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WOW that is a lot of credit. How does Azure stack up "in the real world" compared to Amazon, Rackspace, Google?
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this. For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
However...
For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of those will burn through $500k in no time compared to the equivalent on a more open platform.
Whether or not to use Azure is certainly NOT obvious.
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this. For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
3 years of technical investment is pretty much enough to stop you leaving unless something goes very wrong. This $500k is a small price to pay for a client who goes on to be the next AirBNB or Dropbox. Even just the prestige of having a company like that to draw on for testimonials would justify the spend. However... For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of th…
Why's that? Azure's just another cloud hosting provider. You don't have to run any kind of Microsoft software on the servers.
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this. For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage startups.
That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode and Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills to free services is a no-brainer.
EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.
EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their platform: http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this. For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
3 years of technical investment is pretty much enough to stop you leaving unless something goes very wrong. This $500k is a small price to pay for a client who goes on to be the next AirBNB or Dropbox. Even just the prestige of having a company like that to draw on for testimonials would justify the spend. However... For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of th…
You can spin up bog standard Linux instances if you want. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virt...
You don't have to use a MSFT stack.
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this. For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
3 years of technical investment is pretty much enough to stop you leaving unless something goes very wrong. This $500k is a small price to pay for a client who goes on to be the next AirBNB or Dropbox. Even just the prestige of having a company like that to draw on for testimonials would justify the spend. However... For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of th…
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this. For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
Any idea on the LCV for Azure of the average YC startup? I know the average YC startup is going to be a cut above, but are a large percentage of them going to break the $500k in an early stage?
The oldest tactic in the Proprietary Platform Handbook is giving away free stuff to hook people early on.
In this case Azure can run Linux VMs, so I wouldn't worry much about using them for that. Linux lacks lock in.