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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

#131

Post by ineedasername »

enlyth wrote: post #93
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?

Yes, and they also say that if you're hitting quotas, you can try another less congested region. If you have established workloads in a region though, I'm not sure how quickly you can migrate a complex interplay of services to another region-- are there simple tools to do so in Azure?

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

#132

Post by perl4ever »

amelius wrote: post #25
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…

I suspect the situation is that most customers have already paid for the service, and would demand a refund if they can't reasonably use the service.

In general, not necessarily with Microsoft, the problem is that once people get their money back, then the vendor can't pay its bills and you have a potential for the whole economy to go into a seizure if enough people are like "oh, free market, sanctity of contracts" etc.

This is happening in real time: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/29/coronavirus-mall-owner-taubm...

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

#133

Post by ShinTakuya »

mardifoufs wrote: post #64
ShinTakuya wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 months? Try 2 years. It's a year minimum before we get a handle on this (no, not the vaccine, just the virus itself).

That's ludicrous. If you were right we wouldn't have a stock market by then. We wouldn't even have an economy after 1 year of lock downs, even if they were on and off. There's a point where we just won't be able to isolate and if the virus stays dangerous we will be forced to just take the risk.

Sorry, but the economy doesn't just go poof and disappear, I don't know what theory of economics you ascribe to but that's just nonsense. Everything is a trade-off and we'll find ways over time to ease the effects of the lock downs (more masks, more remote work in fields previously thought unviable to remote work in, gradual exceptions made for certain industries critical to public well-being).

I encourage you to play with the epidemic calculator. This isn't something you "just" take the risk for. And keep in mind that the deaths in the calculator aren't including deaths due to denied hospital beds for more typical things like heart attacks and strokes.

Is 10-30 million deaths in the US this year an acceptable trade-off to keep the all-so-important economy going? Or can we scale back the economy and distribute the wealth so that only food can be afforded while we build up hospital resources, work on a vaccine and save lives?

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

#134

Post by ineedasername »

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…

Mostly traditional, "legacy" companies have been hit hard by this

Yes, this. Where I work, WFH had an outright ban until this all hit the fan. Now, anyone who can do so has a mandate to WFH. We use Citrix to access some internal resources, though it's really inefficient: If you want to access a file on network drive, say an excel file, you need to use Citrix to launch an Excel instance, open the file, and deal with it there. You can't easily get it to your local computer, so this adds to the overhead necessary to use the system, which has been strained of late (and it's not like citrix lacks the ability to transfer files between remote & local, they've just disable mapping of local drives during a session) Luckily I have a server-class workstation under my desk at work for heavy data-crunching, and setup my own VPN, which works much better. At least unless/until they turn power off in building not being used.

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

#135

Post by JumpCrisscross »

p1necone wrote: post #79
freeone3000 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments will also exert this force on behalf of their citizens, is the happier read. In a disaster, everything becomes finite, but profiteering is still deeply disruptive to the shared societal fabric.

Yep - if there's N capacity to provide a necessary necessary good/service, but M > N need, raising the price doesn't seem like a great solution to manage it in a crisis situation. To some extent non necessary uses would decrease, but you also end up with more wealthy people who want it more getting it, and more generally there won't be any distinction between want and need .

> if there's N capacity to provide a necessary necessary good/service, but M > N need, raising the price doesn't seem like a great solution to manage it in a crisis situation

Within a crisis, yes. But this also did-incentivises overprovisioning, i.e. building slack into the system.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

burkaman wrote: post #87
AmericanChopper wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ability to pay is only one aspect of demand. There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Keeping prices artificially low keeps demand artificially high, while supply doesn’t increase, or cannot increase if it’s inelastic.

> There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Money doesn't have much relation to opportunity cost in the presence of enormous wealth inequality. An unemployed person willing to pay their entire bank account of $100 for some good clearly wants it more than a work-from-home tech worker willing to pay the $600 they made yesterday. The same applies to businesses…

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by ineedasername »

How much excess capacity would a cloud provider typically have (as in %) to accommodate normal peak loads and still have a comfortable margin?

Or maybe that's not something providers reveal, so let me as the sys-admins of this thread: For on-premise resources, what is your % margin of excess capacity reserved?

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

#138

Post by Arainach »

prepend wrote: post #101
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…

I would think that additional capacity can be built out to accommodate demand at a rate that still stays profitable after the usage spike. Not that they’re immediately building new data centers, but adding capacity to existing. Just if Microsoft moved internal usage to underused data centers somewhere on earth they could create more capacity for NA, EU, Asia. One of the upsides of cloud is that it’s so much easier to…

Adding capacity how? PC supply chains are drained - they were impacted by the COVID shutdowns in China a few months ago, and extra demands are in place now:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/store-shelves-stripped-of-lapto...

While I have no inside information, I have to imagine that these same shortages have affected data center hardware too, and that it's much more difficult/expensive to add capacity at the moment compared to, say, last December.

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

#140

Post by johannes1234321 »

greatgib wrote: post #27

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

While true: only few individual companies would have enough computing power to handle their suddenly increasing load ready ... or capability to setup the services now in demand
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