Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.
Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage startups.
That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode and Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills to free services is a no-brainer.
EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.
EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their platform: http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/
Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients
unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :)
And the shameless plug:
Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If any one is in need of system administration, integration, performance analysis, optimization, configuration management and devops like services I'm here to help.
As someone who just helped migrate a client to exchange online, do not get it. It's shockingly awful.
They have two separate admin interfaces, neither of which you can do everything in so you have to break out powershell to finish off the job. The client had to lean heavily on me to help, something other clients have never had to do with gmail.
I like a lot of MS products, but from my brief exposure, exchange is a complete mess of WTFs. And annoyingly, googling doesn't often bring up pertinent answers and their help is pathetic.
O365 is good for existing corporate customers who use inhouse exchange servers. Thats what microsoft shops are doing these days: migrate from inhouse exchange to O365.
Otherwise, I don't see why small shops wanna move away from gmail to O365.
"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.
Sorry, should have clarified. Most early stage startups don't do DevOps or sysadmin well. Imagine the typical YC startup where its just 2-3 developers who are comfortable with the command line, but not comfortable with Chef, Puppet, etc. Having to plan a migration is not fun or productive for a set of developers because it means (1) less time for them to focus on mobile/web development (2) learning to do sysadmin when it's out of their comfort zone.
AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.
note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.
Actually Microsoft has not one but two Platform-as-a-Service offerings:
- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)
- Azure Websites (PaaS light)
Unfortunately, when I last looked at it two months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.
First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).
Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.
If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings.
Wild... didn't know that. I've been doing mostly node with some C# for the past 3 years... just double checked MS WebMatrix and nope, doesn't look like Ruby is in the box...
Sure, but in practice if you have any complexity in your stack then it's going to be a PITA to from Azure to AWS (or vice-versa).
If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc...
I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming so wedded to that Azure systems that the opportunity cost of switching to AWS is too high.
I've found this to be very untrue - digital ocean offers very poor performance per $ compared to linode in my experience. Linode don't have a $5/month option but if you pay $10/month or more you will get a lot better performance at Linode
Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not.
In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.
I do have some third-hand insider information that implies that Linode's management/billing/etc systems are old and buggy, which colors my judgement.
Regardless, I don't see how you can judge someone who's had at least two breaches more competent than someone who had zero. In all probability, DO didn't have any breaches precisely because they are more competent.
This is probably a good time to promote my FOSS, PuPHPet [0], an online GUI for creating your own customized VM that you can deploy locally, to AWS/DO/Linode, and soon Azure.
Honestly, O365 is very poorly designed and operated product - I've seen countless organisations either implement it from scratch or migrate to it and they've had more problems than they can afford - the amount of undocumented downtime over the last year has be absolutely unbelievable - If i told you how many clients have said they have not weekly - but daily problems you wouldn't believe me.
Bundle that with cleaverly designed vendor lockin and General poor UX and you've got yourself a real headache.
That's a great idea! I work at Cloud 66 (http://www.cloud66.com) and we let you build your own Heroku on Azure and benefit from this $500k and Heroku-like simplicity. You can also migrate between cloud providers (including Azure and the ones mentioned) if needed.
We think this is a great way for startups to use the tons of cloud credits they get, instead of letting them go to waste or spending precious time on setting up infrastructure.
We have a bunch of Microsofties at YC today, but reach out to Steve or me directly at (founders@microsoft.com) if you're a Winter 2015 batch company and for some reason not at YC today.
It's also worth pointing out that our $60k offer for YC companies is still around, if you're in one of the older batches.
Not a YC company, but we'd love to buy you and Scott coffee or lunch if you're free tomorrow. We (Fanout) received a boat-load of Azure credits that haven't been used, but with all of the cool new Microsoft OSS developments recently we think it'd be great to start working on Azure. My twitter/phone# is the same as my HN handle.
