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Microsoft must be minting money from their subscription and Azure services. We replaced three servers with Office 365 online and Azure virtual machines and Azur

Microsoft must be minting money from their subscription and Azure services. We replaced three servers with Office 365 online and Azure virtual machines and Azure AD. It has several advantages but cost is not one. Anyone that says moving to the cloud saves you money is likely wrong.

mrmondo 11y ago
Not alone there, Microsoft is especially expensive for what you actually get but the more common players such as AWS and Rackspace are highly cost ineffective in many situations. I really wish people would stop calling it 'the cloud' and call it what it is 'outsourced hardware'.
- inopinatus 11y ago
  And a whole bunch of other capabilities. My company couldn't exist if we had to buy & configure our own servers, storage, switching, load balancers, databases, monitoring &c. Characterising the AWS & Azure clouds as "outsourced hardware" demonstrates a real lack of awareness of the services that are available. As a third-party offering, they are about as far from old-style mainframe bureau computing as you can get, in every dimension from the architectural to the commercial. Cloud computing means the entire DC is programmable, and I use it as such. Moreover the unprecedented level of automation means I can spend a lot more time on creating customer value rather than faffing around with admin. The shift I've seen in the last three decades* has been phenomenal. Teams aren't smaller but they are vastly more productive. * yes I have been in tech that long :~
  - mrmondo 11y ago
    If you host your own servers or even PaaS wherever, and you don't have an API and automation framework then yes - you will see benefits from having those things provided to you. If you already have these things and you're not spending a lot of time to make sure they continue to exist then you have a lot more freedom than locking into the tools that your 'cloud' provider has given you.
    - inopinatus 11y ago
      What lock-in? I'm deploying standards-based applications to standards-compliant platforms. Cloud services are simply saving us heaps of time & money. There's no loss of freedom, far from it; the disposability of cloud infrastructure provides enormous opportunity for adaptation and change. In 100% of my experience to date, "cloud lock-in" is a myth trotted out by server huggers and hardware salesmen. Some SaaS providers may be data prisons, sure, but that's a different conversation. If the economics of establishing and operating off-cloud resources ever made sense for us, we'd go for it, but it looks increasingly unlikely.
      - mrmondo 11y ago
        One example of that I've seen have spent significant time on tools like cloudformation can only (as far as I know) be used on AWS. Another would be where when you need decent storage performance - we have several cases where we use 20-40K IOP/s quite easily and doing that kind of work on the current cloud offerings is very expensive and usually involves significantly increase complexity if say you need this in your database layer as you suddenly have the need to scale horizontally while maintaining consistency and durability which is difficult. We can provision 6TB of networked 1M 4K random read IOP/s storage in a highly redundant, load balanced form that's easy to upgrade and scale for less than $500/month and it has little to no management overhead. Now while this may not be what your average startup requires it opens up a world of opportunity to how and what you do with your data. Edit: I should note that we do, where appropriate use 'cloud' services including Rackspace, AWS and Azure where appropriate. Azure has had significant performance issues and has a lot of provable downtime especially due to internal network routing and DNS problems that they fail to acknowledge and we've found their support to be a joke if you know what you need / are doing, even their own O365 service has weekly outages that can take several minutes to resolve. Rackspace's support has been good but they do have a lot of small outages again often network related. AWS' has been alright be very costly unless you're doing either very small deployments or at the other end of the scale massive, horizontally scalable deployments, however their storage performance is woeful. For our mission critical or high performance deployments using our internally hosted platform is significantly fast and almost always cheaper. Our uptime across the platform is fantastic and it generally 'just works' while we watch our cloud hosted services suffer from inconsistent performance and service 'blips'.
- twistedpair 11y ago
  Ever used spot instances? If you use "cloudy" strategies and shop your work to the cheapest AZ's, and only run the jobs when the spot price is right, you can run some pretty nice instances on AWS for cheaper than any other provider. However, if you just want a rack of servers running 24/7, regardless of utilization, you might as well go back to the colo.
curiousDog 11y ago
Well you're probably saving on manpower though right?
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Some times people do, often they don't. We learnt that dealing with 3rd party vendors is a very time consuming and costly ordeal, especially when you realise that they don't care about your business, only about your money.
lostcolony 11y ago
If you're just replacing hardware, yeah, cost isn't an advantage. Because you still have your datacenter (or not enough hardware to have ever required one), you still have your IT department (or not enough systems to have ever required one), you still have to have your devops team (or not enough software/instances to have ever require one), etc. The advantage of a lot of these is that you don't need any of that. You can have just a dev team, nothing else, and be up and running at any scale. At that point cost comparisons may come out in favor of a cloud solution (or at any rate are so close that the tradeoffs become acceptable, hence their popularity)
- _delirium 11y ago
  > You can have just a dev team, nothing else, and be up and running at any scale. Has anyone done this in practice at significant scale? Every shop I know of with a big cloud deployment has armies of devops people managing the deployment, and further reserve armies on pager-duty standby in case something blows up. They're certainly doing different things than if you had an in-house datacenter (less hardware maintenance, more cloud orchestration), but I'm not convinced the sysadmin/devops headcount has actually gone down.
  - adventured 11y ago
    There are plenty of examples at this point. A few I can think of off the top of my head - TwitPic relied on it and operated as basically a one or few person shop the entire time. At the peak, before Twitter came up with their own solution, it was a relatively large service. Instagram, Imgur, and Reddit all had/have (Instagram of course moved to FB) small teams operating at vast scale with the help of AWS. Slack has probably benefited a lot from leaning on AWS for scaling purposes, given their rapid growth. I'd place a bet that they have managed to achieve their scale with a relatively small team managing their infrastructure.
    - mattmanser 11y ago
      You mean Imgur and Reddit that keep going down and have always been notoriously bad at staying up? Not a good example at all. Also Twitpic didn't reduce their sysops, they simply kept it low, AWS didn't do that, a server which serves much more complex stuff and many more people than twitpic can be run by one person, see stackoverflow. There are a lot of people out there who don't realize what can be done with one or two dedicated servers and one or a handful of good developers without ever mucking around with cloud. Cloud can just add yet another point of failure to a small business if it wasn't worth it in the first place.
mappingbabeljc 11y ago
Hiya. One of the authors of the article here. We also reported this week that Azure alone likely did about $400m in revenue for Microsoft in June quarter, versus for Amazon on $1.8 billion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/microsoft-s-azure-had-about-400-million-sales-in-june-quarter http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/microsoft-...
michaelt 11y ago
Anyone that says moving to the cloud saves you money is likely wrong. Evidently you've never worked at a place where database disk space costs $31,000 for a terabyte. :)
- iwalton3 11y ago
  > $31,000 for a terabyte What kind of storage are we talking here? Even 1TB server SSDs don't cost nearly that much.
  - Daviey 11y ago
    Factor in geo-replication, HA/redundancy, tiers of backup, archiving, ACL management and auditing.. I could well believe it.
ownagefool 11y ago
Compared to what? Running a rack of servers? Sure. Running a 3 datacentre presence with low latency interconnect and enough spare capacity to deal with failure? I'm not so sure.

