$500k of Azure credit for YC startups • Hacker News Board

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#21

Post by junto » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:07 PM UTC

kevinschumacher wrote: post #2

WOW that is a lot of credit. How does Azure stack up "in the real world" compared to Amazon, Rackspace, Google?

Uptime for 2014 compared here: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-computing/...

Azure had 39.77 hours of downtime, whilst Rack space had 7.52 and the winner (of the selected cloud providers was AWS with 2.41 hours.

I'm not sure how those figures were calculated though. These cloud providers are multifaceted. I'm not sure which parts if each's services were analysed.

Also, it is worth considering that one serious problem can distort these averages. AWS has a much more stable long term history.

In my opinion the competition is a good thing and Microsoft seem happy to support whatever framework or OS you want. Their node.js support is supposed to be pretty good.

The marketplace also enables you to get things like MongoDb clusters, etc which is competition for SQL Server. They seem to be interested in supporting customer interests rather than the old fashioned MS tech or die philosophy from back in the day.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#22

Post by morganvachon » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:09 PM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #13

onion2k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience Why's that? Azure's just another cloud hosting provider. You don't have to run any kind of Microsoft software on the servers.

Exactly, and Microsoft is happy to host your own custom Linux-based environment if you want complete control over your stack:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virt...

edit: looks like phonon below beat me to it by a few minutes.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#23

Post by shk » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #3

This seems like a Catch-22. If a startup is successful enough to get into YC, wouldn't they have a stable tech infrastructure already? This would only benefit YC startups who already use Azure. (Unless the switching cost from AWS/Rackspace/Google is low enough nowadays.)

Many startups in YC actually launch during the 3 months they are here. Being successful before entering YC is only true for a small percentage of the companies.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#24

Post by aceperry » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

longlivegnu wrote: post #19

nullspace wrote: post #4

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.

does azure offer any *nix services?

You can instantiate ubuntu servers on azure.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#25

Post by aioprisan » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: 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…

"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#26

Post by philip1209 » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#27

Post by philip1209 » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#28

Post by dkarapetyan » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:13 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #3

This seems like a Catch-22. If a startup is successful enough to get into YC, wouldn't they have a stable tech infrastructure already? This would only benefit YC startups who already use Azure. (Unless the switching cost from AWS/Rackspace/Google is low enough nowadays.)

Pretty much all cloud providers are the same. Once you have your service topology figured out deploying to AWS, Azure, or RackSpace is the easy part.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#29

Post by efiftythree » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:13 PM UTC

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#30

Post by aceperry » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.