Microsoft in the last 1-2 years is like a new scrappy competitor who lost market share on hubris. They are now willing to work how developers like to work not forcing them into the corral. Azure is the new OS at Microsoft, lock in higher up the stack but actually not as lock-in as before.
Microsoft went back to developer focus over biz/marketing focus and it is working like it always has.
Can you give explanations on what actually makes you think that way?
=> As a Microsoft employee, i totally disagree. I would even go as far as guessing that you either are talking about something you don't know, or are just one of those evangelists that are paid to write such comments everywhere on the web.
Microsoft is a desperately consumer/business-oriented company, with no interest in technology whatsoever. If you don't get that, then you haven't been paying attention
So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:
- Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
- Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it.
I can't help but think that Microsoft has had quite a few acquisitions as of late, though. Minecraft (gaming), Acompli (mobile email), Sunrise (mobile calendar), and probably others.
Just FYI - the $60k/year Azure offer is technically available for any startup just willing to ask nicely (not limited to just incubators). My company, http://trippeo.com just qualified for it last month (we get $5k/mo free hosting).
softlayer is truly awesome. We at RedCarpet have been using them from India and the experience has been awesome. They have features like Global IP, which is pretty close to what AWS Elastic IP does. They also have an API that is pretty well integrated with Chef and Python-Fog.
I just emailed a developer evangelist at Microsoft - tons of them around and more than willing to help startups, especially new ones with under $1M in funding.
Is there a list for these? I have seriously had problems trying to redeem any offers from Microsoft / Bizspark. I run a sports science startup and would love to look into this.
Hi, great tip. Just fyi - your website is really hard on GPU. I am on Chrome and after keeping it some time in a tab it started to be so brutal on GPU that I had to shut down as my browser was unusable... Maybe possible memory leak?
Only active plugin I have is uBlock.
Hmm thanks for that. Are you by any chance on a chromebook using Chrome? We noticed this issue with chromebooks... but for Macs and Windows using chrome, it seems to be fine (at least from our tests). Can you shoot me an email at adarsh[at]trippeo?
Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.
Azure has been doing better. I've been using them for about 15 months now and the quality, uptime, speed, etc have all steadily improved. I haven't had an issue that was Azure's fault in quite some time now.
You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use than AWS, for example.
It was a multi-region, multi-hour outage on Nov 18. To my knowledge AWS has not experienced a multi-region outage. That said, they are learning from these events and improving stability.
I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net.
I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well.
Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud. While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything critical.
I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the situation, I hope you will understand why. It makes me think that you have not thought carefully about what you are saying here.
If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.
Not sure what you mean by where my info went wrong, but my friend worked at a MS datacenter a few years ago, so I don't know what has changed. At the time, almost all of the techs working at the DC were contractors, not MSFT employees. They were severely understaffed and getting cut back constantly. There were a few different companies doing the contracting as well, and all of them were under the threat of losing out to a lower bid company. The competent techs were getting outnumbered by incompetent techs. That and the fact that MS couldn't even renew basic registrations and certificates didn't surprise me with my poor experience with Azure.
Again, this was a couple of years ago. Also, I attended an event that MS held to show off Azure, and a large percentage of participants couldn't spin up an instance within 10 minutes, some of them didn't even start up. The MS people running the event had a direct line to some techs in the datacenter, but they still couldn't solve the problems. I talked with some MS partners/users who told me that Azure was terrible in their experience and even some MS execs admitted as much in private conversation. It sounds like Azure has improved since then, but I really have to wonder how much improvement has occured.
I take your points to be the following. Correct me if I'm wrong. (1) Morale is low among our DC technicians, (2) many of the tech vendors are incompetent, (3) one time hotmail forgot to renew a cert, (4) you had a bad experience one time with an Azure demo.
Honestly, aceperry, I'm not seeing where any of this reflects poorly on our ability to operate x million machines, and the fact that you present it as evidence that we are not "competent" at provision our cluster effectively for our customers is worrying. I am starting to wonder if you know anything at all about the trade, because literally nothing here is relevant to your case. Even the hearsay you have about the DC vendors being incompetent is not really useful here, because it does not impact our operational capacity at all.
