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Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

forbes.com

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#11

Mostly a short fluff article; however, I have noticed that Azure does have a few powerful features that AWS and GCP lack, most notably InfiniBand (fast interconnects), which I have needed on more than one occasion for HPC tasks. In fact, 4x16 core instances on Azure are currently faster at performing molecular dynamics simulations than 1x"64 core" instance on GCP. But the cost is extremely high, and I still haven't f…

> I still haven't found a good cloud platform for short, high intensity HPC tasks.

I would suggest contacting the nearby university with research groups using HPC such as theoretical chemistry, bioinformatics or computational economics. I would guess you could get a special deal for less than what you'd pay for an AWS instance.

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#12

I had to verify the numbers stated in this article from different sources, and while I think the fair comparison is between Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud unit" (which excludes Office 365) & AWS, the conclusion on financials in the article is surprisingly true, if only by accident. Much to my surprise, Azure/MS seems to be making a lot more money, raking in $6.8B in Q1 2017 [1], vs AWS' $3.66B [2]!! [1]: http://www.b…

The 6.8 in the article is for "Windows Server businesses", wouldn't it be way larger than just cloud sevices ? Even without office, there still would the windows server products in it.

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#13

I had to verify the numbers stated in this article from different sources, and while I think the fair comparison is between Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud unit" (which excludes Office 365) & AWS, the conclusion on financials in the article is surprisingly true, if only by accident. Much to my surprise, Azure/MS seems to be making a lot more money, raking in $6.8B in Q1 2017 [1], vs AWS' $3.66B [2]!! [1]: http://www.b…

I think MS users are more prone to spend money because they are more used to it.

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#14
post #12

I had to verify the numbers stated in this article from different sources, and while I think the fair comparison is between Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud unit" (which excludes Office 365) & AWS, the conclusion on financials in the article is surprisingly true, if only by accident. Much to my surprise, Azure/MS seems to be making a lot more money, raking in $6.8B in Q1 2017 [1], vs AWS' $3.66B [2]!! [1]: http://www.b…

The 6.8 in the article is for "Windows Server businesses", wouldn't it be way larger than just cloud sevices ? Even without office, there still would the windows server products in it.

So that'll include Windows Server licences in AWS, and GCE too wouldn't it?

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#15
post #6

tl;dr: This is a Microsoft puff piece written by a PR firm. The ranking is based on abstract things like "completeness of offerings" and "future vision". There's a token revenue comparison as well in an attempt to give some substance which compares all of Microsoft's "cloud" (that is to say inclusive of things like Office 365) against Amazon's IaaS.

Well, there was also the two revenue figures for their respective offerings. Doesn't get too much more concrete than that.

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#17
I found out recently that good chunk of this progress (esp. in their SaaS space) is being fueled by open source projects, for example Power BI uses D3 3.5 and angular 1.5.

I hope they open source at least a part of their stack, for example the Azure Service Fabric.

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#18
post #13

I had to verify the numbers stated in this article from different sources, and while I think the fair comparison is between Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud unit" (which excludes Office 365) & AWS, the conclusion on financials in the article is surprisingly true, if only by accident. Much to my surprise, Azure/MS seems to be making a lot more money, raking in $6.8B in Q1 2017 [1], vs AWS' $3.66B [2]!! [1]: http://www.b…

I think MS users are more prone to spend money because they are more used to it.

Our CTO keeps 'suggesting' that we build services on Azure vs AWS. They're roughly equivalent but Azure works out to be more expensive and more opaque to our team and there hasn't actually been a justification for why other than "because we use Microsoft services". A significant amount of our infrastructure is on AWS already.

I imagine the more money we spend, the more goodies he gets. They already sent him a Hololens and that's just the thing I can physically see.

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#19

I found out recently that good chunk of this progress (esp. in their SaaS space) is being fueled by open source projects, for example Power BI uses D3 3.5 and angular 1.5. I hope they open source at least a part of their stack, for example the Azure Service Fabric.

Funny that you mention that: they announced the Azure Service Fabric .NET SDK recently went open source and there seems to be some intent to open source more, including possibly an open source version of the runtime:

https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric

Re: Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor

#20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think MS users are more prone to spend money because they are more used to it.

Our CTO keeps 'suggesting' that we build services on Azure vs AWS. They're roughly equivalent but Azure works out to be more expensive and more opaque to our team and there hasn't actually been a justification for why other than "because we use Microsoft services". A significant amount of our infrastructure is on AWS already. I imagine the more money we spend, the more goodies he gets. They already sent him a Hololen…

> They already sent him a Hololens and that's just the thing I can physically see.

And company policy allows him to keep it? That's precisely the sort of reason why companies have policies on capping gift values from partners. If I were a member of the board, I'd be pissed.

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