mrmondo 11y ago

Not alone there, Microsoft is especially expensive for what you actually get but the more common players such as AWS and Rackspace are highly cost ineffective in many situations. I really wish people would stop calling it 'the cloud' and call it what it is 'outsourced hardware'.

inopinatus 11y ago
And a whole bunch of other capabilities. My company couldn't exist if we had to buy & configure our own servers, storage, switching, load balancers, databases, monitoring &c. Characterising the AWS & Azure clouds as "outsourced hardware" demonstrates a real lack of awareness of the services that are available. As a third-party offering, they are about as far from old-style mainframe bureau computing as you can get, in every dimension from the architectural to the commercial. Cloud computing means the entire DC is programmable, and I use it as such. Moreover the unprecedented level of automation means I can spend a lot more time on creating customer value rather than faffing around with admin. The shift I've seen in the last three decades* has been phenomenal. Teams aren't smaller but they are vastly more productive. * yes I have been in tech that long :~
- mrmondo 11y ago
  If you host your own servers or even PaaS wherever, and you don't have an API and automation framework then yes - you will see benefits from having those things provided to you. If you already have these things and you're not spending a lot of time to make sure they continue to exist then you have a lot more freedom than locking into the tools that your 'cloud' provider has given you.
  - inopinatus 11y ago
    What lock-in? I'm deploying standards-based applications to standards-compliant platforms. Cloud services are simply saving us heaps of time & money. There's no loss of freedom, far from it; the disposability of cloud infrastructure provides enormous opportunity for adaptation and change. In 100% of my experience to date, "cloud lock-in" is a myth trotted out by server huggers and hardware salesmen. Some SaaS providers may be data prisons, sure, but that's a different conversation. If the economics of establishing and operating off-cloud resources ever made sense for us, we'd go for it, but it looks increasingly unlikely.
    - mrmondo 11y ago
      One example of that I've seen have spent significant time on tools like cloudformation can only (as far as I know) be used on AWS. Another would be where when you need decent storage performance - we have several cases where we use 20-40K IOP/s quite easily and doing that kind of work on the current cloud offerings is very expensive and usually involves significantly increase complexity if say you need this in your database layer as you suddenly have the need to scale horizontally while maintaining consistency and durability which is difficult. We can provision 6TB of networked 1M 4K random read IOP/s storage in a highly redundant, load balanced form that's easy to upgrade and scale for less than $500/month and it has little to no management overhead. Now while this may not be what your average startup requires it opens up a world of opportunity to how and what you do with your data. Edit: I should note that we do, where appropriate use 'cloud' services including Rackspace, AWS and Azure where appropriate. Azure has had significant performance issues and has a lot of provable downtime especially due to internal network routing and DNS problems that they fail to acknowledge and we've found their support to be a joke if you know what you need / are doing, even their own O365 service has weekly outages that can take several minutes to resolve. Rackspace's support has been good but they do have a lot of small outages again often network related. AWS' has been alright be very costly unless you're doing either very small deployments or at the other end of the scale massive, horizontally scalable deployments, however their storage performance is woeful. For our mission critical or high performance deployments using our internally hosted platform is significantly fast and almost always cheaper. Our uptime across the platform is fantastic and it generally 'just works' while we watch our cloud hosted services suffer from inconsistent performance and service 'blips'.
twistedpair 11y ago
Ever used spot instances? If you use "cloudy" strategies and shop your work to the cheapest AZ's, and only run the jobs when the spot price is right, you can run some pretty nice instances on AWS for cheaper than any other provider. However, if you just want a rack of servers running 24/7, regardless of utilization, you might as well go back to the colo.

