Azure had 39.77 hours of downtime, whilst Rack space had 7.52 and the winner (of the selected cloud providers was AWS with 2.41 hours.
I'm not sure how those figures were calculated though. These cloud providers are multifaceted. I'm not sure which parts if each's services were analysed.
Also, it is worth considering that one serious problem can distort these averages. AWS has a much more stable long term history.
In my opinion the competition is a good thing and Microsoft seem happy to support whatever framework or OS you want. Their node.js support is supposed to be pretty good.
The marketplace also enables you to get things like MongoDb clusters, etc which is competition for SQL Server. They seem to be interested in supporting customer interests rather than the old fashioned MS tech or die philosophy from back in the day.
Those figures are a combination of downtime across all regions globally. So it doesn't mean that any individual servers were down. The largest downtime was in Europe, with had 5.97 hours last year.
Factors for downtime were an update bug in November and weather. The bug is very unlikely to happen again. Outages due to weather really don't tell you much at all other than that they were unlucky. Overall, I would say the downtime numbers are not very useful.
If what you have is a couple of web servers and a couple of database servers, I would take the one weekend off to learn Azure and write up scripts to migrate data and servers and other configuration.
Would definitely be harder if you have a more complex infrastructure - but in most cases entirely worth it.
Many startups in YC actually launch during the 3 months they are here. Being successful before entering YC is only true for a small percentage of the companies.
There is no prerequisite to have a "stable tech infrastructure" -- shoot, there's no prerequisite to even have an actual product! -- for admission to YC. pg has made it pretty clear that YC selects founders, not necessarily ideas.
And for those that have a proof-of-concept running on some other provider(s) (AWS/Rackspace/Google), it would be a huge boon to be able to migrate and scale using Azure and the $500k credit.
3 years of technical investment is pretty much enough to stop you leaving unless something goes very wrong. This $500k is a small price to pay for a client who goes on to be the next AirBNB or Dropbox. Even just the prestige of having a company like that to draw on for testimonials would justify the spend.
However...
For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of those will burn through $500k in no time compared to the equivalent on a more open platform.
Whether or not to use Azure is certainly NOT obvious.
Does the Linux image run virtualized over an MS kernel? I often laugh running MS code in a VM over __nix because when the Guest crashed, my host OS is still running. I cant imagine running a __nix Guest over a MS Host though.
I dont have much experience with MS servers, as I like to get things done, but how are they when it comes to stability?
I have made this comment before but I think that it bears repeating: Azure has good Linux support. I find little difference running Ubuntu VPS's on Azure that on other good platforms like AWS, Google, BlueMix, etc.
They'll recoup the value of the entire thing, with extra profit, if even just one of the YC startups using it has explosive growth. It's a smart investment. Even without the money, it's a great technology showcase. YC now gets to give its startups the Oscars giftbag treatment. :)
In a way, it's like investing in YC startups then. Give a sizable but not unbearably so amount of money to a large set, hope that statistically these companies have a chance to experience hockey stick growth, and have that one black swan cover all your costs across the whole group.
So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:
- Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
- Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it.
I can't help but think that Microsoft has had quite a few acquisitions as of late, though. Minecraft (gaming), Acompli (mobile email), Sunrise (mobile calendar), and probably others.
Microsoft in the last 1-2 years is like a new scrappy competitor who lost market share on hubris. They are now willing to work how developers like to work not forcing them into the corral. Azure is the new OS at Microsoft, lock in higher up the stack but actually not as lock-in as before.
Microsoft went back to developer focus over biz/marketing focus and it is working like it always has.
Can you give explanations on what actually makes you think that way?
=> As a Microsoft employee, i totally disagree. I would even go as far as guessing that you either are talking about something you don't know, or are just one of those evangelists that are paid to write such comments everywhere on the web.
Microsoft is a desperately consumer/business-oriented company, with no interest in technology whatsoever. If you don't get that, then you haven't been paying attention
That is some serious credit... I should share that having access to Azure MFA (formerly PhoneFactor) alone has been worth the R&D time. Their support, although a little tough to nail down 1-on-1 time with, is very friendly. I chose that word carefully, it's not super professional, but I actually had a good time going through a migration with them, for what's it's worth.
Any idea on the LCV for Azure of the average YC startup? I know the average YC startup is going to be a cut above, but are a large percentage of them going to break the $500k in an early stage?
If the next Dropbox builds on Azure, instead of AWS, it would all be worth it. From Microsoft's perspective it's a pretty cheap bet that will probably not pay off.
The oldest tactic in the Proprietary Platform Handbook is giving away free stuff to hook people early on.
