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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.

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...
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    > weird horizontally-expanding OG-Xbox blades user interface God do I hate this. I've given up hope that I'll get used to it at this point. I have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to help me, let alone find a way that it actually does. It's so very weird to seemingly no purpose. And someone had to put in a ton of effort to make it that way! ... but then I kinda hate all of the big 3 cloud web UIs.
    - eropple 7y ago
      I don't like Amazon's, though the incremental spread of their redesigns is helping. GCP's is okay. But Azure's is straight-up bad. And you're right--I can't for the life of me figure out why they did that. I have been told, too, that the team that made it is very pleased with it. "Why" comes to mind.
  - outworlder 7y ago
    > Powershell Core is not, however, a good experience on a Linux machine Or on a Mac. There is the Azure CLI, but it is pretty limited on what it can do. Both GCP and AWS have good command line tools (AWS can be awkward sometimes). GCP will even give you a CLI right there on the web console so you can run CLI commands even if you don't have them locally installed in whatever system you are coming from. Assuming the provider won't break in mysterious ways, or that Azure won't return a 400 error for no discernible reason, you are better off doing whatever you can do from Terraform. And then you have a repeatable environment and won't have to remember Azure quirks every single day. API responses are inconsistent, it has the slowest VM spin up time of the big three(also inconsistent). It has lots of confusing names for instances (and a shit ton of them), weird limitations on SKUs. Anecdote: I almost threw my keyboard away once I figured out why the instances I had deployed suddenty lost network connectivity. I had added a load balancer pointing to them. Really. That's all it was. Once I did so, all traffic started flowing through the load balancer. What kind of design is that? And AFAIK you can only add one. That may differ between Basic or Standard load balancer SKUs, I don't remember, don't care. On either GCP or AWS, one can attach as many load balancers they want, nothing else is affected, only traffic flowing through them. That's just one example. Next time you try attaching some premium disk SKU to some non premium VM SKU (or is it vice-versa?) and a Premium/Standard Storage Account and the Azure API yells at you, you'll understand. The storage account has SKUs too. Premium cannot have blob storage. Or is it the standard that can't? Meh, I don't care. You have to keep track of all of this. Which may or may not be clear in the documentation. Simple things like health checks terminating scale set instances automatically are not there. Heck, until some point in time you couldn't even terminate specific instances in a scale set. They have improved that. You have to do a bunch of work to "generalize" instances for use in Azure. In true Azure fashion, the disk has to be a VHD (not VHDX). Image can only be up to 1023GB in size. Sizes must be aligned to 1MB. And probably more stuff. At the end of the day, things will eventually work. Just budget between 3x to 5x extra development time versus AWS or GCP.
- tootie 7y ago
  Azure is fine, but I don't see a lot of efficiencies between Azure, VSTS and O365. They're all pretty separate. AWS is still the best and it's perfectly fine to use one cloud provider and a different productivity suite.
  - GordonS 7y ago
    > it's perfectly fine to use one cloud provider and a different productivity suite Yes, but this is just the same with Azure as it is with AWS. > I don't see a lot of efficiencies between Azure, VSTS and O365 Efficiencies are certainly there for Microsoft at least, since all these services are hosted on Azure behind the scenes. From the user side, yes, Azure, Azure DevOps, O365, Exchange etc each has its own admin portal/web app. But TBH I think this makes a lot of sense, and results in a better user experience, since each web app can be specialised, instead of having to fit everything into a single UI. Azure DevOps has good integrations with Azure though, such as AAD for users and permissions, service connections, Azure-specific CI/CD tasks etc. > AWS is still the best Citation needed, and by what measure?
- ehsankia 7y ago
  > That, and Azure is actually really good Do you have something to back that up? From almost everything I've heard, and most of the quantitative measures I've seen, they are strictly worse than AWS and GCP. As mentioned above, they are 2nd only due to their strong existing connections to enterprise.
  - darkcha0s 7y ago
    Personal experience. Or how else do you expect to be proven such a sweeping statement? Can you link any sources that azure ranks worse in quantitative measures?
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      This report has some numbers: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1753393/guides/Cloud_Report_2020-1.pdf https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1753393/guides/Cloud_Report_2... Especially in networking, Azure is orders of magnitude worse.
      - GordonS 7y ago
        Your wording "especially in networking" strongly implies that Azure was worst on several counts, but especially so on networking - but that is not the case, they were only worse on networking. - On CPU performance, Azure absolutely smashed it! - For storage read and write, Azure came second behind AWS - For TPC-C perf/$ all 4 providers had similar pricing for similar tiers. Note that Cockroach labs say this only takes into account on-demand pricing, so reserved instance pricing may differ
  - GordonS 7y ago
    Personal experience of around 3 years of solid usage, spanning many Azure services, with complex systems running in production for several clients. > they are 2nd only due to their strong existing connections to enterprise Those connections sure help, but only really for Microsoft-shops. As I mentioned, if you're already using AD, SMB file servers etc, then it makes a lot of sense since they have 1st-class support for these in the cloud.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  These days it's splitting into a Microsoft/Azure shop and a Microsoft/AWS shop.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> making as many parts of ChromeOS open as possible Chromium OS is already a thing; what change do you want?
skybrian 7y ago
You can already run Linux in a container on your Chromebook. I haven't tried it but it seems like it might be a nice developer environment?
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  > Linux > in a container > a nice developer environment Golly, the things you'd read on the Internet...
  - aliswe 7y ago
    Don't be so condescending. Care to explain your point instead? Genuinely interested but not getting anything of what you said.
    - otabdeveloper4 7y ago
      I thought we moved on from the "build your own bespoke Linux distribution by copy-pasting Internet HOWTOs"? Well, apparently not. I don't think that "this time in a container" is a good fix for the problem.
jjeaff 7y ago
Or is it that all the office cloud revenue is being lumped in with Azure and no one is actually using azure? I haven't seen a breakdown where they split out office 365, active directory, etc vs their pure cloud offerings.

