".. Nadella has spurred Microsoft to go all-in and end-to-end on the cloud across its enormous range of products and services that span everything from IoT sensors to mobile devices to hundreds of millions of PCs to [b]mission-critical servers[/b] and all the way in to the data center itself."
Mostly a short fluff article; however, I have noticed that Azure does have a few powerful features that AWS and GCP lack, most notably InfiniBand (fast interconnects), which I have needed on more than one occasion for HPC tasks. In fact, 4x16 core instances on Azure are currently faster at performing molecular dynamics simulations than 1x"64 core" instance on GCP. But the cost is extremely high, and I still haven't found a good cloud platform for short, high intensity HPC tasks.
That said, Azure probably has the worst UI—slow, buggy, and their CLI doesn't work with Anaconda installed on OS X. I had to hack Anaconda out of my path temporarily while using Microsoft's 'az' tool. Also, their new resource manager system is confusing. In terms of sheer compute capability though, Azure is hard to beat.
> I still haven't found a good cloud platform for short, high intensity HPC tasks.
I would suggest contacting the nearby university with research groups using HPC such as theoretical chemistry, bioinformatics or computational economics. I would guess you could get a special deal for less than what you'd pay for an AWS instance.
I don't think Amazon needs to be #1 in everything they do to achieve the kind of worldwide market domination Bezos wants.
They are top five in many multi-billion dollar industries like eCommerce, streaming video, eBooks, rockets, cloud services, and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure I'm missing.
tl;dr: This is a Microsoft puff piece written by a PR firm. The ranking is based on abstract things like "completeness of offerings" and "future vision". There's a token revenue comparison as well in an attempt to give some substance which compares all of Microsoft's "cloud" (that is to say inclusive of things like Office 365) against Amazon's IaaS.
This has become annoyingly common and incredibly difficult to discern from honest articles these days. Google in particular seems to prefer them over actual blog posts of their own these days, and has major outlets like The Verge and WIRED heavily publishing for them.
I feel like its already well-known people are supposed to disclose when they are paid for an article, but there are non-monetary perks like exclusive interviews/access which aren't clearly disclosed as conflicts.
I had to verify the numbers stated in this article from different sources, and while I think the fair comparison is between Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud unit" (which excludes Office 365) & AWS, the conclusion on financials in the article is surprisingly true, if only by accident.
Much to my surprise, Azure/MS seems to be making a lot more money, raking in $6.8B in Q1 2017 [1], vs AWS' $3.66B [2]!!
The 6.8 in the article is for "Windows Server businesses", wouldn't it be way larger than just cloud sevices ?
Even without office, there still would the windows server products in it.
Our CTO keeps 'suggesting' that we build services on Azure vs AWS. They're roughly equivalent but Azure works out to be more expensive and more opaque to our team and there hasn't actually been a justification for why other than "because we use Microsoft services". A significant amount of our infrastructure is on AWS already.
I imagine the more money we spend, the more goodies he gets. They already sent him a Hololens and that's just the thing I can physically see.
> They already sent him a Hololens and that's just the thing I can physically see.
And company policy allows him to keep it? That's precisely the sort of reason why companies have policies on capping gift values from partners. If I were a member of the board, I'd be pissed.
In this uni of Melbourne study 95% of managers would deny their employer profit if it meant a small personal gain. The example given is $500 personal gain denying a $1 million profit for the business.
I found out recently that good chunk of this progress (esp. in their SaaS space) is being fueled by open source projects, for example Power BI uses D3 3.5 and angular 1.5.
I hope they open source at least a part of their stack, for example the Azure Service Fabric.
Funny that you mention that: they announced the Azure Service Fabric .NET SDK recently went open source and there seems to be some intent to open source more, including possibly an open source version of the runtime:
The bulk of Microsoft's customer base is the global "Fortune 1000". They have a cloud structure designed for those customers, and those customers are comfortable working with MS. They are also large consumers of computing so this makes sense (though TBT the article seems more like a market "research" puff piece).
However most startups aren't in that ecosystem; when you start with an empty buffer you don't have the same path dependencies that big businesses do. So the Azure/AWS/Gcs calculus is different, not always in MS's favor. Even Netflix, started by a former MS board director, is on AWS not Azure.
25 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 37.2 ms ] threadWhich servers?
That said, Azure probably has the worst UI—slow, buggy, and their CLI doesn't work with Anaconda installed on OS X. I had to hack Anaconda out of my path temporarily while using Microsoft's 'az' tool. Also, their new resource manager system is confusing. In terms of sheer compute capability though, Azure is hard to beat.
I would suggest contacting the nearby university with research groups using HPC such as theoretical chemistry, bioinformatics or computational economics. I would guess you could get a special deal for less than what you'd pay for an AWS instance.
They are top five in many multi-billion dollar industries like eCommerce, streaming video, eBooks, rockets, cloud services, and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure I'm missing.
I feel like its already well-known people are supposed to disclose when they are paid for an article, but there are non-monetary perks like exclusive interviews/access which aren't clearly disclosed as conflicts.
Much to my surprise, Azure/MS seems to be making a lot more money, raking in $6.8B in Q1 2017 [1], vs AWS' $3.66B [2]!!
[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-q3-fy2017-earnings-...
[2] https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/27/aws-grabs-3-66-billion-in...
I imagine the more money we spend, the more goodies he gets. They already sent him a Hololens and that's just the thing I can physically see.
And company policy allows him to keep it? That's precisely the sort of reason why companies have policies on capping gift values from partners. If I were a member of the board, I'd be pissed.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/most-people-are-willing-t...
I hope they open source at least a part of their stack, for example the Azure Service Fabric.
https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric
However most startups aren't in that ecosystem; when you start with an empty buffer you don't have the same path dependencies that big businesses do. So the Azure/AWS/Gcs calculus is different, not always in MS's favor. Even Netflix, started by a former MS board director, is on AWS not Azure.