4 ms·

And Azure has an insane amount of headroom to grow in to, if they do well. The market there is potentially huge, on the order of multiple times bigger than all

by dmoy 8y ago

And Azure has an insane amount of headroom to grow in to, if they do well. The market there is potentially huge, on the order of multiple times bigger than all advertising.

bryanlarsen 8y ago
Top line (gross revenue) growth potential is massive. Bottom line (net revenue) growth is much more questionable. If you're just selling CPU cycles, that's a commodity in a market with strong competition keeping prices down. And Google/Kubernetes is working hard to turn the other value adds of AWS/Azure into a commodity as well.
- arethuza 8y ago
  Microsoft has a huge portfolio of application with SaaS versions (from SharePoint through to Dynamics 365 CRM and ERPs) - Google doesn't play in those spaces at all.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    But Microsoft is not competition free in any of those fields. The question then becomes how much of a bundling advantage Microsoft can give itself. Many of these competitors are or should be supporting Kubernetes to pursue a "commoditize the complements" strategy.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      But the competitors in those fields say Oracle or SAP are minor players elsewhere. Microsoft's pretty open about SaaS > PaaS > IaaS - raw VMs/containers/storage is a commodity business.
    - StillBored 8y ago
      Its apparently quite significant: https://kevinmccauley.com/2016/02/29/60-percent-of-azure-images-are-linux/ https://kevinmccauley.com/2016/02/29/60-percent-of-azure-ima...
- basch 8y ago
  >If you're just selling CPU cycles That's not the end game. It's to develop services (apis) and sell access to them on a per use basis. Then youre wiring logic between the services. Neither Azure nor AWS nor Google want your code and containers to be portable between infrastructures. They want to offer the hard compute functions to you in rental form.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    Google does want your code and containers to be portable between infrastructures. Kubernetes is very strong evidence of this intent. They appear to have decided that being the obvious place for Kubernetes hosting is worth more to them than competing against AWS & Azure in a world without Kubernetes.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    Until there is a genuinely portable way to move from one to another I'll stick either bare metal or running my own KVM instances on bare metal. From a business risk point of view I don't trust the cloud at all and don't feel comfortable suggesting it to my boss. Long term kubernetes or its three successors might fit the bill but for now running my own stuff has worked out fine.
    - existencebox 8y ago
      I've taken the middle path: Typically I find I can build my apps using standard OSS tooling and just keep it CI'd into a self-contained container or packaged deployment. If I need to roll it out to GCE? Sure. AWS? Sure. Azure? Sure. All 3 at once? no problem. The need to shim common things like "make image, deploy VM, set up VNET" is a pain and does marginally limit portability, but perhaps by nature of my only needing a small set of their IaaS style offerings (compute, networking, MAYBE blob storage/cache if I'm feeling fancy) I've found it rather straightforward to maintain portability through very minimal abstraction. (Disclaimer since I'm talking about cloud stuff, MSFtie, opinions are my own etc)
      - noir_lord 8y ago
- tracker1 8y ago
  One advantage that MS has with Azure over GCP and AWS is the reduction of friction in being able to create hybrid or transitional solutions. You spin up Azure SQL or a Storage account, and with the credentials, you can access and work against them from anywhere. With GCP or AWS, you're stuck trying to create byzantine permissions and/or requiring VPN solutions to get work done. While it may be technically less secure, in many cases reducing friction and getting work done counts for a lot more, even if Azure does cost a bit more than other options.
- GordonS 8y ago
  They're not just selling CPU cycles though - they have a lot of PaaS offerings. For example, an S1 App Service Plan is $73/m - and all that gets you in hardware is a measly 1 core and 1.75GB RAM. When asked by customers why the price is so high, they have said it's because they are not just selling VMs - the service has a lot of value. Although I do still think they are too expensive, especially at the lower end, I'd have to agree that Azure's App Services do provide a lot of value - they really are a joy to work with. I only wish they'd open source it so I could run it on IaaS! Also, given their high VM pricing (IaaS), I'm guessing their margin on VMs is much higher than that of AWS or GCP. Oh, and of course there is bandwidth. Bandwidth is cheap, very much a commodity - but not from Azure/GCP/AWS! Come to think of it, it is interesting that none of the big providers have made any effort to compete on bandwidth...

