11 ms·

AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might appear in their #2 position. They use their Office online revenue to boost their nu

by zapita 7y ago

AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might appear in their #2 position. They use their Office online revenue to boost their numbers (EDIT: apparently they don't do that anymore), and their utilization is probably lower than the competition because they rely heavily on bundling new cloud services into legacy contracts at renewal to reach their targets. So lots of Office / Outlook / AD / Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using, but count against their revenue number anyway. On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three. What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead. I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 7y ago
> Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Can you describe what you are referring to here? I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.
- steverb 7y ago
  I've been quite pleased with the Azure stack myself. There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS. I am focused primarily on .Net though, so your YMMV by a lot.
  - andybak 7y ago
    > There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS. Does Azure have an equivalent for this invaluable resource? https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
    - steverb 7y ago
      Oddly enough... the same site has it. https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english
- nfRfqX5n 7y ago
  not exclusive to azure as aws lambda requires API gateway now, but if i wanted to create a cloud function, azure auto generates like 2-3 other separate requires services for storage, http endpoint, etc
  - tstrimple 7y ago
    You do not need an API gateway for an HTTP triggered Azure Function. You do need a storage account, because that's where it stores the files that back your Function.
- callalex 7y ago
  You can’t utilize anything in their tech stack without spending days going back and forth with the licensing department.
  - tuwtuwtuwtuw 7y ago
    What are you talking about? Can you give some examples? Many of their things are licensed under MIT.
Analemma_ 7y ago
This comment is way out of date, Microsoft started reporting O365 revenue separately from Azure revenue years ago.
- zapita 7y ago
  Thanks for the heads up, I added an EDIT. Have they stopped the bundling of Azure in renewals also?
  - fred_is_fred 7y ago
    Not that I know of. "We'll give you SQL Server for free if you buy $300k of Azure" is still par for the course.
lftl 7y ago
> So lots of Office / Outlook / AD / Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using Sounds like an arbitrage opportunity. Have tons of unused Azure credits that were forced on you? We'll happily use them up and pay you back a fraction of that credit.
century19 7y ago
I don't think it's dreadful (but maybe no. 3) and I think Microsoft are the best out of the 3 at Enterprise sales. Google prob the worst of the 3 in that regard (and no. 1 with stack).
- zapita 7y ago
  Yes, Google is absolutely the worst of the 3 in enterprise sales. I hope for their sake that Kurian can fix that.
rzmnzm 7y ago
Azure has a pretty nice tech stack in my experience, what issues are you experiencing with it?
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  There's a laundry list. The resource template format is inhuman gibberish designed for machines. It does idiotic things like manually hard-coding enums in the template to support drop-downs. This means templates go "stale" very quickly and are super fiddly to update to support things like new VM sizes. You cannot export resource groups bigger than a certain size, so if some idiot in your org makes them too big, there's no backup even in this minimalistic sense. There is no "backup" for anything but a handful of object types (Web Apps, VM disks, Secret Vaults, and that's about it). If you want to protect your data, you'd better have an on-premise copy and 100% automated deployment capability. Speaking of automated deployment capability, 99.9% of the Azure docs mention manual deployment or procedural (PowerShell) deployment. Declarative is clearly an afterthought, and mentioned only in passing. Because of this, ~95% of Azure deployments I've seen in the wild were entirely hand built and very fragile. If some malicious admin ran Remove-AzResource on everything, those orgs may as well declare bankruptcy the next day. Despite this fragility, Azure sales reps are pushing-pushing-pushing for their customers to go "all in" on cloud, be "cloud first", and to basically "lift and shift" their data centres. You gotta break a few eggs to meet your quarterly targets, am I right? Right? Guys? Speaking of the PowerShell, it's 99% auto-generated from the JSON API binding definitions, and about 5% of it is documented even in the bare minimum sense. IPv6 "support" is hilarious. They very generously provide a /124 static public subnet prefix. So many addresses! A whole 14 of them! Woo! It's the future now! No need for NAT! A routable address for every endpoint! Let me get right on that, soon as I figure out the fiddly scripting needed to allocate addresses from hundreds of tiny pools. Much fun. If you delete a DNS Zone by accident, you can't properly recover it within 48 hours because they randomly pick one of 10 name server pools. Hence, your NS bindings at the registrar will point at the wrong servers and even if you update this, there's an inevitable propagation delay. I am aware of workarounds for this like Resource Group Pinning, but only because we jumped