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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 t
by 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 agoMakes me wonder if instead we might see an MS branded Linux distro (think redhat) or C# native on Linux.
- ascii_only 8y agoThey 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 agoMicrosoft 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 agoActually 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 agoThat'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.