8 ms·

Azure is awesome, especially for startups :-) It's really easy to develop for (you don't need to set up everything by yourself, just use the available libraries

by Avalaxy 14y ago

Azure is awesome, especially for startups :-) It's really easy to develop for (you don't need to set up everything by yourself, just use the available libraries) and it support virtually every programming language. Furthermore it's really fast (http://nasunicdn.s3.amazonaws.com/images/nasuni_infographic_the_state_of_cloud_storage_2013.jpg http://nasunicdn.s3.amazonaws.com/images/nasuni_infographic_...) and pretty cheap. It's a shame it's being ignored by most of the HN community.

astrodust 14y ago
It's because of Microsoft's historically hostile attitude towards anything Not Windows which rubs many people in this community the wrong way. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy?
- cooldeal 14y ago
  The iPad killed Silverlight, not Microsoft. The idea of a plugin-free web powered by HTML5 will ultimately benefit everyone, especially given security exploits and performance issues in browser plugins. A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't. Silverlight still works on Windows 8 machines. What do you want them to do? Sue Apple for banning a Silverlight plugin from their tablets and phones? The actual Silverlight and XAML skills are directly applicable to developing Windows 8 Store apps and Windows Phone apps.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    So the iPod killed the Zune? And the old Windows Phone OS? Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows.
    - ghurlman 14y ago
      So you're saying the iPod didn't kill the Zune?
    - cooldeal 14y ago
      >Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows First, Microsoft has three major divisions bringing in somewhat equal amounts of revenue, Windows, Office and Server & Tools. Second, if you apply the same metric to other companies, it would be foolish to use OS X, Gmail, Docs. App Engine. Android, and perhaps even Azure. Third, Microsoft could've competed by making a better Zune, perhaps, but it's not the same thing as the iPad killing Silverlight, because that was done by not supporting plugins. Tablets are slowly overtaking PCs in sales, what sense does it make to push new versions of a plugin that will never run on most of them? The transitions have mostly been smooth, VB apps still run on Windows. Hell, a game bundled with the Windows 95 CD still runs unchanged on a Windows 8 machine. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hover/ http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hov...
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - astrodust 14y ago
        Google App Engine is a risky bet for the same reason as Azure, and perhaps even more so. Google could decide tomorrow that it's not worth supporting and tank it, or change the pricing model to make it no longer cost effective. I don't think the same thing can be said for Amazon's AWS or other infrastructure providers like RackSpace where that would be as much as going out of business. I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't take care of Windows, if anything they support it too much, but anything that's not Windows is just one executive decision away from being shut down.
        outside1234 14y ago
        XBox runs on Azure from what I hear. Its not getting shut down anytime soon. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd even go as far as to say that Azure is the future of Windows Server.
    - daigoba66 14y ago
      The iPhone basically erased the market for standalone music players, which forced Microsoft to abandon the Zune and start catching up on the Windows Phone. But to your point, Microsoft tends to play "me too" when trying to compete with other technology companies which results in a lot of less-than-polished and sometimes abandoned products and services.
      - astrodust 14y ago
        Microsoft's old strategy of surround, starve, and destroy doesn't seem to be working against more aggressive competitors like Apple, Google and even Amazon. Azure could be a decent server platform, but until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear, as right now with Ballmer in charge, nothing other than Windows, Windows, Windows is ever a sure thing. Consider Microsoft's strategy to build the Surface and compete directly with the OEMs they sell through. It's often hard to tell the difference between being a good friend of Microsoft and their worst enemy.
        kooshball 14y ago
        > until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear Here are the intentions from the latest shareholders letter http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar12/shareholder-letter/index.html http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar12/shareholder-l... "Helping businesses move to the cloud is one of our largest opportunities. All the online services people use today — both from Microsoft and other companies — run on servers in datacenters around the globe. The volume of Internet services used will continue to grow as people connect to the Internet from more devices for more purposes — fueling incredible opportunity in our server business. Unique to Microsoft, we continue to design and deliver world-class cloud solutions that allow our customers to move to the cloud on their terms. For example, a company can choose to deploy Office or Microsoft Dynamics on premises, as a cloud service or a combination of both. With Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure and System Center infrastructure, businesses can deploy applications in their own datacenter, a partner's datacenter or in Microsoft's datacenter with common security, management and administration across all environments, with ultimate flexibility and scale. Our business customers tell us these capabilities are critical to harnessing the power of the cloud so they can reach new levels of efficiency and tap new areas of growth."
    - Spooky23 14y ago
      Cloud services are a core strategic direction for Microsoft. Office365 has millions of users. Ditto for XBox Live, etc. Azure is a key component for integrating your business with Microsoft via Office 365. It isn't going anywhere.
  - camus 14y ago
    Lol , Microsoft killed silverlight. And silverlight developers to use HTML5 instead , what a joke. Latest IE versions dont even support silverlight anymore but do support Flash ... that what you get when you use closed source solutions , you cant even patch them yourself...