up and down and forced support to admit that it's a problem. This little "surprise" is still undocumented. Speaking of DNS, until we forced Microsoft to fix it, the only way to back up Azure DNS records (az network dns zone export) would corrupt CNAMES and wouldn't round-trip. Azure DNS uses an idiotic Zone->RecordSet->Record hierarchical structure, which makes small incremental changes hugely fiddly in scripting. You have to download the existing RecordSet, modify it, and then send it back with ETags intact. You can't treat each record as independent rows in a table, even though they effectively are. The Azure DNS servers don't send "Additional" records (e.g.: the matching A records for the target of a CNAME record), which means that a) it's slower for clients, and b) they can charge you more. They have zero incentive to fix this, because it literally doubles their revenue for alias records of all types. DNS Metrics are collected every 2 hours, but the graph displays only daily or hourly intervals, so you either get no detail at all, or a sawtooth graph that gives you no useful feedback at all at best, or is panic inducing at worst. Imagine making a small change, glancing at the graph, and seeing it hit zero. Then... staying at zero for an hour. A joyous time, for sure. I could go on and on. Azure has some neat stuff, but they're moving fast and breaking things, and half their products are basically MVP garbage authored by the lowest-bidding Indian outsourced teams.
Spooky23 7y ago
I'd disagree. Microsoft has an EA with every significant corporate entity, and basically taxes everyone. They have the ability to leverage those relationships unlike any other. Azure is the one to beat, IMO.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Leveraged relationships Oracle has, and look how that turned out for them. Universally hated have they became. Microsoft after a decade of Ballmer is not far from where Oracle is now, despite some recent positive reputation gains. They are already squeezing those relationship by bundling services, and it will be too far too quickly.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Oracle is a very different animal. O365 is a huge lever that isn't going anywhere.
infinitone 7y ago
While AWS has a strong #1 offering in low-hanging fruit products like vms, dbs. I find they have terrible MVP-like execution on niche offerings (and support sucks too) for things like Fargate, K8s, one-off job execution. Azure has a stronger, more thoughtful offering in niche solutions.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  >> Fargate, K8s This is partially because the customers of AWS do not care too much about these solutions. I have seen other solutions used by large customers (still probably classified as a niche) getting improved over time significantly. Fargate and k8s offers very little over a well designed EC2 cluster. This might be another reason.
  - zapita 7y ago
    I think that’s right. ECS for example is mature and in my opinion still the most robust and scalable “container-as-a-service” out there. In spite of the kubernetes hype, I suspect that ECS is more successful than any hosted kubernetes hosted solution out there (in terms of aggregate workload volume and revenue). EKS on the other hand still feels like a checkbox service.
- ElFitz 7y ago
  I'd beg to differ. Between Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, S3, SNS, SQS, API Gateway and now EventBridge, which cost basically nothing at MVP scale and all of which's usage is drastically simplified by tools like the Serverless framework or Amplify, AWS is my go-to for anything MVP I tried Azure. I ran away. I liked GCP, but it seems I'll steer clear for the time being.
  - romanovcode 7y ago
    Yeah, Azure seems pretty good until you calculate your costs and realize you have to pay 200$+ per month for an MVP project with possible of 0 users. I guess if you have the money Azure is pretty good tho.
kerng 7y ago
I think the Azure stack is very solid - UI sucks maybe, but it's best not to use UI anyway. Also, Microsoft naturally is the to-go place if you want a partner to trust as an enterprise. They have proven to support systems and software in the long run. Also, Pentagon just picked Azure over AWS - so Azure has a good run and bright future I'd say.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
My guess is that if Microsoft is able to hold onto the JEDI contract (after Amazon's lawsuit/appeal), Azure is going to be much more unassailable than you think. As it's a huge in to being the de facto US government cloud provider.
eitally 7y ago
I think you're completely wrong. Azure is in the prime position and AWS is on fragile ground. Yes, they have a service for everything, but they've alienated their partners, they aren't viable in an entire industry (Retail), and a significant fraction of their IP is based around creating managed services out of OSS software. My projection is that -- if everything continues along the same trend line we've seen through 2019 -- in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT. Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud but this opinion is my own.
- tstrimple 7y ago
  I recently did some consulting work with a trucking company who is modernizing their mainframe systems and moving to the cloud. They made the decision to cancel all their AWS migration plans and go 100% into Azure due to Amazon moving into logistics and basically becoming a competitor.
- zapita 7y ago
  > in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT. Those are two very bold statements. I think it’s also very unrealistic, but I guess we’ll see!

