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Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. Initial attempts weren't great (Azure tables, branding

Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. Initial attempts weren't great (Azure tables, branding changes) but they iterated fast and knocked it out the park. Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without the mindshare. Amazing because they are the cloud story - many cheap computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook. Right now, nobody gets fired for using Amazon.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
emilsedgh 8y ago
> Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. I'd be interested to know about the number of: * Linux based deployments on Azure * Windows/.Net based deployments on other providers Basically I'm assuming that all the .NET crowd is hosted at Azure and the rest are being hosted on Amazon/Google/RedHat/Heroku. If that assumption is true (even with 4-5% of room for error) the ~20% would be .NET's share on the backend. Am I missing something obvious?
- dsl 8y ago
  Azure is bought in the boardroom, not by the engineers and ops staff that will use it on a day to day basis. When you have a $xx million Azure minimum commit that your C-level has already written a check for, you yell at your account team until they add Linux support and try to make due with what you have. I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net.
  - lugg 8y ago
    Makes me wonder if instead we might see an MS branded Linux distro (think redhat) or C# native on Linux.
    - ascii_only 8y ago
      They already have both. Azure sphere and .Net core.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    > I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net. Presumably they're making a profit on selling the linux VM's. I think MS have more or less accepted that windows has been outcompeted in the server OS market over the long term. It's hard to compete wih free...
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    Microsoft does not need to shift a single Azure Linux customer to the MS stack to make money on Azure. This was a major mindset breakthrough at MS that Nadella is not responsible for, but has leaned into. MS is not a Windows company anymore, they are back to being a software company. And Linux is fine software. AWS delivers most of Amazon’s profit despite Amazon having no proprietary software story to speak of. Well, MS can do that too. EDIT to add that MS does not even sell consulting services, their partners do. I’m sure the “lift and shift” story makes sense to long-standing MS shops, and MS may have even included that in their Azure pitch to them. But ultimately one of the best things about Azure from MS’s perspective is that they don’t need consulting partners to make money from it. They can reach directly into the product and ops teams at major enterprises and sell them raw capability with a spend that auto-scales.
  - sempron64 8y ago
    Actually Azure has a huge hook at the engineering level in that Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions come with $150 a month in Azure credit. It's very hard to avoid using when you just need to slap a quick demo online and need a server or DB and your in-house IT is away, it's all right there in the IDE... and then you're in hook, line, and sinker. So while there are C-suite level mega-sales, Azure has plenty of grassroots appeal.
    - munchbunny 8y ago
      That's actually a great point, Visual Studio becomes a distribution point for Azure client software and SDK's, meaning you potentially don't have to do any extra configuration the way AWS and GCP require.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 8y ago
  All the .NET projects I have done on the cloud have been deployed on Amazon EC2 instances.
- jpalomaki 8y ago
  Microsoft said in September 2018 "about half Azure VMs are Linux." [1] Of course, that leaves it open what they mean with "VM" here. Are they including all the VMs running in Azure, including those powering Microsoft PaaS offerings (like App Service and Azure SQL) or just customer deployed VMs. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/
fredguth 8y ago
Right. My only complaint on AWS is how confusing it is. Gcloud is much simpler, IMO.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  I've looked into a few AWS service over the last week and coming from Azure I am very confused. It's not at all clear how AWS service are grouped together or why certain resources where created at all. The resource group concept in Azure is, in my opinion, much easier to use and understand that VPCs in AWS.
- cm2187 8y ago
  Azure is horribly complex too. There is an involuntary comical course on pluralsight [1] trying to explain all the different types of services and the small subtleties between services that do about the same thing, but not exactly the same. It’s hard not to leave even more confused. [1] https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/microsoft-azure-developers-what-to-use/table-of-contents https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/microsoft-azure-...
- takeda 8y ago
  AWS is easier to set up than to plan your own data center. The difference is that people who opt for AWS think they no longer need ops, and don't even have knowledge of networking. You still should have at least one network engineer to plan VPC and subnet layout. As for GCP, I think it seems easier, because by default it uses public IPs for each instance. That doesn't necessarily mean that one you set up an instance and it runs, you did it correctly. One nice thing though is that Google uses SDN for their internal networking and that made some things easier. Particularly seamless communication with other regions.
tallanvor 8y ago
Unless your business is in direct competition with other parts of Amazon's service. It's not that businesses actually fear that Amazon will look at the data they have in AWS, but AWS props up other Amazon businesses, and who wants to help prop up their competitor?
- scarface74 8y ago
  Seeing that AWS’s largest customer is Netflix and that AWS has Prime Video, that’s not necessarily a showstopper. The tech industry is all about competitors who partner.
  - pquerna 8y ago
    This isn't true in Retail. As far as I know, most of the top national retail brands in the US all use Azure or GCP as a policy over AWS.
chii 8y ago
> App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook. why did this hurt them? I thought appengine was great when i used it (granted, i never paid them for it - the free tier was way too generous).
- michaelt 8y ago
  It delayed them making the product customers wanted?
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  It gave a lot of developers for a long time an impression that Google only really cares about (maybe) Java and Python and other languages are SOL? It gave a lot of developers for a long time an impression that Google both very much wanted proprietary lock-in (App Engine APIs were extremely distinct to other libraries commonly used for those tasks in those languages), but didn't have the dedication to support a lot of backward/forward compatibility and were happy to change those proprietary APIs seemingly on a whim?
- Shakahs 8y ago
  Three things. First, GAE has drastically, massively improved as a product since it was first introduced in 2008(!). But a lot of people don't know that, and the original reputation remains. Second, App Engine was the original Google Cloud product, it came out years before Compute Engine and never took off like they expected but for awhile it was all they had to offer. Thirdly, in 2011 Google changed the billing model. Datastore requests were no longer free and CPU billing was switched from CPU time to wall time [1]. The old billing model did not account for how some developers were actually using GAE and it was not sustainable, so Google had to make a correction and some apps saw a massive cost increase. This further tarnished the GAE reputation. [1] https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Google-App-Engine-Price-Change-FAQ https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Goog...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