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    I don't think the iPad killed Silverlight per se. I think it was dead on arrival for the most part; it was just not a good technology.
- HardyLeung 14y ago
  Steve Jobs killed Silverlight (and Flash). Not by providing a strictly superior technology, but by declaring that the category (rich web client) is unimportant. I'm unhappy that Silverlight is dead but not because of Microsoft.
  - camus 14y ago
    no he did not , MS killed it itself.
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    I don't think that all development should be on the Web but I think the clear winner for Web "rich clients" is the browser, not all these plugins.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  Yeah and IBM helped [Goldman rule] before WWII so they cannot possibly do anything good, ever. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? Ironically, Microsoft is usually known to support things for ages, getting a lot of flak in the process.
  - tracker1 14y ago
    Aside from windows and some of the developer tools, not really aware of much that MS has supported more than 1 generation back, which is pretty typical of most software companies. My only point of contention here is that I won't use a "cross platform" MS technology that hasn't made it to a 3rd release on the non-windows platforms. I do a lot of .Net (ASP/MVC mostly) for server-side code... but never really saw an advantage to Silverlight over Flash/Flex development. I don't fault MS for shuttering Silverlight... but do think that MS should have made efforts for taking Silverlight projects into desktop applets, since the web stuff is a dead end for non-JS/HTML5. MS took what seems like ungodly long to release IE10 for Windows 7... a year ago, it was current... now a lot of new focus has been on WebRTC, where IE will again trail the pack. IE also introduced some new inconsistencies with the Metro docking behavior. I do like the IE10 grid system a bit better than what will likely become the blessed spec though.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? I don't know many happy Flash developers these days, either.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    If Adobe had made a lean, mean, mobile capable player, produced an (understandable) open standard for what Flash is they could've had a shot at being bundled into iOS. Adobe's done a pretty good job of sabotaging a good thing. Maybe they'll make a fully functional JavaScript Flash player to avoid having to use the plug-in in the first place.
    - camus 14y ago
      Adobe did sabotage Flash and basically every Macromedia products. What's left of Macromedia innovative vibe? nothing. Adobe has 0 strategy regarding web development solutions , Flash is dead, coldfusion is dead , Fireworks is dead (a great product for webdesigners), dreamweaver lacks of basic features even a little text editor like sublime text has ... all the edge stuff is a joke. I wish there would be a serious alternative to photoshop , i wish adobe was just died.
      - speeder 14y ago
        I still.use Fireworks 8 to do game art, especially to mix pixel art with vectors. I wish a open source clone of it existed :( Also I wish that Adobe die in a fire. The only product they ever made that made me happy is the font Source Sans Pro.
        czk 14y ago
        Hi, Source Sans Pro is open source (SIL Open Font License): https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro
- outside1234 14y ago
  Do you know any Apple Newton developers that are happy? Or Google Wave developers? Stuff fails in the marketplace - it is a sign of maturity that the company shoots the stuff that isn't working and focuses on the things that are.
- ismaelc 14y ago
  Dude I'm a Silverlight developer, and I'm still able to leverage my XAML/C# skills to build Windows 8/Phone apps. I'm quite happy with that.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
3327 14y ago
we run on AZURE! it rocks (period).
- Avalaxy 14y ago
  Could you share with us how you're using Azure? I'd love to hear from other startups running Azure.
  - cmircea 14y ago
    We're using Azure Web Sites for our site (public/admin), planning on using storage and cloud services soon. It's been very fast and perfectly reliable, also free thanks to BizSpark =)
  - scoj 14y ago
    I am on Azure as well for my startup (sharpplm.com). We are a document/quality management system for small mfg companies. The app was built as a straight .NET web app with sql server backend, so I went the VM path for now. Since its bootstrapped, Bizspark really has helped cut the startup costs. So far I've been really happy, also all the other software is a nice added bonus.
  - 3327 14y ago
    Yes, we run two webapps on azure, migration was super easy (we were on amazon before) its pretty straight forward couldn't be happier to be honest. We applied to bizspark and got accepted (which was also straight forward). So since we have Azure free for a year we deployed our apps pretty recently actually. TBH, not that any of the services are that complicated, the UI is way better than Amazon's, amazon has a strange way of doing things even on amazon.com. In short, clean, easy to scale, and does the job. edit forgot this: startup is www.bemvi.com
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- niggler 14y ago
  Not true at all. "So you basically need to buy windows and visual studio to work with Azure" Comes with BizSpark (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-47B9-A65D-DF84EF88511B/Products_by_Benefit_Level.xlsx http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-4... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500) "if you are not into windows centered development, Azure is not that interesting ." You can use their website to set everything up. I did it from my iMac. As a simple test: http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ <-- this is using their Heroku-like offering. You push to a git endpoint. http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ <-- this is using a ubuntu VM running in their AWS-like offering. Both are running the nodejs script: var http = require('http'); var port = process.env.PORT || 1337; http.createServer(function(req, res) { res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' }); res.end('Stop niggling!\n'); }).listen(port);
  - outside1234 14y ago
    you can do everything on a Mac or Linux. you don't need to be a Windows user. In fact, the CLI for Azure is a node.js app.
nacs 14y ago
Oh the irony of hosting a pro-Azure benchmark image on the Amazon (S3) cloud.

