Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

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.

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.

I'm not surprised.

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 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”.

Active Directory, Domain Services, Exchange Server and SharePoint Servers (which can use integrated Windows auth).

Also many internal Enterprise apps are integrated with AD for auth and permissions.