What am I missing in your statement that should cause me to worry?
They actually did a walkthrough of one of their DC's on video a while ago...it looked fairly impressive and well put together to me, but I've never been in anything but a small Co-Lo, so I'm not really sure what to look for.
You are right - the big outage happened in November. Feels like yesterday (it was a stressful day for me). AWS outages have been more limited in scope/geo, still took some sophisticated users of AWS offline (Netflix, Instagram come to mind).
Glad I'm not alone. Trying to use my account during my Azure trial period resulted in getting 500 errors. I gave up and had a DO droplet going in like 30 seconds instead.
It's much better now. Check out the new Ivy Bridge/Haswell, SSD backed D and G series VMs. They are a vast improvement over the old AMD/magnetic backed A series.
I was accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program last year so I get $150/month free Azure credit. Azure is very nice to use. So far, I have just been using Ubuntu Linux VPS instances (similar to AWS EC2) and everything works similarly to other providers I use like AWS, IBM BlueMix, Digital Ocean, and Google's cloud services. Really, these are all very good services, so use the one you can get for free or at a low cost.
I used to be pretty much down on Microsoft, but now they are doing a lot of stuff right in my opinion: providing solid Linux support on Azure and providing an unbelievably good deal on the family edition of Office365. It seems like they are buying themselves into the cloud market, but with all of their cash on hand, that seems like a good strategy!
Anyway, if you have a business idea you want to try then look into BizSpark.
Free stuff is great but I wonder if there'll be any subtle nudges to use this for the next badges. "Your hosting estimates seem high, why don't you just use Azure"? "Well we considered it but long term we'd rather use another hoster for reasons X,Y,Z"..."Well yeah but 500k more runway is a lot."
I'm probably worried over nothing since YC investors are smart and tend to leave tech choices to the founders but I'd like to hear some feedback on this from people that pitch in the future.
Either way Microsoft seems to make pretty good decisions lately (from my humble POV). Seems like they are essentially playing the same power law as (other) investors, hoping that the next XXX will be run on Azure.
On a somewhat realted note...I worked in IT in Africa for a bit and it was pretty strange how locked into Microsoft server stuff they (Africa is big but it was true for all countires I had work relations in) are. I naively assumed that Linux/BSD would be more wide spread there but my very subjective conclusion is that MSxx-certificates are really widespread there and piracy is kind of tolerated so it's easy to learn. It was a little bit harder than expected to find Linux admins for example. I've always wondered if this was active corporate policy or just an "accident".
Azure has been great for our start-up (http://iactionable.com). We've been with them for over 4 years. There have been ups and downs but we're fans of C#/.NET and it was a great fit for our team. We store and crunch a lot of real-time data with ServiceBus Queues and SQL Server. It has scaled well so far. We also went through the BizSpark program which REALLY helped jump start things.
We were invited up to Redmond in the past to meet with teams from various Azure services and participate in private previews of some cool features. They're really working hard to make a great platform.
Satya, please don't have them mess things up with the next portal release! The whole sideways scrolling gives me a headache.
In the BizSpark Plus days, your company would receive $60K of hosting but could only use it to pay 100% of your bill in the first year of BS+. In the second year, you could use it to pay 50% and then in the third year you were paying full price for Azure. It was a pretty good deal, but if you are already spending $30-60K (or $250-$500 K) on infra in your first year or two, you're in a select breed of companies.
I hope all startups are made aware of Microsoft BizSpark. You get a pretty spectacular line up of freebies. And freebies that stay free even after you graduate. Free copes of Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Office, etc. It's damn near everything. A++++ would recommend.
Note: for anyone interested in this program, make sure you have the following before applying (in addition to a well-written proposal for your business)
1.) A working website, at least a landing page explaining your product/idea.
2.) An email address @ the same domain as the aforementioned website
If you have those two things you have a pretty solid shot at getting approved.
