5 ms·

I can’t imagine choosing Azure and the Microsoft stack for building systems. It’s incomprehensible to me.

by whalesalad 3y ago

tormeh 3y ago
It makes sense on an individual level. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft. Maybe they should be, but they won't.
- blibble 3y ago
  plenty of people have been fired for buying Microsoft Elon Musk was one of them (at what became Paypal)
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Musk was fired for digging in and spending months insisting a working MVP written in Java on Solaris be rewritten in Classic ASP on Windows because he knew the latter and not the former, not because of any intrinsic failing of the latter.
intelVISA 3y ago
It's a form of self-harm at this point..?
Gigachad 3y ago
I worked at a place that used Azure and was told "When Microsoft has a problem, customers understand, its like a natural disaster, can't be avoided. When AWS has a problem customers say 'Huh, what's AWS, fix it now'" I can't remember any outages in the few years I worked there though.
xnyan 3y ago
Our company signed a huge 5 year deal with microsoft for azure services just today. We evaluated all major providers for more than a year, Microsoft offered the best terms by far, and we were able to meet all of our needs using it just as well as with AWS or GCP. Honest question, why was the decision wrong? It does not matter to me eather way, I’m just an engineer that was brought in to consult on some aspects of the contract.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Because some people prefer to bash things with open source rocks instead of using a proprietary hammer. There’s an entire subculture of the IT world that spells it “Micro$oft” and refuses to acknowledge its very existence, or a valid option. I once saw a post about how some Linux tool had support for “every major LDAP directory system” and did not list Active Directory! It’s like… dude… something like 99% of deployed LDAP systems is AD. The rest is a rounding error.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    I think that subculture you're referring to existed in 1990s in places like /.,, but I never encountered it during 2010s or 2020s. (I think it is directly related to the lack of stranglehold which MS had over much of daily computing in 1990s. Apple, Linux, and mobile platforms forced it to compete and innovate more seriously, winning back quite some respect.)
    - AraceliHarker 3y ago
      Microsoft products are often criticized for being expensive to use on public clouds other than Azure. In terms of "bundling", Microsoft has not changed its ways.
  - thewrinklyninja 3y ago
    I was having a twitter argument the other day with someone who maintained that they never really come across any Microsoft systems in their work and who would be crazy enough to use Windows Server. I've worked in orgs from 100 people to 10,000 and it's always Active Directory and MS all the way through with odd few Ubuntu or RHEL servers for a internal application.
    - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
      You haven't worked at a tech company then. The only Windows systems I've seen in over 15 years were to run Active Directory over 10 year ago (and not since), my personal gaming desktop (which no longer runs Windows) and GitHub runners for cross compilation. There's plenty of Microsoft out there, but there's an entire, thriving universe where Microsoft is completely irrelevant.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Some of their systems are fune. Knowing wich ones, thats tough
- mr_toad 3y ago
  C#, VSC, and those are my two examples.
mr_toad 3y ago
Lack of vested interest. Tick the boxes, blame someone else when shit hits the fan, assuming they haven’t jumped ship before then.
magicalhippo 3y ago
We're a small B2B company. For VMs, AWS doesn't have a data center in our country (Norway) which is important due to data storage regulations, nobody sane picks Google for anything they need to rely on... so it's Azure or some local players. We've tried the latter, twice, they got bought and support quality tanked both times. We don't want to manage hardware yet, so... Also, customers want MSSQL, and managed MSSQL is nice since it's trivial to scale up and down with the needs of the customer. Started using their other services like Service Bus, Blob Storage and Application Insights. We're using .Net so integration is quite simple. It wasn't my call, but there weren't that many great alternatives from what I can see.
- nl 3y ago
  > nobody sane picks Google for anything they need to rely on.. In the case of GCP this is untrue. > We're using .Net so integration is quite simple. This is the reason for most deployments. They are MS shops so the go with the MS Cloud.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    > In the case of GCP this is untrue. You're probably right, but anything that isn't core to their ad business seems highly risky to rely on long-term. I certainly wouldn't risk recommending them.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > customers want MSSQL Why would they want that when PostgreSQL exists? That's like saying customers "want" Oracle databases despite the existence of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Integrated in-memory tables, columnstore analytics, etc… Postgres has its strengths, but so does MSSQL.
  - 3y ago
cpitman 3y ago
There are plenty of companies that effectively cannot use AWS because it is owned by Amazon, and either they or one of their customers is in direct competition with Amazon. For example, if you are a vendor for Walmart, they do not want their data ever landing on AWS.
- fredski42 3y ago
  This!
temporallobe 3y ago
We are, ostensibly for cost savings, moving to Azure Virtual Desktops for our local development environments. It’s going to be a glorious shit show.
LargeTomato 3y ago
We found a bug in azure today where our security key was too big and their auth stack failed. They will try to push a fix in two weeks. They're doing their best.
lambersley 3y ago
Large enterprises using MS Office suite eventually rolled into O365. Sharepoint, same. MS cloud offerings were simply evolutionary. Enterprises simply had to shift from capex to opex. This is why they stayed.
llama052 3y ago
Sadly for a lot of these companies it's more of a "business" decision than a technical one. Having said that I will not work for a company in the future that has their primary infrastructure in Azure.
girvo 3y ago
I can tell you why places that previous consulting contracts I've taken used it: 1. Its cheaper 2. They're already a C# shop so it just "feels right" Thats about it, really. That appears to be the sum of the thought that went into it. And that also explains why they had to bring myself (and others) in as very expensive consultants to un-fuck various systems...