In this case Azure can run Linux VMs, so I wouldn't worry much about using them for that. Linux lacks lock in.
Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.
Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage startups.
That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode and Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills to free services is a no-brainer.
EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.
EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their platform: http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/
"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.
Sure, but in practice if you have any complexity in your stack then it's going to be a PITA to from Azure to AWS (or vice-versa).
If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc...
I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming so wedded to that Azure systems that the opportunity cost of switching to AWS is too high.
Sorry, should have clarified. Most early stage startups don't do DevOps or sysadmin well. Imagine the typical YC startup where its just 2-3 developers who are comfortable with the command line, but not comfortable with Chef, Puppet, etc. Having to plan a migration is not fun or productive for a set of developers because it means (1) less time for them to focus on mobile/web development (2) learning to do sysadmin when it's out of their comfort zone.
AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.
note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.
Wild... didn't know that. I've been doing mostly node with some C# for the past 3 years... just double checked MS WebMatrix and nope, doesn't look like Ruby is in the box...
Actually Microsoft has not one but two Platform-as-a-Service offerings:
- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)
- Azure Websites (PaaS light)
Unfortunately, when I last looked at it two months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.
First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).
Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.
If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings.
I've found this to be very untrue - digital ocean offers very poor performance per $ compared to linode in my experience. Linode don't have a $5/month option but if you pay $10/month or more you will get a lot better performance at Linode
Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not.
In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.
I do have some third-hand insider information that implies that Linode's management/billing/etc systems are old and buggy, which colors my judgement.
Regardless, I don't see how you can judge someone who's had at least two breaches more competent than someone who had zero. In all probability, DO didn't have any breaches precisely because they are more competent.
This is probably a good time to promote my FOSS, PuPHPet [0], an online GUI for creating your own customized VM that you can deploy locally, to AWS/DO/Linode, and soon Azure.
Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients
unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :)
And the shameless plug:
Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If any one is in need of system administration, integration, performance analysis, optimization, configuration management and devops like services I'm here to help.
O365 is good for existing corporate customers who use inhouse exchange servers. Thats what microsoft shops are doing these days: migrate from inhouse exchange to O365.
Otherwise, I don't see why small shops wanna move away from gmail to O365.
As someone who just helped migrate a client to exchange online, do not get it. It's shockingly awful.
They have two separate admin interfaces, neither of which you can do everything in so you have to break out powershell to finish off the job. The client had to lean heavily on me to help, something other clients have never had to do with gmail.
I like a lot of MS products, but from my brief exposure, exchange is a complete mess of WTFs. And annoyingly, googling doesn't often bring up pertinent answers and their help is pathetic.
Honestly, O365 is very poorly designed and operated product - I've seen countless organisations either implement it from scratch or migrate to it and they've had more problems than they can afford - the amount of undocumented downtime over the last year has be absolutely unbelievable - If i told you how many clients have said they have not weekly - but daily problems you wouldn't believe me.
Bundle that with cleaverly designed vendor lockin and General poor UX and you've got yourself a real headache.
That's a great idea! I work at Cloud 66 (http://www.cloud66.com) and we let you build your own Heroku on Azure and benefit from this $500k and Heroku-like simplicity. You can also migrate between cloud providers (including Azure and the ones mentioned) if needed.
We think this is a great way for startups to use the tons of cloud credits they get, instead of letting them go to waste or spending precious time on setting up infrastructure.
In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for enterprise services at $5k/mo.
This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.
This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.
I probably shouldn't have used such a initiative word like "will". That said scaling out PaaS compared to scaling out IaaS, specifically on Azure, is almost guaranteed to be less expensive from an infrastructure standpoint. Less actual VM's to manage also translates into less overhead from maintenance activities.
At the very least it will be interesting to see if more people adopt the Azure Websites PaaS offering. I know that right now most people dip their toes into Azure with IaaS because its historically more comfortable for them.
Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.
Glad I'm not alone. Trying to use my account during my Azure trial period resulted in getting 500 errors. I gave up and had a DO droplet going in like 30 seconds instead.
Azure has been doing better. I've been using them for about 15 months now and the quality, uptime, speed, etc have all steadily improved. I haven't had an issue that was Azure's fault in quite some time now.
It's much better now. Check out the new Ivy Bridge/Haswell, SSD backed D and G series VMs. They are a vast improvement over the old AMD/magnetic backed A series.
You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use than AWS, for example.
It was a multi-region, multi-hour outage on Nov 18. To my knowledge AWS has not experienced a multi-region outage. That said, they are learning from these events and improving stability.
