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

#231

Post by audleman » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:26 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.

Same here. Not to derail OP's point on how the use cases are different, but us developers are all trained on using APIs with our cloud backends by now. Obviously Azure produced something of similar quality to the awscli.

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

#232

Post by audleman » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

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…

It's almost a crime that Azure is winning against GCP, like an old jalopy out-selling a Tesla. Yet this article touches upon why, with inferior tech, Microsoft is killing it. Good on them for their business relationship management.

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

#233

Post by okareaman » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

forgot-my-pw wrote: post #223

stevewodil wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you should start a YouTube channel. In that area I'm sure you have a lot of interesting conversations with technical people, and entrepreneurs trying to make it

What happens to passenger-driver confidentiality?

I drive for Lyft and Uber and no one has ever said a word about it. I think it's just understood.

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

#234

Post by dcchambers » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

varshithr wrote: post #148

Where does GCP stand in all this? Are they still an alternative or back-up cloud? I believe GCP is trying hard to match AWS and Azure in terms of capabilities but not sure how GCP handles non-technical aspects.

It seems like people are really only using GCP for Kubernetes stuff and some TPU processing stuff.

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

#235

Post by toohotatopic » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

stevewodil wrote: post #214

okareaman wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some passengers use the ride as a confessional or just to vent. I feel it would be wrong to share too much about what they say. It seems like an unwritten rule. I don't have a front/rear view dash cam like a lot of drivers advise because I appreciate these conversations and don't want to inhibit them.

Of course you would get their permission to record them!

But he wouldn't get Uber's permission. It's against their terms of service to record passengers.

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

#236

Post by adev_ » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

jtwaleson wrote: post #134

adev_ wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 trivia…

> 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.

I do not criticized the fact of outsourcing when an outsourced service does a better job. This is normal and should be like that.

What I am criticizing however, is outsourcing even when local/home made/OSS solutions are a better and cheaper fit even considering SLA.... just to avoid responsibilities.

This is in my experience common, especially if the management has no technical background, no trust in his team and fear its upper layer.

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

#237

Post by adev_ » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #111

adev_ wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, surprisingly enough, people look out for their own self interests. What makes outsourcing hardware different from the dozens of other software as a service vendors that most companies depend on? Why spend the time developing competency in managing servers if that doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. But, going with the biggest most stable vendor is usually good. If you bought IBM hardware in the 70s you can…

> But, going with the biggest most stable vendor is usually good. If you bought IBM hardware in the 70s you can still buy new hardware that supports your software. If you went with their competitors - not so much.

For 20 times the cost of commodities x86 that you should have bought by doing the right thing.

And this 20 times the cost will very likely also please your own competitors because you will yourself be less competitive.

That's how you finish with entire airline industry or bank still running on COBOL with no possibility of migration.

IBM itself is very happy about it however.

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

#238

Post by commandeer » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #209

commandeer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have built a desktop app to manage AWS, and we will be rollin gout some of the main Azure serverless pieces over the next few months. I think you might found our GUI much more user friendly than what is out there now. https://getcommandeer.com

Glad you could find a place to shove in a plug for a piece of software that, if we're being frank, doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd recommend to any user of a cloud environment. GUIs are failure modes for cloud operations. Using APIs first and last is the only way I've found to build a successful cloud team at any scale. (And I have even less use for highly bloggable serverless stuff than I do baseline-working…

You are being frank, I don't think we are. This tool is getting great usage to actually be able to view your cloud data such as S3 and Dynamo in a meaningful way. The testing suite is still in its infancy, but if you are doing serverless development, and want to test out your lambda firing, and see the console logs from a dynamo stream, or an s3 file getting created, it is a great way to do so. Lastly, our tools for IAC are starting to roll out, so it enables you to run your serverless, ansible, or terraform files against any account and region at the click of a button and see the results, rather than having to fiddle with the command line. API's are very important, but enabling your developers to actually see the cloud infrastructure is also equally important. Monolith systems are still popular because people can see the entire system. Serverless and event-driven systems are not easy in this regard, and we are solving the problem right now of great tools being out there, but just trying to get insight into your system is difficult.

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

#239

Post by taurath » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #68

Joe8Bit wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some strategy work for a global retailer a few years ago and this kept coming up, they even have a policy that SaaS tools they acquire "can't be hosted in AWS". Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then…

Amazon absolutely looks at whatever data they legally can, because, well, they’re Amazon. Leveraging their market position to the maximum effect is not only what they do, it’s basically guaranteed.

My comment is sitting at -3 and I'm genuinely curious what people find disagreeable about it? Its a maybe cynical position but I think well earned by Amazon?

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

#240

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #120

polskibus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about CRM, messaging, analytics, BI, etc.? Some time ago they released a beta (?) of invoicing product - not sure how that went.

Microsoft has line-of-business software titles at different market-tiers - so you could be referring to any one of them. At the low-end, Office 365 now includes web-based invoices, bookings (a la hairdresser appointments), and the like. Middle-tier would be using something from their former Great Plains titles (now under the Dynamics brand). And at the high-end, that’d be a partner-customised build of MS Dynamics. No…

> Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!

They call it Excel.

Which is sadly not as facetious as it sounds. Microsoft's smaller finance tools had to compete not just externally with Intuit's and Peachtree/Sage's products but internally with Excel, and Excel has long held steady somewhere in the second or third most commonly used personal and small business finance tool.

(Source/disclaimer: I was a college intern for what for most of my time there was called Microsoft Small Business Accounting, briefly in my experience there was called Microsoft Office Accounting, and sadly didn't survive as a product during the time it took me to finish my degrees. IMNSHO it was a really good product, and I'm sad it never had the chance it deserved, because it sadly wasn't possible to beat Excel for market penetration, even bundled right next to Excel.)