emilsedgh 8y ago

> Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. I'd be interested to know about the number of: * Linux based deployments on Azure * Windows/.Net based deployments on other providers Basically I'm assuming that all the .NET crowd is hosted at Azure and the rest are being hosted on Amazon/Google/RedHat/Heroku. If that assumption is true (even with 4-5% of room for error) the ~20% would be .NET's share on the backend. Am I missing something obvious?

dsl 8y ago
Azure is bought in the boardroom, not by the engineers and ops staff that will use it on a day to day basis. When you have a $xx million Azure minimum commit that your C-level has already written a check for, you yell at your account team until they add Linux support and try to make due with what you have. I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net.
- lugg 8y ago
  Makes me wonder if instead we might see an MS branded Linux distro (think redhat) or C# native on Linux.
  - ascii_only 8y ago
    They already have both. Azure sphere and .Net core.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  > I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net. Presumably they're making a profit on selling the linux VM's. I think MS have more or less accepted that windows has been outcompeted in the server OS market over the long term. It's hard to compete wih free...
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  Microsoft does not need to shift a single Azure Linux customer to the MS stack to make money on Azure. This was a major mindset breakthrough at MS that Nadella is not responsible for, but has leaned into. MS is not a Windows company anymore, they are back to being a software company. And Linux is fine software. AWS delivers most of Amazon’s profit despite Amazon having no proprietary software story to speak of. Well, MS can do that too. EDIT to add that MS does not even sell consulting services, their partners do. I’m sure the “lift and shift” story makes sense to long-standing MS shops, and MS may have even included that in their Azure pitch to them. But ultimately one of the best things about Azure from MS’s perspective is that they don’t need consulting partners to make money from it. They can reach directly into the product and ops teams at major enterprises and sell them raw capability with a spend that auto-scales.
- sempron64 8y ago
  Actually Azure has a huge hook at the engineering level in that Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions come with $150 a month in Azure credit. It's very hard to avoid using when you just need to slap a quick demo online and need a server or DB and your in-house IT is away, it's all right there in the IDE... and then you're in hook, line, and sinker. So while there are C-suite level mega-sales, Azure has plenty of grassroots appeal.
  - munchbunny 8y ago
    That's actually a great point, Visual Studio becomes a distribution point for Azure client software and SDK's, meaning you potentially don't have to do any extra configuration the way AWS and GCP require.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 8y ago
All the .NET projects I have done on the cloud have been deployed on Amazon EC2 instances.
jpalomaki 8y ago
Microsoft said in September 2018 "about half Azure VMs are Linux." [1] Of course, that leaves it open what they mean with "VM" here. Are they including all the VMs running in Azure, including those powering Microsoft PaaS offerings (like App Service and Azure SQL) or just customer deployed VMs. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/

