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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

#131

Post by missosoup »

teddyuk wrote: post #26

Azure sales are very good at offering big discounts and incentives for getting people to migrate, I have seen many enterprises suddenly switch to azure because of big discounts but have never seen any enterprise suddenly switch to aws or gcp.

Microsoft doesn't sell Azure on its technical capabilities or reliability or quality of documentation.

MS sells Azure by leveraging its position within existing enterprise clients to shill it to decision makers, offering discounts that actually don't mean anything once the total costs of projects are tallied up, and misleading decision makers about the proliferation of Azure by budling O365 and AAD and other bullshit into their sales figures.

The standard Azure sale to enterprise is entirely shut off to engineers or any technical decision makers.

Azure is Oracle 2.0. Stay away.

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

#132

Post by romanovcode »

rtyturtu wrote: post #89
adjkant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think narration on HN is that Google's Cloud behind Azure and AWS.

Not HN narration but a simple fact.

> Amazon Web Services accounted for almost 33% of global cloud spending, while Microsoft had nearly 17% and Google had just under 7%

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

oxfordmale wrote: post #12

I think this article is comparing apple and pears to some extend. My company is solely cloud based and are using Azure, AWS and GCP, although 98% of our bespoke infrastructure runs on AWS. We could migrate this infrastructure to GCP, as Google has been catching up with AWS on cloud infrastructure, however, I would dread to migrate it all to Azure. We mostly use Azure for Azure AD (and Office 365), and AWS to build ou…

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by jtwaleson »

adev_ wrote: post #104
ptd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed that outsourcing risk does not free you from the responsibilities. However, for many many services you have to rely on others to provide the service better than you could do yourself, as you are limited in time, money and other resources. For running production grade databases at startups, it's much more cost-efficient to run on AWS RDS than to hire a systems engineering team with 24/7 standby. For more trivial systems you might be right and managers might be cowards. However, you have to realize it's a spectrum.

Whether you're running it yourself or you outsource it, things will go wrong at some time. When this happens, and you run it yourself, you also have to explain why it went wrong in a post-mortem or RCA. The problem is that your customers have no point of reference for your explanation (how likely is it that this occurs again?). In my experience, the following message goes down a lot smoother: "This is an Azure/AWS/GCP outage which affected not just us, but 1000s of other companies. We rely on {provider} to continuously learn from their mistakes and improve their service and they've shown this in the past. Here's their post-mortem report about this outage.". Note that not all cloud providers fit this bill.

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

#135

Post by vsareto »

adev_ wrote: post #104
ptd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>that generally lead to adopt unadapted, bloated, overpriced solutions to trivial problems.

There's almost no meaningful business downside for choosing poorly.

Most businesses just don't care that someone else thinks they didn't use the right tool for the job.

Should it be that way? Definitely not. But it won't change unless there's consequences (and when that happens, those products will die off quickly)

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

#136

Post by dmix »

moksly wrote: post #119
dustinmoris wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I agree, but I think that’s on Microsoft. I’m not sure they’ve ever adopted any suggestions from us that weren’t universally wanted. When teams first became available in 365, it was automatically enabled for everyone. Today it’s not, we requested this change, but I really doubt we were alone in that. That’s not really what’s important to us, but I should have made that more clear. What is important is the direct line…

Microsoft also has one of the best and most effective sales machines in the world.

Those direct lines help with customer retention and expansion of services just as well as it provides technical assistance.

Even if AWS has some tech or price superiority, good luck prying those sales teams away from the big orgs and convincing them to go elsewhere - especially after significant ecosystem lock in. Which is another thing Microsoft is better at.

Microsoft simply has the enterprise sales machine completely dominanting and optimized.

It was fascinating watching them role out Azure with the full force of their developer and CTO focused marketing machine which kept hitting me even though I’d never use Microsoft, their ability to penetrate markets was fascinating to watch as an outsider.

This is something Google will never be able to catch up with. And a very important part of these cloud wars which get overlooked while we debate the merits of Microsoft’s engineering yes-to-everything the managers ask approach.

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

#137

Post by codebolt »

willjr10 wrote: post #115
GordonS wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. I work for a company who is a top 100 globally customer of Azure. In case where we have needed support, depending on how severe we define the issue, we are contacted within minutes. Well within the defined contact times stated as when creating support tickets. In several other cases, Microsoft has brought in people from around the world to help workout various issues. However, I don't know if the response ti…

I'm just a private individual hosting his blog on Azure, and I've had a stellar experience. I made a post about some gripes I had setting up my website, and a person from the developer outreach program reached out to me and put me in touch with the engineering team directly. Turns out my main complaint (lack of support for managed SSL cert for root domains) was already in the pipeline. They even sent a bunch of MS/Azure gear to my doorstep as a thanks for my feedback.

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

#138

Post by oxfordmale »

cglong wrote: post #14
oxfordmale wrote: post #12

I think this article is comparing apple and pears to some extend. My company is solely cloud based and are using Azure, AWS and GCP, although 98% of our bespoke infrastructure runs on AWS. We could migrate this infrastructure to GCP, as Google has been catching up with AWS on cloud infrastructure, however, I would dread to migrate it all to Azure. We mostly use Azure for Azure AD (and Office 365), and AWS to build ou…

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

Azure is still catching up in many areas. For example low-priority VMs is a recent addition to Azure, whereas AWS has had these instances since 2009. I also find the Azure interface really clunky compared to AWS and I am definitely not a fan of the AWS console either.

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

#139

Post by dcolebatch »

vidarh wrote: post #129
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have literally never seen a setup where cloud came out less than ~twice the cost of dedicated hosting. I have seen instances where dedicated hosting comes out cheaper than putting your own equipment in a colo, but even that depends on being in a location where energy and property prices (and so colo rental costs) are high. And this does factor in devops - when doing consulting I earned consistently more (because of…

I suspect you’re doing it wrong, or there’s some niche type of computing you specialize in.

In general purpose IT, looking across an enterprise portfolio of applications, we consistently see customers of Tidal Migrations replatform their applications to cloud and save 95+% in OpEx vs dedicated on-premise hosting.

IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently.

Yes, cloud spend can grow as you open up access to more developers, but that’s why we have a plethora of tools and governance people to help make that manageable. I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill... especially if you’re in a competitive industry & don’t want to get left behind.

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

#140

Post by vsareto »

mr_toad wrote: post #13
bazza451 wrote: 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.

People like to ding AWS for lock-in, but Microsoft still does it better.

Lock-in is basically a footnote at this point. No one is planning to buy major cloud resources and also planning an exit plan. It was more relevant 5-10 years ago when things were less certain
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