by zapita 7y ago

tuwtuwtuwtuw 7y ago

> Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Can you describe what you are referring to here? I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.

steverb 7y ago
I've been quite pleased with the Azure stack myself. There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS. I am focused primarily on .Net though, so your YMMV by a lot.
- andybak 7y ago
  > There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS. Does Azure have an equivalent for this invaluable resource? https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
  - steverb 7y ago
    Oddly enough... the same site has it. https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english
nfRfqX5n 7y ago
not exclusive to azure as aws lambda requires API gateway now, but if i wanted to create a cloud function, azure auto generates like 2-3 other separate requires services for storage, http endpoint, etc
- tstrimple 7y ago
  You do not need an API gateway for an HTTP triggered Azure Function. You do need a storage account, because that's where it stores the files that back your Function.
callalex 7y ago
You can’t utilize anything in their tech stack without spending days going back and forth with the licensing department.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 7y ago
  What are you talking about? Can you give some examples? Many of their things are licensed under MIT.

Analemma_ 7y ago

This comment is way out of date, Microsoft started reporting O365 revenue separately from Azure revenue years ago.

zapita 7y ago
Thanks for the heads up, I added an EDIT. Have they stopped the bundling of Azure in renewals also?
- fred_is_fred 7y ago
  Not that I know of. "We'll give you SQL Server for free if you buy $300k of Azure" is still par for the course.

lftl 7y ago

> So lots of Office / Outlook / AD / Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using Sounds like an arbitrage opportunity. Have tons of unused Azure credits that were forced on you? We'll happily use them up and pay you back a fraction of that credit.

century19 7y ago

I don't think it's dreadful (but maybe no. 3) and I think Microsoft are the best out of the 3 at Enterprise sales. Google prob the worst of the 3 in that regard (and no. 1 with stack).

zapita 7y ago
Yes, Google is absolutely the worst of the 3 in enterprise sales. I hope for their sake that Kurian can fix that.

rzmnzm 7y ago

Azure has a pretty nice tech stack in my experience, what issues are you experiencing with it?

jiggawatts 7y ago
There's a laundry list. The resource template format is inhuman gibberish designed for machines. It does idiotic things like manually hard-coding enums in the template to support drop-downs. This means templates go "stale" very quickly and are super fiddly to update to support things like new VM sizes. You cannot export resource groups bigger than a certain size, so if some idiot in your org makes them too big, there's no backup even in this minimalistic sense. There is no "backup" for anything but a handful of object types (Web Apps, VM disks, Secret Vaults, and that's about it). If you want to protect your data, you'd better have an on-premise copy and 100% automated deployment capability. Speaking of automated deployment capability, 99.9% of the Azure docs mention manual deployment or procedural (PowerShell) deployment. Declarative is clearly an afterthought, and mentioned only in passing. Because of this, ~95% of Azure deployments I've seen in the wild were entirely hand built and very fragile. If some malicious admin ran Remove-AzResource on everything, those orgs may as well declare bankruptcy the next day. Despite this fragility, Azure sales reps are pushing-pushing-pushing for their customers to go "all in" on cloud, be "cloud first", and to basically "lift and shift" their data centres. You gotta break a few eggs to meet your quarterly targets, am I right? Right? Guys? Speaking of the PowerShell, it's 99% auto-generated from the JSON API binding definitions, and about 5% of it is documented even in the bare minimum sense. IPv6 "support" is hilarious. They very generously provide a /124 static public subnet prefix. So many addresses! A whole 14 of them! Woo! It's the future now! No need for NAT! A routable address for every endpoint! Let me get right on that, soon as I figure out the fiddly scripting needed to allocate addresses from hundreds of tiny pools. Much fun. If you delete a DNS Zone by accident, you can't properly recover it within 48 hours because they randomly pick one of 10 name server pools. Hence, your NS bindings at the registrar will point at the wrong servers and even if you update this, there's an inevitable propagation delay. I am aware of workarounds for this like Resource Group Pinning, but only because we jumped up and down and forced support to admit that it's a problem. This little "surprise" is still undocumented. Speaking of DNS, until we forced Microsoft to fix it, the only way to back up Azure DNS records (az network dns zone export) would corrupt CNAMES and wouldn't round-trip. Azure DNS uses an idiotic Zone->RecordSet->Record hierarchical structure, which makes small incremental changes hugely fiddly in scripting. You have to download the existing RecordSet, modify it, and then send it back with ETags intact. You can't treat each record as independent rows in a table, even though they effectively are. The Azure DNS servers don't send "Additional" records (e.g.: the matching A records for the target of a CNAME record), which means that a) it's slower for clients, and b) they can charge you more. They have zero incentive to fix this, because it literally doubles their revenue for alias records of all types. DNS Metrics are collected every 2 hours, but the graph displays only daily or hourly intervals, so you either get no detail at all, or a sawtooth graph that gives you no useful feedback at all at best, or is panic inducing at worst. Imagine making a small change, glancing at the graph, and seeing it hit zero. Then... staying at zero for an hour. A joyous time, for sure. I could go on and on. Azure has some neat stuff, but they're moving fast and breaking things, and half their products are basically MVP garbage authored by the lowest-bidding Indian outsourced teams.

