4 ms·

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

• 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.
      • CoastalCoder 3y ago
        IIRC, both Intel and Qualcomm have a lot of Microsoft IT infrastructure.
  • soulofmischief 3y ago
    This is an uncharitable take which presents both a strawman and a false dichotomy. The reasons for avoiding Microsoft are many. And often philosophical in nature, whether with respect to business practices or the sanity of one's work environment.
    • lost_tourist 3y ago
      I would call them rewards rather than reasons
    • jiggawatts 3y ago
      You can choose to avoid Microsoft, that's perfectly fine. I do however find it amusing to see the very existence of Microsoft casually skipped over, as if they weren't one of the world's biggest corporations. Imagine if someone listed "modern UNIX-like operating systems" and the list went something like: NetBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, OpenSolaris, and then went through dozens like that into ever more obscure things nobody has ever heard of, but skipped Linux like it didn't even exist. Just some Finnish guy's hobby project, not really worth discussing, right? It gets to the point where it's absurd. As a real example, someone made a printable SVG/PDF poster of "big data" and "data science" companies and technologies. They were listing dinky little startups that had a total value smaller than the annual cost of an individual Azure storage blob container that I deleted to save money. That was an "oops" by someone that the customer didn't even notice.
      • soulofmischief 3y ago
        You're still strawmanning by lumping together a huge amount of people with different motivations under one homogeneous group. > It gets to the point where it's absurd. All of the examples you provide don't paint some cohesive picture, they come across as random, haphazard strokes with no form or meaning. Your original comment attempted to answer a question by ridiculing an entire demographic of people who care much more about human rights than you realize.
        • jiggawatts 3y ago
  • zlg_codes 3y ago
    One gains a lot of benefits by building with libre or permissive software. Proprietary software comes with licensing fees and sometimes complex DRM systems that need maintenance. There are totally situations where both are the better tool for the job, though generally the proprietary "solutions" are often just short-term "let's get this done now" stuff, that then later has an increased cost. Leaning on a proprietary solution also means you're downstream of any decision the makers of the tool make, including choosing to nuke your (and/or your business's) use case. I can't comment on the LDAP thing on a technical level, but if the focus is on libre software, why is it apropos to list proprietary things that it's compatible with? Software that boasts this compatibility doesn't always keep it, or sometimes loses it due to deliberate action from the proprietary party. I don't think I'd list Active Directory either. It's not something one can vouch for unless they're literally Microsoft.
    • redserk 3y ago
      Unless your business is in the line of user authentication, what business advantage would one get by developing their own LDAP server? It would be an incredibly inefficient use of resources if you're a 100 person shop only wanting unified logins.
      • owenmarshall 3y ago
        This question feels like it belongs to another comment: where does GP talk about “developing ones own LDAP server”?
        • redserk 3y ago
          No, it was in response to the correct comment but I should elaborate. > Leaning on a proprietary solution also means you're downstream of any decision the makers of the tool make, including choosing to nuke your (and/or your business's) use case. My understanding is that OP is advocating free/libre software protects a business from changes in software that could affect the business' use case. This risk is present in both proprietary and free/libre software. Maintainers may remove features that some users find critical. If a feature is removed and your business requires the feature, you now need to maintain a fork of the software or contribute development time upstream.
• dimgl 3y ago
  > Microsoft offered the best terms by far How is that possible? I'm guessing you mean the best terms for Windows machines and Windows-based services. As soon as you exit the Microsoft realm, the prices plummet...
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    You can solve business problems within the Microsoft realm at commercially reasonable costs. That’s all that matters to the business. Easy to get support, easy to find humans to run it. Like McDonald’s, Microsoft sells consistency. Is an alternate solution cheaper? Would have to compare total cost of ownership to come to a firm conclusion.
• whoknowsidont 3y ago
  I'm extremely interested to know what terms AWS or GCP could not provide you that Azure could. That would be an extremely enlightening post. As someone who has used Azure, AWS, and GCP since their inception but mainly Azure for very unfortunate career choices -- I can assure you Azure has the most problems of any sort you can imagine. Your MS rep (if you're big enough to have contact with one) will most assuredly be using their checkbook for you guys or your client. I'm not being melodramatic. This isn't even an original opinion or experience (go ahead, look around HN). And it certainly isn't some cultural "M$" backlash as another poster put it. If this post seems editorial it's because after nearly a decade of this nonsense I'm just simply exasperated, and it greatly confuses me when people who are within the MS ecosystem don't know how bad they have it with Azure. It's basically unacceptable that MS gets away with it. From AKS to WAF to Cosmos DB take your pick. You will run into issues and you will run into them continually. Personally with my experience, Azure is not something I could ethically ever recommend to anyone.
• ilyt 3y ago
  It's pretty much best of the bad choice when it comes to cloud providers. One of fun things we had with our MS experience was writing code that should work according to docs, returned nonsensical errors (not documented, generic kind of error) from their API, only for that to magically start working next day... Even the basic stuff appears to be shoddy in places, for example I received notification about meeting that I was added to 5 days ago about 3h before the meeting.... when the meeting author edited the meeting to add next person. Also trying to find what made e-mail land into spam in cloud exchange is near-impossibility... and whitelisting them in global rules just doesn't fucking work for no good reason. It's utter mess.
• mkatx 3y ago
  In a corporate setting, I've experienced many problems with Microsoft and their services. Just off the top of my head, we had a ms forms, a couple actually, that as soon as they hit 50k entries, broke in weird ways. Not accepting new entrys, dropping entries, etc.. That's just one example I immediately recall where I could code up a better solution in a short amount of time, that just shouldn't be a thing with a large cloud/service provider like Ms.
• tlb 3y ago
  How did this process rate the relative security of the clouds? How much does security matter to your business? A common bureaucratic failure mode when evaluating competitors is to make a bunch of categories: Performance: 4/5 Ease of use: 4/5 Cost: 3/5 Security: 0/5 and then average them. When for these categories, you probably should compare the minimum rather than average.