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

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

#91

Post by chairmanwow1 »

polskibus wrote: post #28
moksly wrote: post #7

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…

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 ?

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.

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

#92

Post by GordonS »

ailideex wrote: post #86
moksly wrote: post #7

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…

> 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.

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

#93

Post by GordonS »

iakov wrote: post #78
cglong wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer working on Azure, why would you be opposed to migrating everything to Azure specifically?

Not OP, but want to chime in. 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 bei…

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.

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

#94

Post by realusername »

iakov wrote: post #78
cglong wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer working on Azure, why would you be opposed to migrating everything to Azure specifically?

Not OP, but want to chime in. 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 bei…

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.

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

#95

Post by k__ »

addicted wrote: post #22

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…

Well, at least they can't compete with governments

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

#96

Post by dustinmoris »

moksly wrote: post #7

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…

> 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.

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

#97

Post by PasserBy2025 »

adjkant wrote: post #21
Daishiman wrote: post #6

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…

> a clear #3 behind AWS/GCP for most

Maybe in Google board's dreams? As a developer I like support that is: 1) human; 2) available; 3) does not sunset products every week.

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

#98

Post by PasserBy2025 »

simo7 wrote: post #70

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 Athen…

Committing to long-term support is part of quality. And this is simply not there with Google products.

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

#99

Post by jasonvorhe »

addicted wrote: post #22

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…

> 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.

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

#100

Post by JohannesH »

sgt101 wrote: post #72
polskibus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

At this scale why not contact all your neighbouring or peer municipalities and go for a joint cloud migration?

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.

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