That is some serious credit... I should share that having access to Azure MFA (formerly PhoneFactor) alone has been worth the R&D time. Their support, although a little tough to nail down 1-on-1 time with, is very friendly. I chose that word carefully, it's not super professional, but I actually had a good time going through a migration with them, for what's it's worth.
If Microsoft truly wants to transform they need to launch an intensive secret project. Let's call it "Project Redmond". The goal of the project would be to develop "Quantum", the next Microsoft OS. Quantum aligns MS with Linux by effectively building Windows on top of Linux as well as all the tools necessary to, as automatically as possible, migrate existing Windows code into Quantum.
With a move like this Microsoft becomes THE Linux company as the millions of non-tech and tech businesses who are Windows based migrate to Quantum over time. They could make the underlying souped-up Linux OS FOSS and sell the Quantum OS layer (or whatever works).
I am thinking in terms of the next 50 years, not 5. In the long term I just don't see how the existing MS model can prevail. A move like this Quantum OS concept would instantly align them with web development and provide a solid alternative to Apple on developers desktops and perhaps even Ubuntu at the server level.
Considering MS's long track record of offering discounts and freebies to startup (in the form of BizSpark and many other programmes), we can happily assume Redmond's considerable troupe of lawyers has anticipated that loophole.
They'll recoup the value of the entire thing, with extra profit, if even just one of the YC startups using it has explosive growth. It's a smart investment. Even without the money, it's a great technology showcase. YC now gets to give its startups the Oscars giftbag treatment. :)
In a way, it's like investing in YC startups then. Give a sizable but not unbearably so amount of money to a large set, hope that statistically these companies have a chance to experience hockey stick growth, and have that one black swan cover all your costs across the whole group.
3 years of technical investment is pretty much enough to stop you leaving unless something goes very wrong. This $500k is a small price to pay for a client who goes on to be the next AirBNB or Dropbox. Even just the prestige of having a company like that to draw on for testimonials would justify the spend.
However...
For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of those will burn through $500k in no time compared to the equivalent on a more open platform.
Whether or not to use Azure is certainly NOT obvious.
I have made this comment before but I think that it bears repeating: Azure has good Linux support. I find little difference running Ubuntu VPS's on Azure that on other good platforms like AWS, Google, BlueMix, etc.
Does the Linux image run virtualized over an MS kernel? I often laugh running MS code in a VM over __nix because when the Guest crashed, my host OS is still running. I cant imagine running a __nix Guest over a MS Host though.
I dont have much experience with MS servers, as I like to get things done, but how are they when it comes to stability?
How is this any different than their previous "free" access to server products for a few years? The idea being build it at low cost, then flip the company?
Azure also offers a small business "BizSpark" program. http://www.devfactor.net is hosted on Azure thanks to BizSpark, where it gets $150/mo for three years. It was enough to handle the front page of Reddit.
This is pretty cool but I'd still prefer to use Google Apps and Gmail. The MS office web apps are pretty poor in comparison and unless you're a dedicated windows shop or have a lot of ex-finance people there is little benefit to the office suite.
True if you're in the 1% of users who need features that go beyond what Google Apps does and prefer to manually deal with the versioning mess using some ad-hoc convention.
This is huge for Microsoft, because this is how Azure is finally starting to get accepted by the startup/VC community. They never had difficulty selling Azure to the enterprise, but for startups - AWS had always been the default choice.
Wow amazing, I am not the biggest Microsoft fan & I would never have what it takes to be part of a YC startup, yet just reading this got me all excited. This is truly great for those startups that qualify!
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.
I probably shouldn't have used such a initiative word like "will". That said scaling out PaaS compared to scaling out IaaS, specifically on Azure, is almost guaranteed to be less expensive from an infrastructure standpoint. Less actual VM's to manage also translates into less overhead from maintenance activities.
At the very least it will be interesting to see if more people adopt the Azure Websites PaaS offering. I know that right now most people dip their toes into Azure with IaaS because its historically more comfortable for them.
