Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

101–110 of 260 posts

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

#101
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.

Not there with free consumer Google products. Their enterprise level GCP support is pretty much the same as the other providers.

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

#102

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…

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.

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

#103
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.

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".

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

#104
post #33

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 ?

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 busines…

> 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

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

#105

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…

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.

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

#106
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.

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

#107
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. Durab…

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.

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

#108
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 .

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

#109
post #27
post #5

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)…

Back in the late 90's Bill Gates was known to personally pitch for really big contracts.

He did this for British Telecom when we where deciding which word processor to use AMI Pro vs MS Word

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

#110
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.

Post reply on HN