I can’t imagine choosing Azure and the Microsoft stack for building systems. It’s incomprehensible to me.

tormeh 3y ago

It makes sense on an individual level. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft. Maybe they should be, but they won't.

blibble 3y ago
plenty of people have been fired for buying Microsoft Elon Musk was one of them (at what became Paypal)
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Musk was fired for digging in and spending months insisting a working MVP written in Java on Solaris be rewritten in Classic ASP on Windows because he knew the latter and not the former, not because of any intrinsic failing of the latter.

intelVISA 3y ago

It's a form of self-harm at this point..?

Gigachad 3y ago

I worked at a place that used Azure and was told "When Microsoft has a problem, customers understand, its like a natural disaster, can't be avoided. When AWS has a problem customers say 'Huh, what's AWS, fix it now'" I can't remember any outages in the few years I worked there though.

xnyan 3y ago

Our company signed a huge 5 year deal with microsoft for azure services just today. We evaluated all major providers for more than a year, Microsoft offered the best terms by far, and we were able to meet all of our needs using it just as well as with AWS or GCP. Honest question, why was the decision wrong? It does not matter to me eather way, I’m just an engineer that was brought in to consult on some aspects of the contract.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Because some people prefer to bash things with open source rocks instead of using a proprietary hammer. There’s an entire subculture of the IT world that spells it “Micro$oft” and refuses to acknowledge its very existence, or a valid option. I once saw a post about how some Linux tool had support for “every major LDAP directory system” and did not list Active Directory! It’s like… dude… something like 99% of deployed LDAP systems is AD. The rest is a rounding error.
- nine_k 3y ago
  I think that subculture you're referring to existed in 1990s in places like /.,, but I never encountered it during 2010s or 2020s. (I think it is directly related to the lack of stranglehold which MS had over much of daily computing in 1990s. Apple, Linux, and mobile platforms forced it to compete and innovate more seriously, winning back quite some respect.)
  - AraceliHarker 3y ago
    Microsoft products are often criticized for being expensive to use on public clouds other than Azure. In terms of "bundling", Microsoft has not changed its ways.
- thewrinklyninja 3y ago
  I was having a twitter argument the other day with someone who maintained that they never really come across any Microsoft systems in their work and who would be crazy enough to use Windows Server. I've worked in orgs from 100 people to 10,000 and it's always Active Directory and MS all the way through with odd few Ubuntu or RHEL servers for a internal application.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    You haven't worked at a tech company then. The only Windows systems I've seen in over 15 years were to run Active Directory over 10 year ago (and not since), my personal gaming desktop (which no longer runs Windows) and GitHub runners for cross compilation. There's plenty of Microsoft out there, but there's an entire, thriving universe where Microsoft is completely irrelevant.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

Some of their systems are fune. Knowing wich ones, thats tough

mr_toad 3y ago
C#, VSC, and those are my two examples.

mr_toad 3y ago

Lack of vested interest. Tick the boxes, blame someone else when shit hits the fan, assuming they haven’t jumped ship before then.

magicalhippo 3y ago

We're a small B2B company. For VMs, AWS doesn't have a data center in our country (Norway) which is important due to data storage regulations, nobody sane picks Google for anything they need to rely on... so it's Azure or some local players. We've tried the latter, twice, they got bought and support quality tanked both times. We don't want to manage hardware yet, so... Also, customers want MSSQL, and managed MSSQL is nice since it's trivial to scale up and down with the needs of the customer. Started using their other services like Service Bus, Blob Storage and Application Insights. We're using .Net so integration is quite simple. It wasn't my call, but there weren't that many great alternatives from what I can see.

nl 3y ago
> nobody sane picks Google for anything they need to rely on.. In the case of GCP this is untrue. > We're using .Net so integration is quite simple. This is the reason for most deployments. They are MS shops so the go with the MS Cloud.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  > In the case of GCP this is untrue. You're probably right, but anything that isn't core to their ad business seems highly risky to rely on long-term. I certainly wouldn't risk recommending them.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> customers want MSSQL Why would they want that when PostgreSQL exists? That's like saying customers "want" Oracle databases despite the existence of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Integrated in-memory tables, columnstore analytics, etc… Postgres has its strengths, but so does MSSQL.
- 3y ago

cpitman 3y ago

There are plenty of companies that effectively cannot use AWS because it is owned by Amazon, and either they or one of their customers is in direct competition with Amazon. For example, if you are a vendor for Walmart, they do not want their data ever landing on AWS.

fredski42 3y ago
This!

temporallobe 3y ago

We are, ostensibly for cost savings, moving to Azure Virtual Desktops for our local development environments. It’s going to be a glorious shit show.

LargeTomato 3y ago

We found a bug in azure today where our security key was too big and their auth stack failed. They will try to push a fix in two weeks. They're doing their best.

lambersley 3y ago

Large enterprises using MS Office suite eventually rolled into O365. Sharepoint, same. MS cloud offerings were simply evolutionary. Enterprises simply had to shift from capex to opex. This is why they stayed.

llama052 3y ago

Sadly for a lot of these companies it's more of a "business" decision than a technical one. Having said that I will not work for a company in the future that has their primary infrastructure in Azure.

girvo 3y ago

I can tell you why places that previous consulting contracts I've taken used it: 1. Its cheaper 2. They're already a C# shop so it just "feels right" Thats about it, really. That appears to be the sum of the thought that went into it. And that also explains why they had to bring myself (and others) in as very expensive consultants to un-fuck various systems...