Azure had 39.77 hours of downtime, whilst Rack space had 7.52 and the winner (of the selected cloud providers was AWS with 2.41 hours.
I'm not sure how those figures were calculated though. These cloud providers are multifaceted. I'm not sure which parts if each's services were analysed.
Also, it is worth considering that one serious problem can distort these averages. AWS has a much more stable long term history.
In my opinion the competition is a good thing and Microsoft seem happy to support whatever framework or OS you want. Their node.js support is supposed to be pretty good.
The marketplace also enables you to get things like MongoDb clusters, etc which is competition for SQL Server. They seem to be interested in supporting customer interests rather than the old fashioned MS tech or die philosophy from back in the day.
Those figures are a combination of downtime across all regions globally. So it doesn't mean that any individual servers were down. The largest downtime was in Europe, with had 5.97 hours last year.
Factors for downtime were an update bug in November and weather. The bug is very unlikely to happen again. Outages due to weather really don't tell you much at all other than that they were unlucky. Overall, I would say the downtime numbers are not very useful.
This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.
Ms has a terrible records of abandoning Ms-related tech followers by technology renewal: vb->.net，wp7 !-> wp8.
To many developers,ms is irrelevant.
And after using onedrive/Office365 for a long time, the experience is poor:sometimes even on a wp/lumia,bugs like file
loss and page broken is usual。
This would be against the spirit of the offer, but I wonder if there is any easy way to arbitrage that credit into cold hard cash with low effort.
E.g., boot up a bitcoin mining cluster (though this particular idea would obviously yield low return since it would be running on off the shelf hardware)
Many startups in YC actually launch during the 3 months they are here. Being successful before entering YC is only true for a small percentage of the companies.
There is no prerequisite to have a "stable tech infrastructure" -- shoot, there's no prerequisite to even have an actual product! -- for admission to YC. pg has made it pretty clear that YC selects founders, not necessarily ideas.
And for those that have a proof-of-concept running on some other provider(s) (AWS/Rackspace/Google), it would be a huge boon to be able to migrate and scale using Azure and the $500k credit.
If what you have is a couple of web servers and a couple of database servers, I would take the one weekend off to learn Azure and write up scripts to migrate data and servers and other configuration.
Would definitely be harder if you have a more complex infrastructure - but in most cases entirely worth it.
I wondered why my company after 18 months of effort to get going on AWS with certain apps has had a shift to get on Azure 'without compromise' in 2 months.
I doubt these sort of offers are only going to start ups, Microsoft is taking on web services hard core.
This is something we may start to see. I think they are aggressively targeting AWS customers with lower pricing and getting companies (including my employer) to begin the move to Azure.
In case anyone here missed this, Microsoft gives a bunch of free stuff (including an MSDN subscription) to any new startup through their BizSpark program: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark
I have had no end of problems getting signed up for this for my startup. It was a month of back and forth arguing then I eventually gave up and paid $200/month on Digital Ocean and stuck with Linux. Very frustrating. Anyone to talk to there that can help outside of generic customer support?
I wonder if Azure competitors will increase their free offerings to YC companies as a result of this.
The PaaS front is of particular interest. For example, it's not immediately evident that Heroku even offers anything similar, beyond a small free tier available to anyone.
Reach out to me if you need help with the PaaS side of things for Azure. I am currently a DevOps lead at my company and we deploy approximately 35+ micro-services to Azure about a few hundred times a day. I'd love to talk!
I'm not sure how Azure intends to compete in this space. I've used Amazon, Rackspace, Google Cloud, Azure, and a bunch more.
Professionally, for simplicity I'd choose Rackspace or Google. For Scalability and price I'd choose Amazon. For personal projects I love Digital Ocean.
I dislike Azure's control panel and VM setup, and find their VMs slow. I'd only really consider them if I planned to implement a project that required leveraging the entirety of the Microsoft technology stack.