by dmoy 8y ago

And Azure has an insane amount of headroom to grow in to, if they do well. The market there is potentially huge, on the order of multiple times bigger than all advertising.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

Top line (gross revenue) growth potential is massive. Bottom line (net revenue) growth is much more questionable. If you're just selling CPU cycles, that's a commodity in a market with strong competition keeping prices down. And Google/Kubernetes is working hard to turn the other value adds of AWS/Azure into a commodity as well.

arethuza 8y ago
Microsoft has a huge portfolio of application with SaaS versions (from SharePoint through to Dynamics 365 CRM and ERPs) - Google doesn't play in those spaces at all.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  But Microsoft is not competition free in any of those fields. The question then becomes how much of a bundling advantage Microsoft can give itself. Many of these competitors are or should be supporting Kubernetes to pursue a "commoditize the complements" strategy.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    But the competitors in those fields say Oracle or SAP are minor players elsewhere. Microsoft's pretty open about SaaS > PaaS > IaaS - raw VMs/containers/storage is a commodity business.
  - StillBored 8y ago
    Its apparently quite significant: https://kevinmccauley.com/2016/02/29/60-percent-of-azure-images-are-linux/ https://kevinmccauley.com/2016/02/29/60-percent-of-azure-ima...
basch 8y ago
>If you're just selling CPU cycles That's not the end game. It's to develop services (apis) and sell access to them on a per use basis. Then youre wiring logic between the services. Neither Azure nor AWS nor Google want your code and containers to be portable between infrastructures. They want to offer the hard compute functions to you in rental form.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  Google does want your code and containers to be portable between infrastructures. Kubernetes is very strong evidence of this intent. They appear to have decided that being the obvious place for Kubernetes hosting is worth more to them than competing against AWS & Azure in a world without Kubernetes.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Until there is a genuinely portable way to move from one to another I'll stick either bare metal or running my own KVM instances on bare metal. From a business risk point of view I don't trust the cloud at all and don't feel comfortable suggesting it to my boss. Long term kubernetes or its three successors might fit the bill but for now running my own stuff has worked out fine.
  - existencebox 8y ago
    I've taken the middle path: Typically I find I can build my apps using standard OSS tooling and just keep it CI'd into a self-contained container or packaged deployment. If I need to roll it out to GCE? Sure. AWS? Sure. Azure? Sure. All 3 at once? no problem. The need to shim common things like "make image, deploy VM, set up VNET" is a pain and does marginally limit portability, but perhaps by nature of my only needing a small set of their IaaS style offerings (compute, networking, MAYBE blob storage/cache if I'm feeling fancy) I've found it rather straightforward to maintain portability through very minimal abstraction. (Disclaimer since I'm talking about cloud stuff, MSFtie, opinions are my own etc)
    - noir_lord 8y ago
tracker1 8y ago
One advantage that MS has with Azure over GCP and AWS is the reduction of friction in being able to create hybrid or transitional solutions. You spin up Azure SQL or a Storage account, and with the credentials, you can access and work against them from anywhere. With GCP or AWS, you're stuck trying to create byzantine permissions and/or requiring VPN solutions to get work done. While it may be technically less secure, in many cases reducing friction and getting work done counts for a lot more, even if Azure does cost a bit more than other options.
GordonS 8y ago
They're not just selling CPU cycles though - they have a lot of PaaS offerings. For example, an S1 App Service Plan is $73/m - and all that gets you in hardware is a measly 1 core and 1.75GB RAM. When asked by customers why the price is so high, they have said it's because they are not just selling VMs - the service has a lot of value. Although I do still think they are too expensive, especially at the lower end, I'd have to agree that Azure's App Services do provide a lot of value - they really are a joy to work with. I only wish they'd open source it so I could run it on IaaS! Also, given their high VM pricing (IaaS), I'm guessing their margin on VMs is much higher than that of AWS or GCP. Oh, and of course there is bandwidth. Bandwidth is cheap, very much a commodity - but not from Azure/GCP/AWS! Come to think of it, it is interesting that none of the big providers have made any effort to compete on bandwidth...