fredguth 8y ago

Right. My only complaint on AWS is how confusing it is. Gcloud is much simpler, IMO.

mrweasel 8y ago
I've looked into a few AWS service over the last week and coming from Azure I am very confused. It's not at all clear how AWS service are grouped together or why certain resources where created at all. The resource group concept in Azure is, in my opinion, much easier to use and understand that VPCs in AWS.
cm2187 8y ago
Azure is horribly complex too. There is an involuntary comical course on pluralsight [1] trying to explain all the different types of services and the small subtleties between services that do about the same thing, but not exactly the same. It’s hard not to leave even more confused. [1] https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/microsoft-azure-developers-what-to-use/table-of-contents https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/microsoft-azure-...
takeda 8y ago
AWS is easier to set up than to plan your own data center. The difference is that people who opt for AWS think they no longer need ops, and don't even have knowledge of networking. You still should have at least one network engineer to plan VPC and subnet layout. As for GCP, I think it seems easier, because by default it uses public IPs for each instance. That doesn't necessarily mean that one you set up an instance and it runs, you did it correctly. One nice thing though is that Google uses SDN for their internal networking and that made some things easier. Particularly seamless communication with other regions.

tallanvor 8y ago

Unless your business is in direct competition with other parts of Amazon's service. It's not that businesses actually fear that Amazon will look at the data they have in AWS, but AWS props up other Amazon businesses, and who wants to help prop up their competitor?

scarface74 8y ago
Seeing that AWS’s largest customer is Netflix and that AWS has Prime Video, that’s not necessarily a showstopper. The tech industry is all about competitors who partner.
- pquerna 8y ago
  This isn't true in Retail. As far as I know, most of the top national retail brands in the US all use Azure or GCP as a policy over AWS.

chii 8y ago

> App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook. why did this hurt them? I thought appengine was great when i used it (granted, i never paid them for it - the free tier was way too generous).

michaelt 8y ago
It delayed them making the product customers wanted?
WorldMaker 8y ago
It gave a lot of developers for a long time an impression that Google only really cares about (maybe) Java and Python and other languages are SOL? It gave a lot of developers for a long time an impression that Google both very much wanted proprietary lock-in (App Engine APIs were extremely distinct to other libraries commonly used for those tasks in those languages), but didn't have the dedication to support a lot of backward/forward compatibility and were happy to change those proprietary APIs seemingly on a whim?
Shakahs 8y ago
Three things. First, GAE has drastically, massively improved as a product since it was first introduced in 2008(!). But a lot of people don't know that, and the original reputation remains. Second, App Engine was the original Google Cloud product, it came out years before Compute Engine and never took off like they expected but for awhile it was all they had to offer. Thirdly, in 2011 Google changed the billing model. Datastore requests were no longer free and CPU billing was switched from CPU time to wall time [1]. The old billing model did not account for how some developers were actually using GAE and it was not sustainable, so Google had to make a correction and some apps saw a massive cost increase. This further tarnished the GAE reputation. [1] https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Google-App-Engine-Price-Change-FAQ https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Goog...