Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 275 posts

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

#151

Post by chipotle_coyote »

loeg wrote: post #118
burkaman wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You've just described how a monetary system works and have not refuted the link between prices and opportunity cost.

I'm not sure "opportunity cost" is the correct term for what the OP wanted to say, since it usually refers to the (theoretical) loss incurred by choosing one alternative over another. The point is simply that a consumer's ability to pay is not necessarily a reflection of their need of the product. That's not an argument to blithely decouple pricing from supply and demand, but it's a recognition of a problem that a market-based society needs to deal with under extraordinary conditions.

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

#152

Post by chipotle_coyote »

aianus wrote: post #141
perl4ever wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something something mythical man-month.

I have an entire Costco package of toilet paper that will last me months while some poor bastard near me is probably wiping his ass with his hand (or worse, flushing paper towel and causing thousands of dollars of damage) because there is no effective way for me to resell my excess in a way that is legal and won’t result in crazy social media backlash against me. I similarly have months of supply of hand sanitizer (o…

Wouldn't you be within the law if you simply sold the rolls at your own cost, or even your cost plus 10%, rather than trying to turn a large profit from them?

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

#153

Post by bharam »

yurlungur wrote: post #24
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…

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.

We now use Teams at work for video conferencing all the time. Before the emergency we hardly ever did.

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

#154

Post by bharam »

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…

In the short term it might look bad. But in the long term it would encourage other companies to enter the market and existing players to increase their capacity.

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

#155

Post by pjscott »

sneak wrote: post #56
salex89 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At the moment it's reputational enforcement: if enough people badmouth them on Hacker News, the money will flow to competitors. (There are other ways to enforce norms, but they have their own problems.)

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

#156

Post by bharam »

sfifs wrote: post #97
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.

We now use Teams video chat at work. The results have been mixed. When the number of meeting participants is low (<5) the video seems to work well. Anything above that we start seeing random disconnects. We've had better experiences with Zoom for larger meetings (~25).

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

#157

Post by pjscott »

leesalminen wrote: post #99
ma2rten wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anybody at AWS is reading this: congratulations! Thank you! Keeping infrastructure running is hard in the best of times, and these times definitely are not the best.

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

#158

Post by ineedasername »

xapata wrote: post #143
ineedasername wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if demand is artifial if there's a filter in place to allocate resources on a need-basis. Not matter the demand from non-need customers, they won't get it, or get less of it. The point in a crisis isn't to let markets find a natural equilibrium, which could mean it stabilizes into a state that isn't optimal to public health. On a crisis, the point is to prioritize those usages that will deal with an…

> prioritize those usages that will deal with and help lessen the crisis Who is responsible for that decision? Do they become a bottleneck? Might they make mistakes? Are they susceptible to corruption? If so, it may be more wise to distribute that decision-making... via the market system.

The market system has, so far, benefited hoarders to the detriment of health care providers that need it more. Under normal circumstances, the market system would be just fine. In a crisis, something else is needed on top of normal market forces, which may still play a part for whatever resources are left after they reach those that truly need it.

As for who is responsible for that decision, it's a role the government generally fills. Can it be a bottleneck? Yes. But there are extreme bottlenecks now with hospitals already out of, or about to run out of, PPE and ventilators. Might there be mistakes? Sure, but again there are mistakes right now too, with market forces favoring those who can pay, have inside connections, etc., instead of those who need the resources. In short, the detriments you cite are a reality of any system, while their presence during a crisis can be mitigated at least a little, and help critical need be filled at least a little bit easier.

Don't let the desire for a "perfect" allocation system blind you to one that is merely "better" than what we currently have now with panic buying, hoarding, price gouging, etc.

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

#159

Post by discordance »

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…

Are your VMs failing on deployment or after they are deployed?

If it’s after deployment that would be concerning

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

#160

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #71
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utilization.

Their utilization has gone up 700%? Bullshit.

Not for Azure as a whole, no, but that sounds entirely plausible for specific services like Teams.
Post reply on HN