8 ms·

Microsoft is pushing Azure hard. Not to disclose specifics but there are cases where deals with Microsoft for unrelated things are reliant on the company adopti

by orf 7y ago

Microsoft is pushing Azure hard. Not to disclose specifics but there are cases where deals with Microsoft for unrelated things are reliant on the company adopting/moving parts of their work to Azure, with huge amounts of free credits for the first year as a sweetener. It's not in writing on contracts but it's very much a requirement. I'm not sure how they can hope to become the number 2 cloud provider when pitted against that. Say what you want about Microsoft but they are in a really good position to take large chunks of the enterprise cloud market, and that's where the money is.

shiftpgdn 7y ago
I know a company that got a very, very, very sweetheart deal with GCP on a tens of million dollar contract. They have a huge sales team with a monsterous entertainment budget to land "traditional" companies.
- ttul 7y ago
  Please lavish some of that on me, oh lords of cloud.
  - shiftpgdn 7y ago
    If you have a CIO/CTO title at a "traditional" fortune 500 there are a busload of cloud sales people waiting to take you out to the finest steak houses and gentlemen's clubs as often as you please. Along with all expenses paid trips to Jackson hole, Aspen or any other upper crust resort city for company trainings and seminars.
    - ttul 7y ago
      I'll get right to work on obtaining that title now so that I can benefit from this largesse.
  - ttul 7y ago
    More seriously, I have heard that you need to be doing $300K+ a month in order to attract the attention of the Jackson Hole sales people.
- jbigelow76 7y ago
  Translation, both Microsoft and Google have train cars full of money to light on fire in the short term to subsidize long term contracts and integrations. It'll be interesting to see who is number 2 in three and then five years.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
    > train cars full of money to light on fire Is there any indicator that these credits are actually "lighting train cars full of money on fire", as opposed to "selling product with a small instead of a huge markup"?
    - Ameo 7y ago
      The cloud provider market seems too competitive for them to be getting huge markups; if there was a 50% margin on storage, why wouldn't Microsoft or whomever just knock 20% off and undercut all of their competitors thereby making them the obvious choice?
      - thu2111 7y ago
        All three are totally dependent on cloud services to power revenue growth in the forseeable future. Amazon's retail efforts aren't where the big exciting growth for investors is, it's all AWS. Windows/Office has been stagnant for a long time, or even in decline. MSFT price only took off once Azure took off. And as for Google, well, what exactly are they doing that's new other than GCP? They've got nothing that can absorb growth at their scale. If you look at the costs of the big 3 tech firm cloud solutions relative to what you can get from smaller providers, it's an enormous markup. None of them are going to compete with each other on price because that'd void the point of doing cloud to begin with. Plus tech firms hate competing on price. It signals to the market that you've run out of innovations.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - Techies4Trump 7y ago
- jrockway 7y ago
  > They have a huge sales team with a monsterous entertainment budget to land "traditional" companies. This is the disillusionment I experienced in the B2B industry. Nobody cares about your products, they just care about getting free stuff from you. When people are buying something for a company, the money they're spending isn't theirs... but they're the one that gets free sports tickets or free dinners or whatever. It almost feels like stealing to me, but it's "business as usual".
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Sounds like embezzlement.
    - jrockway 7y ago
      I completely agree but that is how it all works. I think if the IRS wanted to crack down on this, the US economy would grind to a halt. (I never see people paying taxes on these gifts.)
tgtweak 7y ago
I wish gcp and aws would take some notes (or make some acquisitions) to get close to Azure Devops... It has been a natural - dare I say pleasant - exercise to move some really rancid 15-year old legacy .net sql server/stored procedure nightmare applications to the cloud and get them into modern devops pipelines. That would not even be a project I would contemplate with aws or gcp. It's actually on par cost-wise in a lot of cases with running it on-prem which is a rare thing to say about the cloud. Azure is growing pretty damn fast. One thing they don't have over AWS however is the scale of cheap resources. If you're using public cloud properly, you should be leveraging spot instances wherever possible - and in that case, azure doesn't really have a solution here. GCP preemptible instances are closer. You can spin up a rediculous amount of machines for pennies on the dollar at 2am in us-east and I see no such solution in Azure. So all-in-all it seems that a good chunk of Azure's growth is proprietary migrations and thus they don't have to focus too hard on being cost competitive at the hardware level.
- discordance 7y ago
  Spot Instances have been around on Azure for a while. They were called Low Priority VMs previously but are now called Spot VMs [0]. 0: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/
  - texasbigdata 7y ago
    It's interesting because the blog post is dated December 2019 and they are in "preview". Cute strategy if they are indeed a rebrand. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-preview-of-azure-spot-virtual-machines/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-previe...
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  Didn't they just get spot instances recently? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/
- GordonS 7y ago
  Azure Batch let's you use pre-emptible VMs for at least a couple of years now. I used it on a compute-intensive AI project a while back - it worked quite well, and was cost efficient relative to normal VM pricing.
quadrifoliate 7y ago
A lot of the Microsoft Azure stuff is simply because companies do large volume deals with Microsoft for Windows/Office/Sharepoint and Azure becomes a piggyback. "Well we are paying Microsoft millions of dollars anyway, why not use their cloud too?". Google could solve this by fixing Linux on the desktop, or essentially making as many parts of ChromeOS open as possible. With Windows 10's bloatware, Microsoft has made many missteps – a Google Linux that looks and works like a Mac, and has native G Suite as well as meaningful GCP integrations would be an Azure-killing app. Unfortunately chances seem very slim that Google will ever have the imagination to do something like this.
- GordonS 7y ago
  > A lot of the Microsoft Azure stuff is simply because companies do large volume deals with Microsoft for Windows/Office/Sharepoint and Azure becomes a piggyback. "Well we are paying Microsoft millions of dollars anyway, why not use their cloud too? It's not just about licensing fees - it's also practicality. That, and Azure is actually really good (relative to the other major players, GCP and AWS). If you're a Microsoft-shop, you use Active Directory. Naturally, Azure Active Directory (AAD) works well with your existing on-prem AD deployment, so with very little effort, your employees get SSO for your shiny new cloud services.
  - eropple 7y ago
    > That, and Azure is actually really good This doesn't match my experience at all, from the inconsistent and weird horizontally-expanding OG-Xbox blades user interface to thrown-over-the-wall API libraries[0] to Azure AD being a complete waste of time and effort if you don't want them owning your entire directory (I'm sorry, I have to pay for Office or separate API access to manage users through Okta?) to real fun stuff like servers not recording restart or shutdown events in their audit logs if they were under load. In fairness, I will say one nice thing about Azure: their CLI tools, under Powershell, are pretty good. I was impressed. Powershell Core is not, however, a good experience on a Linux machine, and while WSL2 is a lot better it's still not replacing my normal day-job workflow. But it's been over a year since I had to use the comprehensively bad clusterfuck that is Azure, and honestly I'm still pretty mad about the experience. Azure is the one cloud provider that a company can't pay me enough money to work with. Well, one of two; there's also IBM Cloud, which, whoa-nope. [0] - https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for-ruby/issues/61 https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for...
linuxftw 7y ago
Agreed. Witnessed first hand a large enterprise company was given free Azure credits in the millions. The executives loved it, until it was time to start paying.... Then they freaked out. Unfortunately for them, they had no centralized mechanism for control to reign in applications, so of course everyone said their application was critical. Part of the ever-failing multi/hybrid cloud approach.
outworlder 7y ago
sigh I wish they would use those resources in improving the platform itself. Azure may be nice for the decision makers, but as an engineer, _it is infuriating_
threatofrain 7y ago
AWS does the same thing. I believe all the cloud providers offer custom arrangements once you’re big enough.

