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Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

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Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#91

Post by locusm »

captainchaos wrote: post #51
gecko wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's prices for Azure are actually very reasonable, and I generally find their tools easier to configure and use in real life. Microsoft makes some horrible products, but I actually really like Azure a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDAyI0imqGE I checked this out as a pretty heavy AWS user, and I have to admit that GUI looks pretty nice.

Make sure you benchmark the VM's if you intend to use them - performance was horrible during the preview. http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1206086-BY-1103157IV31

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#92

Post by thejosh »

Red_Curry wrote: post #58
cinquemb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please everyone, not all at once.

I like how HN is so blatantly anti-Microsoft, but Reddit is overly Microsoft supportive. Which hipsters do I believe in?!

It depends what subreddit you go onto, HN is pretty small compared to the reddit hivemind.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#93

Post by rbanffy »

nivla wrote: post #86
rbanffy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Azure, if SQL has a problem, Microsoft has to fix it, Not really. Vendor lock in still applies.

>Not really. Mind explaining a bit more? If I buy a Samsung Galaxy S4 and the lock screen wouldn't let me in because of a bug in Android, Samsung is still responsible. >Vendor lock in still applies. Again, how exactly would that be, if I am say using Ubuntu and Mysql+PHP on a Azure?

And how much effort is Microsoft willing to dedicate to fix your Ubuntu/MySQL/PHP stack?

It's only a single vendor solution until you introduce a second one.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#95

Post by jmspring »

iamleppert wrote: post #47

Love this quote: “The biggest advantage I have with Microsoft is I don’t have to go to any other vendor for any solution -- I can go to one partner for all of my operating systems, all of my development environment and all of my infrastructure tools,” he said. “Why would I waste time looking at another third-party solution?” ... "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". "I'm a lazy C-level exec." "I love having all my…

There are a lot of people building on top of MSFT platforms. ASP.NET, C#, etc. may not be sexy, but a lot of people use these languages/platforms regularly. Probably more than any particular web-based language. Being able to your desktop skills and move them to the "cloud" with tight integration in Visual Studio helps leverage a large existing developer ecosystem.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#96

Post by skylan_q »

OGinparadise wrote: post #85
tytso wrote: post #41

Comparing against Amazon's total cloud sales may be comparing apples and orange. To quote from the article: "Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview." What software is included "to create related Windows cloud services", and is that the only use for said softare? i.e., are they including things…

The numbers are fishy, but if they are growing by XX% (1) a year, expect MS to reach that pretty soon. Love it or hate it, getting all your tech needs from one company has its advantages (and disadvantages). 1. Azure subscriptions have risen 48 percent in the past six months, said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s vice president for marketing for the server and tools division. That unit, which encompasses Azure, has posted…

It's easy to rise 46% in terms of subscriptions when they offer tens of thousands of dollars worth of their service for free.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#97

Post by quaffapint »

I LOVE Visual Studio and working in C# / Asp.Net MVC. I do it full time at work, and now writing my SaaS in it which I plan to host on Azure (though, I wish they had an official MongoDB offering).

I've always done PHP on my side stuff, partly because of the hosting issues, but now with PaaS' like Azure and Appharbor, people who enjoy the MS Stack at least have reasonable options.

People bitch about MS, but without competition from Azure, Google, and others, Amazon wouldn't keep lowering their rates.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#98

Post by theg2 »

skylan_q wrote: post #96
OGinparadise wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers are fishy, but if they are growing by XX% (1) a year, expect MS to reach that pretty soon. Love it or hate it, getting all your tech needs from one company has its advantages (and disadvantages). 1. Azure subscriptions have risen 48 percent in the past six months, said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s vice president for marketing for the server and tools division. That unit, which encompasses Azure, has posted…

It's easy to rise 46% in terms of subscriptions when they offer tens of thousands of dollars worth of their service for free.

Amazon micro instances are basically the same thing...

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#99

Post by skylan_q »

I've been using azure a bunch at work. I don't know where the sales numbers come from. I have reasons for being skeptical after being in on conversations with their sales reps. I hate how they hide important details about their systems. The shroud of mystery is really infuriating.

Useful bits in terms of performance metrics just aren't there or just aren't visible. I've used Amazon's services and Rackspace's services as well. I've had mixed experiences with all of them. I honestly feel that I'd be getting work done much quicker if I was just handed a vmware portal and managed VMs in a datacenter to implement our systems. It's very nice when you're able to SSH into a system and run top or other tools to see what's going on. Running queries or checking out charts that show data at hourly intervals is next to useless. As an added bonus, I wouldn't have to stop queries and go up to the application layer and reconnect to another shard in order to continue my query.

I honestly don't know what's so appealing about Azure. Maybe devs these days don't know how to ping a server or set up a database. If it weren't for getting tons of free cash to start, we'd be on about 1/10th the "budget" using other services. But it's hard to beat free.

Would I ever pay for it? Yes. But only in the situation where I had a bunch of sub-par developers. Id also be looking for an out from the company while getting patted on the back for going with MS.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#100

Post by Encosia »

blantonl wrote: post #43

Who here on HN is running any portion of their startup or established Internet business on Azure?

I'm running an "established Internet business" on Azure. I moved from VPSes to Azure last year when the "Azure Websites" feature was available. It has saved me money over the VPS instances, actually increased performance a bit at the lower price point, and has dramatically lower administration overhead since I'm using it as PaaS.

The only thing negative I could say is that I have a hard time logging into the portal sometimes, due to some weird interaction between my primary MS account and one of my clients' Office365 organizational accounts. So, I sometimes have to switch to an incognito window to log in and use the portal. It's a nuisance, but trivial.

Otherwise, I couldn't be happier.

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