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$500k of Azure credit for YC startups

blog.ycombinator.com

141–150 of 179 posts

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#141
post #115
post #82

Just FYI - the $60k/year Azure offer is technically available for any startup just willing to ask nicely (not limited to just incubators). My company, http://trippeo.com just qualified for it last month (we get $5k/mo free hosting).

For others interested, Softlayer does too. I like their competitive stack compared to AWS.

Link for the interested: https://www.softlayer.com/catalyst

They're a great company. Certly took advantage of the offer and their support and services have been excellent.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#142
The fact that HN doesn't view Microsoft's known complicity with NSA programs (partner of PRISM data collection since before 2007, _NSAKEY[1] before that) as a human rights violation is troubling, to say the least, but it's absolutely unnerving that anyone would trust them (including YC members) to store sensitive data post-Snowden.

Does anyone actually trust cloud services in Five-eyes jurisdictions anymore? Is there a company in those jurisdictions that people could use that is more dangerous to trust than Microsoft?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#145
post #77
post #15

Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services. 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) th…

I'm not very keen on office365. Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :) And the shameless plug: Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If an…

O365 is good for existing corporate customers who use inhouse exchange servers. Thats what microsoft shops are doing these days: migrate from inhouse exchange to O365.

Otherwise, I don't see why small shops wanna move away from gmail to O365.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#146

I hope all startups are made aware of Microsoft BizSpark. You get a pretty spectacular line up of freebies. And freebies that stay free even after you graduate. Free copes of Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Office, etc. It's damn near everything. A++++ would recommend. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx

[deleted]

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#147
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure also has a Heroku-like offering: Azure Websites http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/websites/

Whoa! Didn't know about that! Very cool. No ruby support though :/

Wild... didn't know that. I've been doing mostly node with some C# for the past 3 years... just double checked MS WebMatrix and nope, doesn't look like Ruby is in the box...

Been playing with CoreOS though...

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#149
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not very keen on office365. Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :) And the shameless plug: Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If an…

Are you using the web app or the installed app? I haven't had a bit of a problem with the installed version (The UI can be slow though).

I'm a linux guy I do not need to touch windows or windows clients daily so what I'm talking about is web ui.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#150
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net. I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frig…

I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the situation, I hope you will understand why. I…

Not sure what you mean by where my info went wrong, but my friend worked at a MS datacenter a few years ago, so I don't know what has changed. At the time, almost all of the techs working at the DC were contractors, not MSFT employees. They were severely understaffed and getting cut back constantly. There were a few different companies doing the contracting as well, and all of them were under the threat of losing out to a lower bid company. The competent techs were getting outnumbered by incompetent techs. That and the fact that MS couldn't even renew basic registrations and certificates didn't surprise me with my poor experience with Azure.

Again, this was a couple of years ago. Also, I attended an event that MS held to show off Azure, and a large percentage of participants couldn't spin up an instance within 10 minutes, some of them didn't even start up. The MS people running the event had a direct line to some techs in the datacenter, but they still couldn't solve the problems. I talked with some MS partners/users who told me that Azure was terrible in their experience and even some MS execs admitted as much in private conversation. It sounds like Azure has improved since then, but I really have to wonder how much improvement has occured.

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