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...
- karatestomp 7y ago
  > weird horizontally-expanding OG-Xbox blades user interface God do I hate this. I've given up hope that I'll get used to it at this point. I have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to help me, let alone find a way that it actually does. It's so very weird to seemingly no purpose. And someone had to put in a ton of effort to make it that way! ... but then I kinda hate all of the big 3 cloud web UIs.
  - eropple 7y ago
    I don't like Amazon's, though the incremental spread of their redesigns is helping. GCP's is okay. But Azure's is straight-up bad. And you're right--I can't for the life of me figure out why they did that. I have been told, too, that the team that made it is very pleased with it. "Why" comes to mind.
- outworlder 7y ago
  > Powershell Core is not, however, a good experience on a Linux machine Or on a Mac. There is the Azure CLI, but it is pretty limited on what it can do. Both GCP and AWS have good command line tools (AWS can be awkward sometimes). GCP will even give you a CLI right there on the web console so you can run CLI commands even if you don't have them locally installed in whatever system you are coming from. Assuming the provider won't break in mysterious ways, or that Azure won't return a 400 error for no discernible reason, you are better off doing whatever you can do from Terraform. And then you have a repeatable environment and won't have to remember Azure quirks every single day. API responses are inconsistent, it has the slowest VM spin up time of the big three(also inconsistent). It has lots of confusing names for instances (and a shit ton of them), weird limitations on SKUs. Anecdote: I almost threw my keyboard away once I figured out why the instances I had deployed suddenty lost network connectivity. I had added a load balancer pointing to them. Really. That's all it was. Once I did so, all traffic started flowing through the load balancer. What kind of design is that? And AFAIK you can only add one. That may differ between Basic or Standard load balancer SKUs, I don't remember, don't care. On either GCP or AWS, one can attach as many load balancers they want, nothing else is affected, only traffic flowing through them. That's just one example. Next time you try attaching some premium disk SKU to some non premium VM SKU (or is it vice-versa?) and a Premium/Standard Storage Account and the Azure API yells at you, you'll understand. The storage account has SKUs too. Premium cannot have blob storage. Or is it the standard that can't? Meh, I don't care. You have to keep track of all of this. Which may or may not be clear in the documentation. Simple things like health checks terminating scale set instances automatically are not there. Heck, until some point in time you couldn't even terminate specific instances in a scale set. They have improved that. You have to do a bunch of work to "generalize" instances for use in Azure. In true Azure fashion, the disk has to be a VHD (not VHDX). Image can only be up to 1023GB in size. Sizes must be aligned to 1MB. And probably more stuff. At the end of the day, things will eventually work. Just budget between 3x to 5x extra development time versus AWS or GCP.
tootie 7y ago
Azure is fine, but I don't see a lot of efficiencies between Azure, VSTS and O365. They're all pretty separate. AWS is still the best and it's perfectly fine to use one cloud provider and a different productivity suite.
- GordonS 7y ago