by orf 7y ago

shiftpgdn 7y ago

I know a company that got a very, very, very sweetheart deal with GCP on a tens of million dollar contract. They have a huge sales team with a monsterous entertainment budget to land "traditional" companies.

ttul 7y ago
Please lavish some of that on me, oh lords of cloud.
- shiftpgdn 7y ago
  If you have a CIO/CTO title at a "traditional" fortune 500 there are a busload of cloud sales people waiting to take you out to the finest steak houses and gentlemen's clubs as often as you please. Along with all expenses paid trips to Jackson hole, Aspen or any other upper crust resort city for company trainings and seminars.
  - ttul 7y ago
    I'll get right to work on obtaining that title now so that I can benefit from this largesse.
- ttul 7y ago
  More seriously, I have heard that you need to be doing $300K+ a month in order to attract the attention of the Jackson Hole sales people.
jbigelow76 7y ago
Translation, both Microsoft and Google have train cars full of money to light on fire in the short term to subsidize long term contracts and integrations. It'll be interesting to see who is number 2 in three and then five years.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  > train cars full of money to light on fire Is there any indicator that these credits are actually "lighting train cars full of money on fire", as opposed to "selling product with a small instead of a huge markup"?
  - Ameo 7y ago
    The cloud provider market seems too competitive for them to be getting huge markups; if there was a 50% margin on storage, why wouldn't Microsoft or whomever just knock 20% off and undercut all of their competitors thereby making them the obvious choice?
    - thu2111 7y ago
      All three are totally dependent on cloud services to power revenue growth in the forseeable future. Amazon's retail efforts aren't where the big exciting growth for investors is, it's all AWS. Windows/Office has been stagnant for a long time, or even in decline. MSFT price only took off once Azure took off. And as for Google, well, what exactly are they doing that's new other than GCP? They've got nothing that can absorb growth at their scale. If you look at the costs of the big 3 tech firm cloud solutions relative to what you can get from smaller providers, it's an enormous markup. None of them are going to compete with each other on price because that'd void the point of doing cloud to begin with. Plus tech firms hate competing on price. It signals to the market that you've run out of innovations.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- Techies4Trump 7y ago
jrockway 7y ago
> They have a huge sales team with a monsterous entertainment budget to land "traditional" companies. This is the disillusionment I experienced in the B2B industry. Nobody cares about your products, they just care about getting free stuff from you. When people are buying something for a company, the money they're spending isn't theirs... but they're the one that gets free sports tickets or free dinners or whatever. It almost feels like stealing to me, but it's "business as usual".
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Sounds like embezzlement.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    I completely agree but that is how it all works. I think if the IRS wanted to crack down on this, the US economy would grind to a halt. (I never see people paying taxes on these gifts.)

