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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

#91

Post by lkbm »

greatgib wrote: post #27

Good time to remind that 'the cloud is just some else computer' ...

The cloud is someone else's collection of computers operating at a very large scale. If my load changes in a way uncorrelated with other users', that's a very good thing. If my load is correlated with other users', that's may be bad. But it could still be good, because at that scale, they can justify having robust contingency plans -- back-up supply contracts, extra engineers around to ramp stuff up, or relatively unimportant stuff they can de-prioritize. (If you're relatively unimportant, that's a bummer; if you're a hospital getting priority, that's a plus.)

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

#92

Post by edmundsauto »

dfee wrote: post #57
burkaman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

The additional dimension is time-smoothing. Emergency declarations that solely serve to smooth over a few weeks spike can be effective. There does not appear to be a predictive estimator whether emergency declarations will be appropriately time limited.

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

#93

Post by enlyth »

spencerwgreene wrote: post #68

The Microsoft blog post that the article is using as a source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-microsoft... .

After reading this, it seems the headline is a bit misleading.

The Microsoft blog post states: "We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders."

So it's not an overall increase, just in certain regions?

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

#94

Post by leesalminen »

smcleod wrote: post #88

Office365 and AzureAD has been even more unreliable than usual over the past week or so, plenty of "an error has occurred" pages and delayed mail - as usually Microsoft didn't update the status dashboards (the ones you can see without being able to log in anyway), The other client I work with uses GCP and Google Mail/Docs for business which I haven't noticed any issues with.

GSuite and GCP had impactful outages for us this past week and were listed on the status dashboards.

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

#95

Post by lend000 »

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 wonder how many masks would be floating around by now if there were no laws or public shaming for raising prices in an emergency.

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

#96

Post by smcleod »

leesalminen wrote: post #94
smcleod wrote: post #88

Office365 and AzureAD has been even more unreliable than usual over the past week or so, plenty of "an error has occurred" pages and delayed mail - as usually Microsoft didn't update the status dashboards (the ones you can see without being able to log in anyway), The other client I work with uses GCP and Google Mail/Docs for business which I haven't noticed any issues with.

GSuite and GCP had impactful outages for us this past week and were listed on the status dashboards.

We might have been lucky with the region and timezone we're in - australia-southeast1

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

#97

Post by sfifs »

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…

Possibly Teams video chat which seems to work better more consistently than Zoom or Cisco Webex for small groups. At least in my organization, we've seen a lot of folks move to it in the last two-three weeks.

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

#98

Post by rodgerd »

lewispb wrote: post #34
yurlungur wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Team usage is up significantly. You can do video conferencing via Team which is one aspect that is quite different from Slack. I imagine there are some new use cases arising from that.

Different in what way? Slack has built-in video conferencing?

When I raise a meeting in Outlook, I get a Teams videoconf button and attendance etc will all be managed via Exchange on-line. I can record the meeting and have it shared in the channel as part of the process. There are beta features that transcribe the audio to text, as well.

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

#99

Post by leesalminen »

ma2rten wrote: post #73
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?

My theory is that Amazon and Google are more prepared to handle surges because they run some of the largest web properties. This like every day is Black Friday for Amazon. It's rough, but not something they have never dealt with before.

GCP and GSuite had outages this week listed on their status pages.

AWS has been rock solid for us in the 3 regions we operate in.

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

#100

Post by dehrmann »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #31
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?

>> Why would Microsoft be disproportionately affected by this? Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft..er IBM. Inertia too.

If you're shopping for cloud providers, nobody gets fired for picking AWS. Microsoft is if you're looking for email, spreadsheets, and desktop publishing.
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