by Avalaxy 14y ago

astrodust 14y ago

It's because of Microsoft's historically hostile attitude towards anything Not Windows which rubs many people in this community the wrong way. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy?

cooldeal 14y ago
The iPad killed Silverlight, not Microsoft. The idea of a plugin-free web powered by HTML5 will ultimately benefit everyone, especially given security exploits and performance issues in browser plugins. A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't. Silverlight still works on Windows 8 machines. What do you want them to do? Sue Apple for banning a Silverlight plugin from their tablets and phones? The actual Silverlight and XAML skills are directly applicable to developing Windows 8 Store apps and Windows Phone apps.
- astrodust 14y ago
  So the iPod killed the Zune? And the old Windows Phone OS? Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows.
  - ghurlman 14y ago
    So you're saying the iPod didn't kill the Zune?
  - cooldeal 14y ago
    >Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows First, Microsoft has three major divisions bringing in somewhat equal amounts of revenue, Windows, Office and Server & Tools. Second, if you apply the same metric to other companies, it would be foolish to use OS X, Gmail, Docs. App Engine. Android, and perhaps even Azure. Third, Microsoft could've competed by making a better Zune, perhaps, but it's not the same thing as the iPad killing Silverlight, because that was done by not supporting plugins. Tablets are slowly overtaking PCs in sales, what sense does it make to push new versions of a plugin that will never run on most of them? The transitions have mostly been smooth, VB apps still run on Windows. Hell, a game bundled with the Windows 95 CD still runs unchanged on a Windows 8 machine. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hover/ http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hov...
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - astrodust 14y ago
      Google App Engine is a risky bet for the same reason as Azure, and perhaps even more so. Google could decide tomorrow that it's not worth supporting and tank it, or change the pricing model to make it no longer cost effective. I don't think the same thing can be said for Amazon's AWS or other infrastructure providers like RackSpace where that would be as much as going out of business. I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't take care of Windows, if anything they support it too much, but anything that's not Windows is just one executive decision away from being shut down.
      - outside1234 14y ago
        XBox runs on Azure from what I hear. Its not getting shut down anytime soon. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd even go as far as to say that Azure is the future of Windows Server.
  - daigoba66 14y ago
    The iPhone basically erased the market for standalone music players, which forced Microsoft to abandon the Zune and start catching up on the Windows Phone. But to your point, Microsoft tends to play "me too" when trying to compete with other technology companies which results in a lot of less-than-polished and sometimes abandoned products and services.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      Microsoft's old strategy of surround, starve, and destroy doesn't seem to be working against more aggressive competitors like Apple, Google and even Amazon. Azure could be a decent server platform, but until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear, as right now with Ballmer in charge, nothing other than Windows, Windows, Windows is ever a sure thing. Consider Microsoft's strategy to build the Surface and compete directly with the OEMs they sell through. It's often hard to tell the difference between being a good friend of Microsoft and their worst enemy.
      - kooshball 14y ago
        > until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear Here are the intentions from the latest shareholders letter http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar12/shareholder-letter/index.html http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar12/shareholder-l... "Helping businesses move to the cloud is one of our largest opportunities. All the online services people use today — both from Microsoft and other companies — run on servers in datacenters around the globe. The volume of Internet services used will continue to grow as people connect to the Internet from more devices for more purposes — fueling incredible opportunity in our server business. Unique to Microsoft, we continue to design and deliver world-class cloud solutions that allow our customers to move to the cloud on their terms. For example, a company can choose to deploy Office or Microsoft Dynamics on premises, as a cloud service or a combination of both. With Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure and System Center infrastructure, businesses can deploy applications in their own datacenter, a partner's datacenter or in Microsoft's datacenter with common security, management and administration across all environments, with ultimate flexibility and scale. Our business customers tell us these capabilities are critical to harnessing the power of the cloud so they can reach new levels of efficiency and tap new areas of growth."
