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$500k of Azure credit for YC startups

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#51

Post by jread »

aceperry wrote: post #30

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.

It's much better now. Check out the new Ivy Bridge/Haswell, SSD backed D and G series VMs. They are a vast improvement over the old AMD/magnetic backed A series.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#53

Post by photorized »

aceperry wrote: post #30

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.

You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use than AWS, for example.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#54

Post by mbesto »

aioprisan wrote: post #25
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.

Sorry, should have clarified. Most early stage startups don't do DevOps or sysadmin well. Imagine the typical YC startup where its just 2-3 developers who are comfortable with the command line, but not comfortable with Chef, Puppet, etc. Having to plan a migration is not fun or productive for a set of developers because it means (1) less time for them to focus on mobile/web development (2) learning to do sysadmin when it's out of their comfort zone.

AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.

note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#55

Post by jread »

photorized wrote: post #53
aceperry wrote: post #30

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.

You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use than AWS, for example.

It was a multi-region, multi-hour outage on Nov 18. To my knowledge AWS has not experienced a multi-region outage. That said, they are learning from these events and improving stability.

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#57

Post by blumkvist »

cbhl wrote: post #33
sz4kerto wrote: post #5

This reminds me of the old joke: Nietzsche: God is dead. God (couple of years later): Nietzsche is dead. pg: Microsoft is dead. http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html Microsoft (couple of years later): Here's some gift* for your startups. :) (*: please don't start explaining that it is not a gift, etc. -- I know. :) )

So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: - Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook. - Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond. I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. I can't help but think that Microsoft h…

Microsoft has been acquiring aprox. 1 company every two months for the last 28 years...

Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

#60

Post by drawkbox »

sz4kerto wrote: post #5

This reminds me of the old joke: Nietzsche: God is dead. God (couple of years later): Nietzsche is dead. pg: Microsoft is dead. http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html Microsoft (couple of years later): Here's some gift* for your startups. :) (*: please don't start explaining that it is not a gift, etc. -- I know. :) )

The old Microsoft (Ballmer era) is dead though.

Microsoft in the last 1-2 years is like a new scrappy competitor who lost market share on hubris. They are now willing to work how developers like to work not forcing them into the corral. Azure is the new OS at Microsoft, lock in higher up the stack but actually not as lock-in as before.

Microsoft went back to developer focus over biz/marketing focus and it is working like it always has.

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