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Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

zdnet.com

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Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#51

Post by techntoke »

jedieaston wrote: post #41
techntoke wrote: post #33

Leave it up to Microsoft to find out ways to profit more during a pandemic, rather than open sourcing their software and platform to be used anywhere and everywhere. People forgot what hosting is like without these massively overpriced cloud services that nickel and dime for every feature. Want encryption which basically costs nothing? Oh, you'll pay an extra $0.10 per hour on top of your $.08GB of outbound traffic.…

Office (/Microsoft) 365 is a pretty good value for what it is. It isn’t free, but $20 per user per month for Windows + Office + Exchange + OneDrive + Azure AD and support is pretty good. Microsoft saying “Ahh! Crisis! Here’s the Windows Server codebase!” wouldn’t help, since you’d have to still find a host and time to make sure your code works on this upstream variant without all of the licensed DLLs that makes Windo…

Google offers the same for less than $12 a month with unlimited storage for large companies and $12 a month for everyone else. Plus you get an operating system that is based off Linux and open source. Windows is a giant PITA when it comes to deploying and setting up mobile device management.

Matrix offers free decentralized video/voice communication and there are lots of self-hosted alternatives that often provide better features than things like Teams. With NextCloud you basically get a free office solution that just needs to be deployed. With Kubernetes you can quickly deploy a Nextcloud cluster. These services should be free and open source because the goal should be helping build a better world, not building better profits through backroom deals with tax dollars.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#52

Post by x0x0 »

burkaman wrote: post #16
crazygringo wrote: post #6

Wow. First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what. But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in p…

It would certainly look bad, and I think it would potentially be illegal in some states. https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou... For example, Georgia: > Selling items or services determined by the Governor during a declared state of emergency to be necessary for public safety at a higher cost than they were immediately prior to the declaration. Kansas: > For any supplier of a "necessary proper…

They aren't raising prices; they're limiting availability. All three quoted laws solely cover prices.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#53

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Wow. First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what. But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in p…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#54

Post by felipelemos »

voltagex_ wrote: post #50
hkmurakami wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>does Disney+ run on Azure? Some cursory web searching suggests that at least as of 2017, BAMTECH / Disney were using AWS as their public cloud provider. There's enough inertia here that you'd imagine that this is still the case.

From here in Australia, developer tools tells me the video is coming from vod-akc-oc-east-1.media.dssott.com which appears to be an Akamai thing.

Akamai is just a CDN so it's cloud agnostic.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#56

Post by sneak »

salex89 wrote: post #17
gundmc wrote: post #2

Why would Microsoft be disproportionately affected by this? Are we expecting similar decrees from AWS and GCP? Or was Microsoft operating with less runway before this began?

Working with all three of them, so here's my two cents: 1. Mostly traditional, "legacy" companies have been hit hard by this. Ones that don't have culture or technology of work-from-home. Those companies use some Microsoft products. Also, Microsoft has been poaching them heavily, handing out trials, bundling licenses and so on. A lot of them don't actually buy stuff from Microsoft, but through 3rd party vendors which…

> But the thing I'm mostly pissed of is the status page. VM's are failing left, right and center and everything is nice and green on the status page. Once you open a ticket, they send you an incident-in-progress report.

Status pages parroting lies in service of marketing should incur more liability for companies than they do. How does a society discourage vendors from doing things like this?

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#57

Post by dfee »

burkaman wrote: post #16
crazygringo wrote: post #6

Wow. First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what. But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in p…

It would certainly look bad, and I think it would potentially be illegal in some states. https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou... For example, Georgia: > Selling items or services determined by the Governor during a declared state of emergency to be necessary for public safety at a higher cost than they were immediately prior to the declaration. Kansas: > For any supplier of a "necessary proper…

I don’t know how I feel about this. In the general case, I feel like price gouging during emergencies is unethical.

But, when there is a non-artificial supply and demand issue, I struggle with the derivative effects of these policies.

My concern is that rather than simply evaluating on the consumers ability to pay (and backwards-looking at prior statements instead of increased go-forward costs), these policies add only one additional criteria: ability to threaten legal issues. Thus, it’s only effect is to prioritize government agencies alongside wealthy clients. And that’s just governments using force to get better treatment. Which also feels unethical.

But maybe there’s a happier and healthier read of the situation.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#58

Post by gpm »

pwarner wrote: post #40
crazygringo wrote: post #6

Wow. First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what. But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in p…

AWS spot prices are rising last 3 weeks.

Is there a graph somewhere that shows by how much?

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#60

Post by rightbyte »

daxfohl wrote: post #30
rightbyte wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rampant" work from home with Office 365 I guess. I guess most of the load is all these Team video calls and VPN services?

Yeah as a member of Azure networking, it's odd: HR is communicating we should do video calls for meetings instead of just audio, to keep the personal touch, and I'm wondering if that's really the best use of our bandwidth. I keep my video off anyway.

Imagine thousand and thousand video calls with multiple receivers for each transmitter ... over VPN.

I don't use video since I feel weird doing it. Also I don't want to do my hair and change from pyjamas.

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