Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
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Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
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Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#2> One misleading headline that’s been pushed out by Microsoft and unfortunately picked up by various tech media outlets, is the “775% increase” in Azure cloud service usage in geographical areas that are most committed to some form of social distancing or shelter-in-place policy.
It's way worse than that. The original statement:
> We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders
The updated statement:
> We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced.
Somehow an increase in usage of a single feature of a single product in a single country was miscommunicated as an increase in demand for all of Azure's cloud services. Microsoft's PR team royally screwed up on this one.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-microsoft...
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#3> limited to places where shelter-in-place is in full force, which at least in the United States, is only a small part of the country with densely populated urban areas: New York, California, New Jersey, Michigan, etc.
Ummm, it is NOT a "small part" of the country that is under "shelter-in-place". By geographic area, maybe, but California, New York and New Jersey alone include some of the largest cities by population and population density. And there are now several other states with large populations (Illinois, Florida, Washington, for example) not listed here that have shelter-in-place as well.
UPDATE: I found an interactive map that shows which states have statewide shelter-in-place orders in the United States; it looks like all the states with the largest populations (and more than 50% of the country's total population) are covered, which is actually significantly larger than I had actually thought before I looked this up: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay...
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#4A better comparison would be between Azure and GCP, both of them provide office suite (SAAS) to customers.
Google recently released its side of the numbers (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/how...)
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#5> limited to places where shelter-in-place is in full force, which at least in the United States, is only a small part of the country with densely populated urban areas: New York, California, New Jersey, Michigan, etc. Ummm, it is NOT a "small part" of the country that is under "shelter-in-place". By geographic area, maybe, but California, New York and New Jersey alone include some of the largest cities by population…
By population, New York + California + New Jersey is 22% of the USA.
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#6> limited to places where shelter-in-place is in full force, which at least in the United States, is only a small part of the country with densely populated urban areas: New York, California, New Jersey, Michigan, etc. Ummm, it is NOT a "small part" of the country that is under "shelter-in-place". By geographic area, maybe, but California, New York and New Jersey alone include some of the largest cities by population…
By population, New York + California + New Jersey is 22% of the USA.
and have 6% representation in the Senate...
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#7A better comparison would be between Azure and GCP, both of them provide office suite (SAAS) to customers. Google recently released its side of the numbers ( https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/how... )
From the link, Google has seen the following for Meet usage:
“Over the last few weeks, Meet’s day-over-day growth surpassed 60%, and as a result, its daily usage is more than 25 times what it was in January. Despite this growth, the demand has been well within the bounds of our network’s ability.”
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#8> Since Microsoft’s other businesses are either hardware or office software, with the exception of maybe XBox’s gaming, it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges.
Uh, as a former Microsoft equivalent of a SRE this is a utterly ridiculous statement.
I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry - we definitely knew how to prepare for traffic surges and keep our services "always on".
Has the author never seen Office 365? Bing? The entirety of Azure in general that has dozens if not hundreds of publicly facing always on services?