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Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

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Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#151

Post by moksly »

ailideex wrote: post #86
moksly wrote: post #7

I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are…

> They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something Yet amazingly their interfaces and quality is incredibly horrible. Azure like most other things Microsoft makes feels like a half baked and over fitted platform with serious quality issues.

I don’t really like the admin interfaces or CLIs of either AWS or Azure. I’ve had an easier time with Azure than AWS for my personal projects, but maybe that’s just from being used to the Microsoft way.

I’m not sure why they are so much harder to use than the smaller services like heroku or digital ocean. You’d think the big guys would have the best and easiest services, but they sure don’t.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#152

Post by oblio »

sciurus wrote: post #149
oblio wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like AWS, but AWS EFS has the same problem. They've improved it a bit through some recent changes, but it's not much better. The way it would work: they gave you absolutely pitiful base IOPS credits for EFS and everything else was related to disk space used. So more disk space used (and paid), more IOPS. After that they'd completely detroy your IOPS if you used up all the credits. By destroy I mean IOPS at the leve…

I think it's throughput credits that EFS gives you (e.g r/w MiB/s), not IOPS. AFAIK they don't document the IOPS available at all. In my experience the latency for an individual i/o operation on EFS is always at the "HDD from 1995" level regardless of available burst credits. Something that does lots of small random I/O like checking out got repos on Jenkins workers is basically worst case for EFS. https://docs.aws.a…

Throughput credits, you're right, my bad.

The agents were in ECS with no persistent storage, so that wasn't the problem. I was just running the Jenkins master off of EFS, for the persistent configuration storage.

And I don't think it's the latency that's killing EFS usage, it's the throughput. While the credits were there, everything went smoothly, once the credits ran out, the base throughput was fit for IO meant for the 90s.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#153

Post by christophilus »

polskibus wrote: post #28
moksly wrote: post #7

I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are…

At this scale, why not invest in your own datacenter, since you already have a lot of servers to maintain? I understand you have to use Office 365, but what is the value prop of Azure to you beyond that ?

My experience with home-rolled solutions suggests there are plenty of hidden costs. Got a new project, and want to spin up some experimental servers? Gotta wade through a bunch of IT guys. Documentation and training around Azure, etc is also going to be better than homegrown alternatives, most likely. Things like that.

It’s hard to put a monetary figure on the frictions costs, but they are there.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#154

Post by auggierose »

alasdair_ wrote: post #18
auggierose wrote: post #10

I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac.

> I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac. I'd love to hear what mac-based GPU cloud computing system you are using. Apple badly needs a cloud compute system. If yo…

Oh I am just using GCP instead. Needed to wait 2 days for it, but at least it worked from the beginning.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#155

Post by auggierose »

auggierose wrote: post #154
alasdair_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac. I'd love to hear what mac-based GPU cloud computing system you are using. Apple badly needs a cloud compute system. If yo…

Oh I am just using GCP instead. Needed to wait 2 days for it, but at least it worked from the beginning.

And yes, I think Apple should work on bringing Metal to the cloud.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#156

Post by webpaymentsguy »

addicted wrote: post #22

I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider…

I'm not sure this is true? I know Azure/MS was way better with sending someone to contact my team (as well as other larger corporations I got to talk to) to figure out a type of partnership with us and determine the level of support we'd need. I don't think Amazon being a competitor is really considered for most cos, either.

I don't think there's some latent distrust of AWS or that people really equate Windows being good means Azure is good - I think it's known Amazon has top tier support, really great reliability and security (like Azure), as well as seemingly the best selection.

GCP for example isn't even in the running for most people even though I'd say Google is probably considered the 'brainiest' tech co.

Source: talked to folks at banks, a handful of startups, and manufacturers who've gone with Azure or AWS when deciding for our biz.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#157

Post by webpaymentsguy »

laurentb wrote: post #127
scarface74 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists. Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.

They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples. However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.

I don't think it's the exception, rather the other way around actually!

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#158

Post by webpaymentsguy »

blihp wrote: post #27
bazza451 wrote: post #5

I would assume it’s due to a lot of the banks running windows and having large AD rollouts means it’s a bit of a gateway to the rest of their cloud services. You have to use Azure ADFS for things like office 365/teams, so would make sense for people to keep all their eggs in one basket.

Unfortunately, Enterprise deals are more based on sales skills than technology. Companies like Microsoft tend to have multiple ongoing points of contact with their Enterprise customers such as account managers, technical account managers, professional services consultants etc. These points of contact are (hopefully) doing whatever it is the customer wants them to but are also feeding back intel to their (Microsoft's)…

Think MS just has a better sales experience for cloud in general after getting to know the space - not just existing contacts.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#159

Post by webpaymentsguy »

mr_toad wrote: post #13
bazza451 wrote: post #5

I would assume it’s due to a lot of the banks running windows and having large AD rollouts means it’s a bit of a gateway to the rest of their cloud services. You have to use Azure ADFS for things like office 365/teams, so would make sense for people to keep all their eggs in one basket.

People like to ding AWS for lock-in, but Microsoft still does it better.

I don't think people worry about about lock in for either when deciding cloud providers, considering cloud agnostic solutions exist when it is a concern.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#160

Post by webpaymentsguy »

GordonS wrote: post #93
iakov wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but want to chime in. My experience with Azure support has been dreadful, to say the least. Insanely long response times, being bounced from agent to agent, people just misreading the ticket. I really don't want to deal with Azure at this point because I don't trust the support. Most of our company infra is on AWS, and while they aren't without fault, I can say that every time we needed to talk to a human bei…

To chime in with another single data point, my experience with Azure support has actually been pretty good. Tickets take anywhere between 2h and 72h to get a response, which I'll grant is not ideal, but the ticket handlers I've dealt with have all been knowledgeable and helpful. I work for enterprise-level companies though, so I don't know if support varies for smaller ones depending on spend.

Do you think you know or could guess an average response time for ticket responses?
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