tgtweak 7y ago

I wish gcp and aws would take some notes (or make some acquisitions) to get close to Azure Devops... It has been a natural - dare I say pleasant - exercise to move some really rancid 15-year old legacy .net sql server/stored procedure nightmare applications to the cloud and get them into modern devops pipelines. That would not even be a project I would contemplate with aws or gcp. It's actually on par cost-wise in a lot of cases with running it on-prem which is a rare thing to say about the cloud. Azure is growing pretty damn fast. One thing they don't have over AWS however is the scale of cheap resources. If you're using public cloud properly, you should be leveraging spot instances wherever possible - and in that case, azure doesn't really have a solution here. GCP preemptible instances are closer. You can spin up a rediculous amount of machines for pennies on the dollar at 2am in us-east and I see no such solution in Azure. So all-in-all it seems that a good chunk of Azure's growth is proprietary migrations and thus they don't have to focus too hard on being cost competitive at the hardware level.

discordance 7y ago
Spot Instances have been around on Azure for a while. They were called Low Priority VMs previously but are now called Spot VMs [0]. 0: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/spot/
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  It's interesting because the blog post is dated December 2019 and they are in "preview". Cute strategy if they are indeed a rebrand. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-preview-of-azure-spot-virtual-machines/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-previe...
texasbigdata 7y ago
Didn't they just get spot instances recently? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spot/
GordonS 7y ago
Azure Batch let's you use pre-emptible VMs for at least a couple of years now. I used it on a compute-intensive AI project a while back - it worked quite well, and was cost efficient relative to normal VM pricing.

quadrifoliate 7y ago

A lot of the Microsoft Azure stuff is simply because companies do large volume deals with Microsoft for Windows/Office/Sharepoint and Azure becomes a piggyback. "Well we are paying Microsoft millions of dollars anyway, why not use their cloud too?". Google could solve this by fixing Linux on the desktop, or essentially making as many parts of ChromeOS open as possible. With Windows 10's bloatware, Microsoft has made many missteps – a Google Linux that looks and works like a Mac, and has native G Suite as well as meaningful GCP integrations would be an Azure-killing app. Unfortunately chances seem very slim that Google will ever have the imagination to do something like this.

GordonS 7y ago
> A lot of the Microsoft Azure stuff is simply because companies do large volume deals with Microsoft for Windows/Office/Sharepoint and Azure becomes a piggyback. "Well we are paying Microsoft millions of dollars anyway, why not use their cloud too? It's not just about licensing fees - it's also practicality. That, and Azure is actually really good (relative to the other major players, GCP and AWS). If you're a Microsoft-shop, you use Active Directory. Naturally, Azure Active Directory (AAD) works well with your existing on-prem AD deployment, so with very little effort, your employees get SSO for your shiny new cloud services.
- eropple 7y ago
  > That, and Azure is actually really good This doesn't match my experience at all, from the inconsistent and weird horizontally-expanding OG-Xbox blades user interface to thrown-over-the-wall API libraries[0] to Azure AD being a complete waste of time and effort if you don't want them owning your entire directory (I'm sorry, I have to pay for Office or separate API access to manage users through Okta?) to real fun stuff like servers not recording restart or shutdown events in their audit logs if they were under load. In fairness, I will say one nice thing about Azure: their CLI tools, under Powershell, are pretty good. I was impressed. Powershell Core is not, however, a good experience on a Linux machine, and while WSL2 is a lot better it's still not replacing my normal day-job workflow. But it's been over a year since I had to use the comprehensively bad clusterfuck that is Azure, and honestly I'm still pretty mad about the experience. Azure is the one cloud provider that a company can't pay me enough money to work with. Well, one of two; there's also IBM Cloud, which, whoa-nope. [0] - https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for-ruby/issues/61 https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for...

linuxftw 7y ago

Agreed. Witnessed first hand a large enterprise company was given free Azure credits in the millions. The executives loved it, until it was time to start paying.... Then they freaked out. Unfortunately for them, they had no centralized mechanism for control to reign in applications, so of course everyone said their application was critical. Part of the ever-failing multi/hybrid cloud approach.

outworlder 7y ago

sigh I wish they would use those resources in improving the platform itself. Azure may be nice for the decision makers, but as an engineer, _it is infuriating_

threatofrain 7y ago

AWS does the same thing. I believe all the cloud providers offer custom arrangements once you’re big enough.