Spooky23 7y ago

I'd disagree. Microsoft has an EA with every significant corporate entity, and basically taxes everyone. They have the ability to leverage those relationships unlike any other. Azure is the one to beat, IMO.

Aperocky 7y ago
Leveraged relationships Oracle has, and look how that turned out for them. Universally hated have they became. Microsoft after a decade of Ballmer is not far from where Oracle is now, despite some recent positive reputation gains. They are already squeezing those relationship by bundling services, and it will be too far too quickly.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Oracle is a very different animal. O365 is a huge lever that isn't going anywhere.

infinitone 7y ago

While AWS has a strong #1 offering in low-hanging fruit products like vms, dbs. I find they have terrible MVP-like execution on niche offerings (and support sucks too) for things like Fargate, K8s, one-off job execution. Azure has a stronger, more thoughtful offering in niche solutions.

StreamBright 7y ago
>> Fargate, K8s This is partially because the customers of AWS do not care too much about these solutions. I have seen other solutions used by large customers (still probably classified as a niche) getting improved over time significantly. Fargate and k8s offers very little over a well designed EC2 cluster. This might be another reason.
- zapita 7y ago
  I think that’s right. ECS for example is mature and in my opinion still the most robust and scalable “container-as-a-service” out there. In spite of the kubernetes hype, I suspect that ECS is more successful than any hosted kubernetes hosted solution out there (in terms of aggregate workload volume and revenue). EKS on the other hand still feels like a checkbox service.
ElFitz 7y ago
I'd beg to differ. Between Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, S3, SNS, SQS, API Gateway and now EventBridge, which cost basically nothing at MVP scale and all of which's usage is drastically simplified by tools like the Serverless framework or Amplify, AWS is my go-to for anything MVP I tried Azure. I ran away. I liked GCP, but it seems I'll steer clear for the time being.
- romanovcode 7y ago
  Yeah, Azure seems pretty good until you calculate your costs and realize you have to pay 200$+ per month for an MVP project with possible of 0 users. I guess if you have the money Azure is pretty good tho.

kerng 7y ago

I think the Azure stack is very solid - UI sucks maybe, but it's best not to use UI anyway. Also, Microsoft naturally is the to-go place if you want a partner to trust as an enterprise. They have proven to support systems and software in the long run. Also, Pentagon just picked Azure over AWS - so Azure has a good run and bright future I'd say.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

My guess is that if Microsoft is able to hold onto the JEDI contract (after Amazon's lawsuit/appeal), Azure is going to be much more unassailable than you think. As it's a huge in to being the de facto US government cloud provider.

eitally 7y ago

I think you're completely wrong. Azure is in the prime position and AWS is on fragile ground. Yes, they have a service for everything, but they've alienated their partners, they aren't viable in an entire industry (Retail), and a significant fraction of their IP is based around creating managed services out of OSS software. My projection is that -- if everything continues along the same trend line we've seen through 2019 -- in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT. Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud but this opinion is my own.

tstrimple 7y ago
I recently did some consulting work with a trucking company who is modernizing their mainframe systems and moving to the cloud. They made the decision to cancel all their AWS migration plans and go 100% into Azure due to Amazon moving into logistics and basically becoming a competitor.
zapita 7y ago
> in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT. Those are two very bold statements. I think it’s also very unrealistic, but I guess we’ll see!