Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by webpaymentsguy » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

oxfordmale wrote: post #138

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?

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.

Azure and GCP had either comparable or worse UIs for a lot of services compared to AWS, but region specific UIs were a notable unintuitive design compared to others.

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

#162

Post by webpaymentsguy » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #20

zdragnar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but in a similar boat. Basically, having everything in one cloud provider's hardware is a risk to uptime guarantees is the biggest reason. There are other, less good reasons too, but that is the one that can't be changed by adding features to Azure (or any other).

Is Azure unique in that if you shift to Azure you cannot also use other cloud providers but if you are on GCP or Azure you can use the other?

AWS has better open source managed solutions than Azure and GCP right now, but Azure also has things like a billing console that can integrate with AWS - which is a great feature albeit not being so powerful yet.

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

#163

Post by webpaymentsguy » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

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…

I don't think Azure is behind GCP - from what I've not only read but personally found in their offerings and support teams, Azure and AWS are really comparable for most, and GCP lags behind both.

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

#164

Post by coredog64 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

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…

Boeing didn’t outsource MCAS to India. The outsourcing contract was for display software.

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

#165

Post by okareaman » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

I'm a retired programmer and now Uber driver in Silicon Valley so I often talk shop with my riders. I was giving a guy a ride to make a pitch for his product to a Japanese company. He related that his biggest challenge so far was when Walmart licensed his product and they insisted it absolutely could not be hosted on AWS so he had to transfer over to Azure. Obviously Amazon and Walmart are competitors and that might apply in many other situations.

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

#166

Post by teddyuk » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

paulv wrote: post #83

closeparen wrote: post #36

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…

> I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero. I can't speak for anyone else, but we make sure extensive use of the Azure API, both via the 'az' command line tool and through terraform. From what I've heard, read, and had conference calls about, Microsoft treats the API as a first-class citizen.

I’ve seen azure implemented at dozens of top enterprises and every single one used the api’s to some extent.

People make dev/test/pox’s by hand then automate it.

I’d take the wager :)

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

#167

Post by la6470 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

You just lost trust

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

#168

Post by GordonS » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

webpaymentsguy wrote: post #160

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.

Do you think you know or could guess an average response time for ticket responses?

We don't open enough tickets for this to be really meaningful (things generally work as expected), but I'd guess around 8h

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

#169

Post by coredog64 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

romanovcode wrote: post #132

rtyturtu wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

AIUI, Microsoft juices those numbers a bit by including Office365. Yes, it’s in the “cloud”, but it’s not exactly apples-to-apples with AWS.

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

#170

Post by username90 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

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 ?

Public institutions usually have a lot of systems but not a lot of traffic (if we compare to tech companies), so it makes sense for them to put things in the cloud instead of building everything themselves. Also public institutions rarely get top talent and instead do everything via contractors, do you really think it is cheaper to get government contractors to build and run infrastructure instead of letting Microsoft do it?