers, offering discounts that actually don't mean anything once the total costs of projects are tallied up, and misleading decision makers about the proliferation of Azure by budling O365 and AAD and other bullshit into their sales figures.
The standard Azure sale to enterprise is entirely shut off to engineers or any technical decision makers.
I've only used Azure so far. I can see why a big company would choose Azure. Although as we move further into the tech era, we're going to see a decline in the size of companies. Internet services will continue to make it easier for small companies to offload pieces of work to other small companies. They'll get good quality results for reasonable costs. Then soon, these small companies are producing big company results, shaving off big company profits. Welcome in the hunter gather era of computation. Bottom line, if Azure stays around, it's just going to become what AWS already is.
Non tech centric people go with options which are cheap and just work -> MS products. You buy windows, you buy 365 you buy Azure , makes things cheaper. IT product centric companies focus on quality which you get on AWS.
No doubt most banks would just go with MS products but fintech banks are with AWS - n26, revolut, transferwise (not a bank though).
However it's the best not to rely on any single provider and keep your eggs in different basket. But AWS is the first choice when you think about quality. MS the first when you think about cost cutting.
> Non tech centric people go with options which are cheap and just work -> MS products. You buy windows, you buy 365 you buy Azure , makes things cheaper.
This is quite far from the truth as while they do work they are not cheap. G-Suite is (or used to be when I last checked) significantly cheaper than office 365, but everybody wants excel so ....
Firstly let me say that AWS and Azure are in many ways equivalent - there’s nothing you could build in one you couldn’t build in the other.
But from the POV of an enterprise AWS requires you to have serious full-time AWS gurus in-house or rely on expensive external consultants. You probably need a whole team just for cost optimisation. Whereas most of what you actually want in Azure can probably be done by your existing Windows guys that you have anyway, its layered services are much more mature and aligned with typical enterprise use cases, especially if you have existing workloads you want to migrate. AWS maybe has the edge for a pure greenfield play but those are rare in the big corporate space.
Google cloud is nowhere, they are not a player in this space at all.
Ex-MS employee, Azure consultant here. I don't have any experience with AWS or GCP other than some very trivial, getting started stuff. But I really don't think what you say is true. While most of the stuff in Azure has a very familiar feel and intuitive interface (either on the UI or the API level) if you are coming from a MS background, there are still glaring exceptions and you certainly need experienced/certified people to build something that's ready for serious production usage. I agree though that Azure has a very nice and happy path for most enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud stories.
Yes you always need skilled people but the path from on-prem Windows guy to Azure guy is much shorter and easier than the path from say on-prem Red Hat guy to AWS guy.
I don’t think so. If you’re just spinning up a Windows VM then yes, your Windows guy can take it from there. But that’s not cloud computing. That’s just a “server”. To really use Azure with secured applications using databases, logging, storage, auto-scaling, ...
I don’t see how being a Windows guy makes Azure easier to grasp. It’s mostly not even Windows you’re interacting with.
I don’t see how being a Windows guy makes Azure easier to grasp. It’s mostly not even Windows you’re interacting with.
Because you’re already familiar with the Microsoft ecosystem and they have invested a lot in making it a smooth transition. If you know C# or Powershell or use Visual Studio and watch Channel 9 and know your way around MSDN etc etc etc it’s all the same. Whereas AWS is a cold start and uphill in comparison.
Microsoft has been one of our better partners in all of this. They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something. We have a direct line to Seattle, and parts of what we ring up at tickets have made it into the global 365 infrastructure. Stuff like making it easier to hide teams-emails from the company-wide outlook address-book.
More than that though, our tech-team is trained and certified in Microsoft technologies. The combination of in-house staff and a 30+ year long good business relationship makes Azure such an obvious choice for cloud. Some of the co-municipal systems we buy through a joint-owned organisation called KOMBIT operate in AWS (support and operations is handled by private sector companies), and it’s not like we’re religious about not using AWS or something other, but we’d need to build a relationship and retrain staff to do so.