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> Azure’s unique architecture design has been crucial in delivering best-in-class performance and scale Is there something unique about Azure, which makes it w

by Tempest1981 4y ago

> Azure’s unique architecture design has been crucial in delivering best-in-class performance and scale Is there something unique about Azure, which makes it well suited for AI?

bfeynman 4y ago
Other than just marketing BS, probably lack of customers who use GPUs. Both AWS and GCP have capacity issues. The biggest factor is also that Google is a direct competitor and invented the technology even, so obviously they will not cannibalize themselves by giving google more money to train its own models.
- rospaya 4y ago
  Don't use GCP but I've only had capacity issues on Azure since covid hit.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Interesting. My precovid experience was AWS was much harder to get GPU on.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  That’s funny as the other commenter said, azure has had some crazy capacity issues, but maybe this is their benefit, they get first dibs.
dharmab 4y ago
You can get really good discounts if you're a major Microsoft partner.
frusky 4y ago
[flagged]
coliveira 4y ago
It will quickly chain you to Microsoft products, that's the uniqueness.
- alex_duf 4y ago
  In fairness that's also true for AWS and GCP
sidcool 4y ago
Yep, the discounts.
pm90 4y ago
No. Its all spin. The only uniqueness is the discount and preferential treatment they would get. Azure gets a nice callout in return.
MicrosoftShill 4y ago
Azure/O365 admin here. No, nothing special from a technical perspective. The value to OpenAI to go Azure(/Microsoft) exclusive is: - Money & general financial security forever - Integration with the largest software suite in the world (Windows, O365, Active Directory, etc) - Rapid push to worldwide enterprise sector - Rapid push to worldwide gov/mil sector (ChatGPT, coming soon to a war near you!) - Rapid push to education sector
jiggawatts 4y ago
Most of the responses to this are just preconceptions or assumptions. Azure does have unique offerings, such as higher-spec compute nodes than AWS and RDMA-capable “HPC” sizes that can be used to build mini supercomputers. AFAIK, no other public cloud has this type of capability.
- tester756 4y ago
  Indeed, it's crazy how people can go out here and claim crazy stuff as if they knew internals of Azure
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    "I like Linux and Amazon, hence Azure must be bad. I assume, I've never seen it." is something I've heard commonly. I have a customer where they use both clouds, and they will spend weeks spinning up Rube Goldberg machines in AWS even though there is a turnkey solution available in Azure. For example, Elastic File System (EFS) in AWS is only compatible with UNIX-like operating systems, because it is NFS v4. Azure has both NFS and SMB file shares as a service -- the latter is a unique offering. It's not magic, but it does eliminate quite a bit of complexity around managing large, scalable file server clusters for Windows clients if you need that kind of thing.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  Microsoft went into the HPC market aggressively very early as a differentiator to the AWS general computing strategy. Azure has been focused on HPC much longer and has a head start on AWS. Not sure if they knew it would pay off with AI, but it looks like it’ll work out well for them.

> Azure’s unique architecture design has been crucial in delivering best-in-class performance and scale Is there something unique about Azure, which makes it well suited for AI?

bfeynman 4y ago

Other than just marketing BS, probably lack of customers who use GPUs. Both AWS and GCP have capacity issues. The biggest factor is also that Google is a direct competitor and invented the technology even, so obviously they will not cannibalize themselves by giving google more money to train its own models.

rospaya 4y ago
Don't use GCP but I've only had capacity issues on Azure since covid hit.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Interesting. My precovid experience was AWS was much harder to get GPU on.
vxNsr 4y ago
That’s funny as the other commenter said, azure has had some crazy capacity issues, but maybe this is their benefit, they get first dibs.

dharmab 4y ago

You can get really good discounts if you're a major Microsoft partner.

frusky 4y ago

[flagged]

coliveira 4y ago

It will quickly chain you to Microsoft products, that's the uniqueness.

alex_duf 4y ago
In fairness that's also true for AWS and GCP

sidcool 4y ago

Yep, the discounts.

pm90 4y ago

No. Its all spin. The only uniqueness is the discount and preferential treatment they would get. Azure gets a nice callout in return.

MicrosoftShill 4y ago

Azure/O365 admin here. No, nothing special from a technical perspective. The value to OpenAI to go Azure(/Microsoft) exclusive is: - Money & general financial security forever - Integration with the largest software suite in the world (Windows, O365, Active Directory, etc) - Rapid push to worldwide enterprise sector - Rapid push to worldwide gov/mil sector (ChatGPT, coming soon to a war near you!) - Rapid push to education sector

jiggawatts 4y ago

Most of the responses to this are just preconceptions or assumptions. Azure does have unique offerings, such as higher-spec compute nodes than AWS and RDMA-capable “HPC” sizes that can be used to build mini supercomputers. AFAIK, no other public cloud has this type of capability.

tester756 4y ago
Indeed, it's crazy how people can go out here and claim crazy stuff as if they knew internals of Azure
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  "I like Linux and Amazon, hence Azure must be bad. I assume, I've never seen it." is something I've heard commonly. I have a customer where they use both clouds, and they will spend weeks spinning up Rube Goldberg machines in AWS even though there is a turnkey solution available in Azure. For example, Elastic File System (EFS) in AWS is only compatible with UNIX-like operating systems, because it is NFS v4. Azure has both NFS and SMB file shares as a service -- the latter is a unique offering. It's not magic, but it does eliminate quite a bit of complexity around managing large, scalable file server clusters for Windows clients if you need that kind of thing.
berniedurfee 4y ago
Microsoft went into the HPC market aggressively very early as a differentiator to the AWS general computing strategy. Azure has been focused on HPC much longer and has a head start on AWS. Not sure if they knew it would pay off with AI, but it looks like it’ll work out well for them.