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    Cloud services are a core strategic direction for Microsoft. Office365 has millions of users. Ditto for XBox Live, etc. Azure is a key component for integrating your business with Microsoft via Office 365. It isn't going anywhere.
- camus 14y ago
  Lol , Microsoft killed silverlight. And silverlight developers to use HTML5 instead , what a joke. Latest IE versions dont even support silverlight anymore but do support Flash ... that what you get when you use closed source solutions , you cant even patch them yourself...
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I don't think the iPad killed Silverlight per se. I think it was dead on arrival for the most part; it was just not a good technology.
HardyLeung 14y ago
Steve Jobs killed Silverlight (and Flash). Not by providing a strictly superior technology, but by declaring that the category (rich web client) is unimportant. I'm unhappy that Silverlight is dead but not because of Microsoft.
- camus 14y ago
  no he did not , MS killed it itself.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I don't think that all development should be on the Web but I think the clear winner for Web "rich clients" is the browser, not all these plugins.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Yeah and IBM helped [Goldman rule] before WWII so they cannot possibly do anything good, ever. That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? Ironically, Microsoft is usually known to support things for ages, getting a lot of flak in the process.
- tracker1 14y ago
  Aside from windows and some of the developer tools, not really aware of much that MS has supported more than 1 generation back, which is pretty typical of most software companies. My only point of contention here is that I won't use a "cross platform" MS technology that hasn't made it to a 3rd release on the non-windows platforms. I do a lot of .Net (ASP/MVC mostly) for server-side code... but never really saw an advantage to Silverlight over Flash/Flex development. I don't fault MS for shuttering Silverlight... but do think that MS should have made efforts for taking Silverlight projects into desktop applets, since the web stuff is a dead end for non-JS/HTML5. MS took what seems like ungodly long to release IE10 for Windows 7... a year ago, it was current... now a lot of new focus has been on WebRTC, where IE will again trail the pack. IE also introduced some new inconsistencies with the Metro docking behavior. I do like the IE10 grid system a bit better than what will likely become the blessed spec though.
MartinCron 14y ago
Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy? I don't know many happy Flash developers these days, either.
- astrodust 14y ago
  If Adobe had made a lean, mean, mobile capable player, produced an (understandable) open standard for what Flash is they could've had a shot at being bundled into iOS. Adobe's done a pretty good job of sabotaging a good thing. Maybe they'll make a fully functional JavaScript Flash player to avoid having to use the plug-in in the first place.
  - camus 14y ago
    Adobe did sabotage Flash and basically every Macromedia products. What's left of Macromedia innovative vibe? nothing. Adobe has 0 strategy regarding web development solutions , Flash is dead, coldfusion is dead , Fireworks is dead (a great product for webdesigners), dreamweaver lacks of basic features even a little text editor like sublime text has ... all the edge stuff is a joke. I wish there would be a serious alternative to photoshop , i wish adobe was just died.
    - speeder 14y ago
      I still.use Fireworks 8 to do game art, especially to mix pixel art with vectors. I wish a open source clone of it existed :( Also I wish that Adobe die in a fire. The only product they ever made that made me happy is the font Source Sans Pro.
      - czk 14y ago
        Hi, Source Sans Pro is open source (SIL Open Font License): https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro
outside1234 14y ago
Do you know any Apple Newton developers that are happy? Or Google Wave developers? Stuff fails in the marketplace - it is a sign of maturity that the company shoots the stuff that isn't working and focuses on the things that are.
ismaelc 14y ago
Dude I'm a Silverlight developer, and I'm still able to leverage my XAML/C# skills to build Windows 8/Phone apps. I'm quite happy with that.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