You are right - the big outage happened in November. Feels like yesterday (it was a stressful day for me). AWS outages have been more limited in scope/geo, still took some sophisticated users of AWS offline (Netflix, Instagram come to mind).
I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net.
I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well.
Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud. While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything critical.
They actually did a walkthrough of one of their DC's on video a while ago...it looked fairly impressive and well put together to me, but I've never been in anything but a small Co-Lo, so I'm not really sure what to look for.
I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the situation, I hope you will understand why. It makes me think that you have not thought carefully about what you are saying here.
If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.
Not sure what you mean by where my info went wrong, but my friend worked at a MS datacenter a few years ago, so I don't know what has changed. At the time, almost all of the techs working at the DC were contractors, not MSFT employees. They were severely understaffed and getting cut back constantly. There were a few different companies doing the contracting as well, and all of them were under the threat of losing out to a lower bid company. The competent techs were getting outnumbered by incompetent techs. That and the fact that MS couldn't even renew basic registrations and certificates didn't surprise me with my poor experience with Azure.
Again, this was a couple of years ago. Also, I attended an event that MS held to show off Azure, and a large percentage of participants couldn't spin up an instance within 10 minutes, some of them didn't even start up. The MS people running the event had a direct line to some techs in the datacenter, but they still couldn't solve the problems. I talked with some MS partners/users who told me that Azure was terrible in their experience and even some MS execs admitted as much in private conversation. It sounds like Azure has improved since then, but I really have to wonder how much improvement has occured.
I take your points to be the following. Correct me if I'm wrong. (1) Morale is low among our DC technicians, (2) many of the tech vendors are incompetent, (3) one time hotmail forgot to renew a cert, (4) you had a bad experience one time with an Azure demo.
Honestly, aceperry, I'm not seeing where any of this reflects poorly on our ability to operate x million machines, and the fact that you present it as evidence that we are not "competent" at provision our cluster effectively for our customers is worrying. I am starting to wonder if you know anything at all about the trade, because literally nothing here is relevant to your case. Even the hearsay you have about the DC vendors being incompetent is not really useful here, because it does not impact our operational capacity at all.
What am I missing in your statement that should cause me to worry?
We have a bunch of Microsofties at YC today, but reach out to Steve or me directly at (founders@microsoft.com) if you're a Winter 2015 batch company and for some reason not at YC today.
It's also worth pointing out that our $60k offer for YC companies is still around, if you're in one of the older batches.
Not a YC company, but we'd love to buy you and Scott coffee or lunch if you're free tomorrow. We (Fanout) received a boat-load of Azure credits that haven't been used, but with all of the cool new Microsoft OSS developments recently we think it'd be great to start working on Azure. My twitter/phone# is the same as my HN handle.
In the BizSpark Plus days, your company would receive $60K of hosting but could only use it to pay 100% of your bill in the first year of BS+. In the second year, you could use it to pay 50% and then in the third year you were paying full price for Azure. It was a pretty good deal, but if you are already spending $30-60K (or $250-$500 K) on infra in your first year or two, you're in a select breed of companies.
I was accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program last year so I get $150/month free Azure credit. Azure is very nice to use. So far, I have just been using Ubuntu Linux VPS instances (similar to AWS EC2) and everything works similarly to other providers I use like AWS, IBM BlueMix, Digital Ocean, and Google's cloud services. Really, these are all very good services, so use the one you can get for free or at a low cost.
I used to be pretty much down on Microsoft, but now they are doing a lot of stuff right in my opinion: providing solid Linux support on Azure and providing an unbelievably good deal on the family edition of Office365. It seems like they are buying themselves into the cloud market, but with all of their cash on hand, that seems like a good strategy!
Anyway, if you have a business idea you want to try then look into BizSpark.
Wow amazing, I am not the biggest Microsoft fan & I would never have what it takes to be part of a YC startup, yet just reading this got me all excited. This is truly great for those startups that qualify!
How is this any different than their previous "free" access to server products for a few years? The idea being build it at low cost, then flip the company?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadAzure had 39.77 hours of downtime, whilst Rack space had 7.52 and the winner (of the selected cloud providers was AWS with 2.41 hours.
I'm not sure how those figures were calculated though. These cloud providers are multifaceted. I'm not sure which parts if each's services were analysed.
Also, it is worth considering that one serious problem can distort these averages. AWS has a much more stable long term history.
In my opinion the competition is a good thing and Microsoft seem happy to support whatever framework or OS you want. Their node.js support is supposed to be pretty good.
The marketplace also enables you to get things like MongoDb clusters, etc which is competition for SQL Server. They seem to be interested in supporting customer interests rather than the old fashioned MS tech or die philosophy from back in the day.