  > it's perfectly fine to use one cloud provider and a different productivity suite Yes, but this is just the same with Azure as it is with AWS. > I don't see a lot of efficiencies between Azure, VSTS and O365 Efficiencies are certainly there for Microsoft at least, since all these services are hosted on Azure behind the scenes. From the user side, yes, Azure, Azure DevOps, O365, Exchange etc each has its own admin portal/web app. But TBH I think this makes a lot of sense, and results in a better user experience, since each web app can be specialised, instead of having to fit everything into a single UI. Azure DevOps has good integrations with Azure though, such as AAD for users and permissions, service connections, Azure-specific CI/CD tasks etc. > AWS is still the best Citation needed, and by what measure?
ehsankia 7y ago
> That, and Azure is actually really good Do you have something to back that up? From almost everything I've heard, and most of the quantitative measures I've seen, they are strictly worse than AWS and GCP. As mentioned above, they are 2nd only due to their strong existing connections to enterprise.
- darkcha0s 7y ago
  Personal experience. Or how else do you expect to be proven such a sweeping statement? Can you link any sources that azure ranks worse in quantitative measures?
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    This report has some numbers: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1753393/guides/Cloud_Report_2020-1.pdf https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1753393/guides/Cloud_Report_2... Especially in networking, Azure is orders of magnitude worse.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      Your wording "especially in networking" strongly implies that Azure was worst on several counts, but especially so on networking - but that is not the case, they were only worse on networking. - On CPU performance, Azure absolutely smashed it! - For storage read and write, Azure came second behind AWS - For TPC-C perf/$ all 4 providers had similar pricing for similar tiers. Note that Cockroach labs say this only takes into account on-demand pricing, so reserved instance pricing may differ
- GordonS 7y ago
  Personal experience of around 3 years of solid usage, spanning many Azure services, with complex systems running in production for several clients. > they are 2nd only due to their strong existing connections to enterprise Those connections sure help, but only really for Microsoft-shops. As I mentioned, if you're already using AD, SMB file servers etc, then it makes a lot of sense since they have 1st-class support for these in the cloud.
james_s_tayler 7y ago
These days it's splitting into a Microsoft/Azure shop and a Microsoft/AWS shop.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

> making as many parts of ChromeOS open as possible Chromium OS is already a thing; what change do you want?

skybrian 7y ago

You can already run Linux in a container on your Chromebook. I haven't tried it but it seems like it might be a nice developer environment?

otabdeveloper4 7y ago
> Linux > in a container > a nice developer environment Golly, the things you'd read on the Internet...
- aliswe 7y ago
  Don't be so condescending. Care to explain your point instead? Genuinely interested but not getting anything of what you said.
  - otabdeveloper4 7y ago
    I thought we moved on from the "build your own bespoke Linux distribution by copy-pasting Internet HOWTOs"? Well, apparently not. I don't think that "this time in a container" is a good fix for the problem.

jjeaff 7y ago

Or is it that all the office cloud revenue is being lumped in with Azure and no one is actually using azure? I haven't seen a breakdown where they split out office 365, active directory, etc vs their pure cloud offerings.