I can't see technology companies embracing Virtual Windows Server RTs and MSSQL Servers. Startups enjoy technologies that are easy to manage and scale with smaller teams. Enterprise level companies still need inhouse dedicated hardware for security.
Azure is kind of an oddball in the virtual hosting space.
I recently had to compare AWS and Azure for my company. I limited my comparison to AWS c3 and c4 class instances versus mid-range A and D class instances.
My tests are very limited I realise, but it looks to me like the AWS boxes represent better value for the money there, even in the on-demand range. Azure used to offer 6-month and 12-month plans but they removed those. Now you need an enterprise agreement to get anything other than published rates, and you need a big spend to qualify for that AFAICT. AWS reserved instances therefore make their instance rates even more competitive, if those make sense for you.
I sent all this to the company trying to push Azure to us hoping they would have better data to refute my simple benchmarks, but they didn't really have any coherent response beyond talking about the "other advantages" of Azure.
Beyond that I looked at the excellent data at https://cloudharmony.com/cloudscores (great site by the way). Their service is not live yet, so I scraped the data into Google Sheets and compared it there. AWS seems to beat Azure on most cases.
(Data entirely owned by Cloud Harmony). Sorry, I can't find a way to let viewers change the filter on the data.
As far as "other advantages go":-
* If you use Win Server 2012 + HyperV in house then there's a good reason to use Azure because of tight integration.
* If you're using SQL Server it's potentially a good fit too. (MySQL on Azure is recommended via a DB as a service they offer from a 3rd party which seems very pricey).
* If you're starting out and are using Visual Studio tooling then the tight integration with Azure Websites, Web Roles and Worker Roles would be pretty nice since the build/test/deploy process would be pretty slick. Re-engineering an existing system to fit the PaaS could be hard, depending on your architecture (it would be for us).
Azure is also about double the price of Google Compute Engine. And GCE offers much faster processors, from my quick tests. But no matter which way you slice it, Azure is much more expensive, even with a discount for commitment.
AWS might be slightly less, but I've found it more complicated to determine pricing. Plus AWS locks you in to specific instances (more or less) whereas Google just automatically applies it, nice and easy.
Of course I'm nervous about using Google for anything, but they have a very impressive offering.
If you're using MS stack, their web app hosting is really easy to use. One-click publish from VS and auto-running migrations are pretty handy if you want to focus on delivering some prototype fast, rather than mucking around with various admin and deployment tools. I think it's a good selling/entry point for some of their services.
Also, do competing services have anything similar to MS's machine learning services?
I've found the network drives to be oddly slow, but the machines otherwise to perform well. So they can be performant if you can run I/O-intensive stuff off the ephemeral local storage, especially on one of the SSD instances.
Any idea on the LCV for Azure of the average YC startup? I know the average YC startup is going to be a cut above, but are a large percentage of them going to break the $500k in an early stage?
If the next Dropbox builds on Azure, instead of AWS, it would all be worth it. From Microsoft's perspective it's a pretty cheap bet that will probably not pay off.
The oldest tactic in the Proprietary Platform Handbook is giving away free stuff to hook people early on.
In this case Azure can run Linux VMs, so I wouldn't worry much about using them for that. Linux lacks lock in.
In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for enterprise services at $5k/mo.
The fact that HN doesn't view Microsoft's known complicity with NSA programs (partner of PRISM data collection since before 2007, _NSAKEY[1] before that) as a human rights violation is troubling, to say the least, but it's absolutely unnerving that anyone would trust them (including YC members) to store sensitive data post-Snowden.
Does anyone actually trust cloud services in Five-eyes jurisdictions anymore? Is there a company in those jurisdictions that people could use that is more dangerous to trust than Microsoft?
That doesn't seem like a germane comparison. Scrip was given in lieu of compensation - I don't think that describes the deal MS is offering here. Without this program, YC companies wouldn't otherwise be receiving anything of value from MS, would they?
Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage startups.
That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode and Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills to free services is a no-brainer.
EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.
EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their platform: http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/