3327 14y ago

we run on AZURE! it rocks (period).

Avalaxy 14y ago
Could you share with us how you're using Azure? I'd love to hear from other startups running Azure.
- cmircea 14y ago
  We're using Azure Web Sites for our site (public/admin), planning on using storage and cloud services soon. It's been very fast and perfectly reliable, also free thanks to BizSpark =)
- scoj 14y ago
  I am on Azure as well for my startup (sharpplm.com). We are a document/quality management system for small mfg companies. The app was built as a straight .NET web app with sql server backend, so I went the VM path for now. Since its bootstrapped, Bizspark really has helped cut the startup costs. So far I've been really happy, also all the other software is a nice added bonus.
- 3327 14y ago
  Yes, we run two webapps on azure, migration was super easy (we were on amazon before) its pretty straight forward couldn't be happier to be honest. We applied to bizspark and got accepted (which was also straight forward). So since we have Azure free for a year we deployed our apps pretty recently actually. TBH, not that any of the services are that complicated, the UI is way better than Amazon's, amazon has a strange way of doing things even on amazon.com. In short, clean, easy to scale, and does the job. edit forgot this: startup is www.bemvi.com

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

niggler 14y ago
Not true at all. "So you basically need to buy windows and visual studio to work with Azure" Comes with BizSpark (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-47B9-A65D-DF84EF88511B/Products_by_Benefit_Level.xlsx http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-4... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500) "if you are not into windows centered development, Azure is not that interesting ." You can use their website to set everything up. I did it from my iMac. As a simple test: http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ <-- this is using their Heroku-like offering. You push to a git endpoint. http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ <-- this is using a ubuntu VM running in their AWS-like offering. Both are running the nodejs script: var http = require('http'); var port = process.env.PORT || 1337; http.createServer(function(req, res) { res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' }); res.end('Stop niggling!\n'); }).listen(port);
- outside1234 14y ago
  you can do everything on a Mac or Linux. you don't need to be a Windows user. In fact, the CLI for Azure is a node.js app.

nacs 14y ago

Oh the irony of hosting a pro-Azure benchmark image on the Amazon (S3) cloud.