curiousDog 11y ago

Well you're probably saving on manpower though right?

mrmondo 11y ago
Some times people do, often they don't. We learnt that dealing with 3rd party vendors is a very time consuming and costly ordeal, especially when you realise that they don't care about your business, only about your money.

lostcolony 11y ago

If you're just replacing hardware, yeah, cost isn't an advantage. Because you still have your datacenter (or not enough hardware to have ever required one), you still have your IT department (or not enough systems to have ever required one), you still have to have your devops team (or not enough software/instances to have ever require one), etc. The advantage of a lot of these is that you don't need any of that. You can have just a dev team, nothing else, and be up and running at any scale. At that point cost comparisons may come out in favor of a cloud solution (or at any rate are so close that the tradeoffs become acceptable, hence their popularity)

_delirium 11y ago
> You can have just a dev team, nothing else, and be up and running at any scale. Has anyone done this in practice at significant scale? Every shop I know of with a big cloud deployment has armies of devops people managing the deployment, and further reserve armies on pager-duty standby in case something blows up. They're certainly doing different things than if you had an in-house datacenter (less hardware maintenance, more cloud orchestration), but I'm not convinced the sysadmin/devops headcount has actually gone down.
- adventured 11y ago
  There are plenty of examples at this point. A few I can think of off the top of my head - TwitPic relied on it and operated as basically a one or few person shop the entire time. At the peak, before Twitter came up with their own solution, it was a relatively large service. Instagram, Imgur, and Reddit all had/have (Instagram of course moved to FB) small teams operating at vast scale with the help of AWS. Slack has probably benefited a lot from leaning on AWS for scaling purposes, given their rapid growth. I'd place a bet that they have managed to achieve their scale with a relatively small team managing their infrastructure.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    You mean Imgur and Reddit that keep going down and have always been notoriously bad at staying up? Not a good example at all. Also Twitpic didn't reduce their sysops, they simply kept it low, AWS didn't do that, a server which serves much more complex stuff and many more people than twitpic can be run by one person, see stackoverflow. There are a lot of people out there who don't realize what can be done with one or two dedicated servers and one or a handful of good developers without ever mucking around with cloud. Cloud can just add yet another point of failure to a small business if it wasn't worth it in the first place.

mappingbabeljc 11y ago

Hiya. One of the authors of the article here. We also reported this week that Azure alone likely did about $400m in revenue for Microsoft in June quarter, versus for Amazon on $1.8 billion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/microsoft-s-azure-had-about-400-million-sales-in-june-quarter http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/microsoft-...

michaelt 11y ago

Anyone that says moving to the cloud saves you money is likely wrong. Evidently you've never worked at a place where database disk space costs $31,000 for a terabyte. :)

iwalton3 11y ago
> $31,000 for a terabyte What kind of storage are we talking here? Even 1TB server SSDs don't cost nearly that much.
- Daviey 11y ago
  Factor in geo-replication, HA/redundancy, tiers of backup, archiving, ACL management and auditing.. I could well believe it.

ownagefool 11y ago

Compared to what? Running a rack of servers? Sure. Running a 3 datacentre presence with low latency interconnect and enough spare capacity to deal with failure? I'm not so sure.