4 ms·

As I mentioned up-thread, the only thing "special" about Amazon is that there isn't a single competitor in ALL their spaces. Each space definitely has competit

As I mentioned up-thread, the only thing "special" about Amazon is that there isn't a single competitor in ALL their spaces. Each space definitely has competitors that would step up. My experiences with AD are anything other than "ease of use", but again, I tend to live outside the MS stack, and it's been 15 or so years since I did anything remotely related (I did a lot of interaction with some LDAP servers, but only interact with AD as an end-user...where I have weird issues like "must authenticate with a userId@domain that is not my actual email address at that domain" or "Have to look up everyone by last name, even though we have 50 Agrawals but only one Preetha" or "can't get a frigging email address without navigating into contact details, and that won't even work if it's a forward email from someone outside" (though that might be Outlook). Voicing these complaints gets me "oh, you just don't have a good administrator", but...just about every place I've been has had these issues, so either AD isn't that easy to use or everything else is REALLY bad. I'm also uncertain what functionality AD has that isn't specific to integrating with the MS Stack, but that's a literal lack of knowledge, not a criticism.

tw04 10y ago
Amazon doesn't have any competitors? They are literally Walmart or Target + leasing access to their IT infrastructure. Name one thing that isn't AWS that doesn't overlap with Target/Walmart. And AWS literally maps to Walmart IT and Target IT, they just aren't interested in competing in that space (and rightly so). As for AD: An email address isn't an identity. I'm not sure why you would expect the two to match. I don't login to my mac with tw04@gmail.com, I don't expect to login to my Windows laptop with tw04@mydomain.com either. The searching I can only surmise you were doing it wrong? I've never had an issue searching by first or last name in any tool whether it be the AD tools themselves or Outlook. AD is a directory server, it can service a Windows environment or a Mac environment or a Linux environment. They've got a complete implementation of LDAP if you choose not to use AD auth on the client side. That being said: EVERYONE integrates with AD. Very few people integrate with anything else. I like having unified auth in my environment, perhaps you enjoy managing local hosts but that sounds disgusting to me.

tw04 10y ago

Amazon doesn't have any competitors? They are literally Walmart or Target + leasing access to their IT infrastructure. Name one thing that isn't AWS that doesn't overlap with Target/Walmart. And AWS literally maps to Walmart IT and Target IT, they just aren't interested in competing in that space (and rightly so). As for AD: An email address isn't an identity. I'm not sure why you would expect the two to match. I don't login to my mac with tw04@gmail.com, I don't expect to login to my Windows laptop with tw04@mydomain.com either. The searching I can only surmise you were doing it wrong? I've never had an issue searching by first or last name in any tool whether it be the AD tools themselves or Outlook. AD is a directory server, it can service a Windows environment or a Mac environment or a Linux environment. They've got a complete implementation of LDAP if you choose not to use AD auth on the client side. That being said: EVERYONE integrates with AD. Very few people integrate with anything else. I like having unified auth in my environment, perhaps you enjoy managing local hosts but that sounds disgusting to me.