MS has more user facing SaaS offerings than Amazon, so both are not impacted the same way due to the lock down. What is the AWS equivalent of Teams & Office 365? Chime and work docs? The comparison is apples to oranges.
Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
81–90 of 92 posts
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't Zoom on AWS? So are Slack and Chime (the little known AWS competitor to Teams). As are parts of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and of course Prime Video. I don't know the exact numbers but I'm pretty sure the rise in popularity of Zoom is just as high, if not possibly higher, than Teams. Entire universities of 50k+ students started using Zoom for online classes, not to mention all of the companies that have started us…
>The software giant counted 32 million daily active users of Teams last week on March 11th, but this jumped by 12 million to 44 million daily active users yesterday. https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/19/21186452/microsoft-teams-... Zoom does not release numbers but they have seen an increase say in usage but if we look at estimated numbers: >Zoom had 12.92 million monthly active users, up 21% since the end of 2019, Chr…
> Zoom does not release numbers
Zoom released some numbers a couple of days ago:
“To put this growth in context, as of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid.”
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u...
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google? Did not they have a multi-hour outage just a few days ago?
Google employee here (my own statements, not the company's, blah blah blah). The incident last week was due to hardware failure and completely unrelated to Capacity or COVID. https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20002
I don't think this thread is about capacity. The comment I was replying to was about general service availability.
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS even admits that only 5% of enterprise IT spend is in the cloud.
I think its safe to say that more consumer services are using AWS than Azure, things like Spotify, Netflix, Snapchat, etc. But when it comes to large enterprises, I'd bet that Azure is first place by a significant margin. Given that these enterprises power a significant chunk of the worlds supply chains, manufacturing processes and so on, I'd say that the piece of the digital world that Azure offers is way more criti…
Amazon always brags that they have twice as many Windows VMs running as Azure.
I’m by no means a Windows hater. I’ve never developed on anything professionally besides a Windows computer - these days .Net Core, Python and Node. But once I started working with AWS, I avoided deploying to Windows servers like the plague. Anytime you add Windows to the mix you basically more than double your cost between Windows licenses and the increased hardware required over running Linux.
All that to say, no one chooses to use Windows on AWS. So if there are that many Windows instances on AWS, they are more than likely old enterprise workloads.
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#85> Since Microsoft’s other businesses are either hardware or office software, with the exception of maybe XBox’s gaming, it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges. Uh, as a former Microsoft equivalent of a SRE this is a utterly ridiculous statement. I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry - we definitely…
Office 365 was derisively referred to as “Office 360” with some good reason years ago. (I use it and the uptime has gotten noticeably better. That it could get noticeably better is the problem.)
And now it’s going to be Microsoft 365!
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what the house is for. The senate is there so the larger states don't trample over, say, Idaho. Majority rules does NOT work for the USA. You have to think of us as the EU with member votes for each country (country being state). This nation is not supposed to be about the federal government, it all went to shit around 9/11 and has continued to do so.
> it all went to shit around 9/11 Not really. You could argue that it's been like this for a while. Depending on what you want to judge, there's - Johnson's Great Society (Medicaid and Medicare, urban renewal, War on Poverty) - Eisenhower (Interstates, the first nationwide public transportation network) - FDR (The New Deal, Social Security)
I would go even earlier
- Fugitive Slave Act (Federal government uses military force to kidnap people who were, according to the laws of the state they were in, free citizens and force them back into captivity)
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
and have 6% representation in the Senate...
That's what the house is for. The senate is there so the larger states don't trample over, say, Idaho. Majority rules does NOT work for the USA. You have to think of us as the EU with member votes for each country (country being state). This nation is not supposed to be about the federal government, it all went to shit around 9/11 and has continued to do so.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the Senate arrangement is a good thing - it just happened to be the compromise they had to settle on to move forward with the Constitution back in the day. EC is a similar arrangement.
But one has to remember that this was back when there were 13 states, and the states themselves were very different from what they are today. So was the federal government, of course (and the change in that began long before 9/11). What may have been a reasonable compromise back then is not necessarily so reasonable today.
Interestingly, the Federalist papers, when arguing for the new Constitution, criticized the Articles of Confederation arrangement of one-state-one-vote - but that criticism is formulated broadly enough that in today's context, it's just as applicable to the Senate:
"Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."
Note the highlighted bit. At the time it was written, a simple majority of the states could be had with less than one-third of the total population represented by those votes. Today, a 75% supermajority of the states (as necessary to e.g. ratify constitutional amendments) can be had with less than 1/4 of the total population of the country. It's a very different balance, and given how much more important the Senate specifically is due to Supreme Court appointment, I'd say that the warning Hamilton gave to smaller states in the Confederation is once again fully in force today.
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#88Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it all went to shit around 9/11 Not really. You could argue that it's been like this for a while. Depending on what you want to judge, there's - Johnson's Great Society (Medicaid and Medicare, urban renewal, War on Poverty) - Eisenhower (Interstates, the first nationwide public transportation network) - FDR (The New Deal, Social Security)
I would go even earlier - Fugitive Slave Act (Federal government uses military force to kidnap people who were, according to the laws of the state they were in, free citizens and force them back into captivity)
I'd go even further:
- The Constitution, which was a coup that displaced the old confederation of states.
Re: Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> we definitely knew how to prepare for traffic surges and keep our services "always on" Okay, but as a heavy customer of AWS for 10 years and Azure & GCP for 6 years... there's some very valid criticism of the capacity planning and elasticity. I hit capacity, provisioning and scaling issues all the time in Azure regions. And many times the cause is not obvious because most services seem to be unaware that the resou…
AWS have the same sort of problems sometimes, try to use 100/1000s of some C5 instances in some regions.
even getting 20 r4.4xlarges in us-east1 in some AZs was a problem for our workloads a few months ago