Factors for downtime were an update bug in November and weather. The bug is very unlikely to happen again. Outages due to weather really don't tell you much at all other than that they were unlucky. Overall, I would say the downtime numbers are not very useful.
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240238379/Microsoft-Azur...
This would only benefit YC startups who already use Azure. (Unless the switching cost from AWS/Rackspace/Google is low enough nowadays.)
Would definitely be harder if you have a more complex infrastructure - but in most cases entirely worth it.
And for those that have a proof-of-concept running on some other provider(s) (AWS/Rackspace/Google), it would be a huge boon to be able to migrate and scale using Azure and the $500k credit.
For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
However...
For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of those will burn through $500k in no time compared to the equivalent on a more open platform.
Whether or not to use Azure is certainly NOT obvious.
Why's that? Azure's just another cloud hosting provider. You don't have to run any kind of Microsoft software on the servers.
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virt...
edit: looks like phonon below beat me to it by a few minutes.
You can spin up bog standard Linux instances if you want. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virt...
You don't have to use a MSFT stack.
I dont have much experience with MS servers, as I like to get things done, but how are they when it comes to stability?
Nietzsche: God is dead.
God (couple of years later): Nietzsche is dead.
pg: Microsoft is dead. http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Microsoft (couple of years later): Here's some gift* for your startups. :)
(*: please don't start explaining that it is not a gift, etc. -- I know. :) )
- Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
- Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it.
I can't help but think that Microsoft has had quite a few acquisitions as of late, though. Minecraft (gaming), Acompli (mobile email), Sunrise (mobile calendar), and probably others.
Microsoft in the last 1-2 years is like a new scrappy competitor who lost market share on hubris. They are now willing to work how developers like to work not forcing them into the corral. Azure is the new OS at Microsoft, lock in higher up the stack but actually not as lock-in as before.
Microsoft went back to developer focus over biz/marketing focus and it is working like it always has.
=> As a Microsoft employee, i totally disagree. I would even go as far as guessing that you either are talking about something you don't know, or are just one of those evangelists that are paid to write such comments everywhere on the web.
Microsoft is a desperately consumer/business-oriented company, with no interest in technology whatsoever. If you don't get that, then you haven't been paying attention
The oldest tactic in the Proprietary Platform Handbook is giving away free stuff to hook people early on.
In this case Azure can run Linux VMs, so I wouldn't worry much about using them for that. Linux lacks lock in.
Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage startups.
That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode and Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills to free services is a no-brainer.
EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.
EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their platform: http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/
If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc...
I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming so wedded to that Azure systems that the opportunity cost of switching to AWS is too high.
Edit: Typo
AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.
note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.
Been playing with CoreOS though...
- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)
- Azure Websites (PaaS light)
Unfortunately, when I last looked at it two months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.
First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).
Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.
If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings.
You can spin up your own load balancer pretty easily. DO offers backup too.
In terms of bang for the buck, you can't really beat DO, unless you're giving your services away for free ...
If you treat DO as just another VPS provider and pay on a monthly basis does it offer advantages over the competition?
http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/02/digitalocean-fixes-securit...
In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.
In contrast, the performance difference is objectively measurable: http://joshtronic.com/2014/06/22/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-...
Regardless, I don't see how you can judge someone who's had at least two breaches more competent than someone who had zero. In all probability, DO didn't have any breaches precisely because they are more competent.
[0] https://puphpet.com
The post mentions that this is only for new YC startups, i.e. folks that won't have anything (or very little) to migrate.
Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :)
And the shameless plug: Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If any one is in need of system administration, integration, performance analysis, optimization, configuration management and devops like services I'm here to help.
Gmail is not flaky the way O365 is. Random outages with no explanation/contact from support until days after remedy...are no fun.
Otherwise, I don't see why small shops wanna move away from gmail to O365.
They have two separate admin interfaces, neither of which you can do everything in so you have to break out powershell to finish off the job. The client had to lean heavily on me to help, something other clients have never had to do with gmail.
I like a lot of MS products, but from my brief exposure, exchange is a complete mess of WTFs. And annoyingly, googling doesn't often bring up pertinent answers and their help is pathetic.
Bundle that with cleaverly designed vendor lockin and General poor UX and you've got yourself a real headache.
We think this is a great way for startups to use the tons of cloud credits they get, instead of letting them go to waste or spending precious time on setting up infrastructure.
How do you figure that? Pricing on cloud services can be tough to compare so I really question anyone who presents blanket statements like that.
At the very least it will be interesting to see if more people adopt the Azure Websites PaaS offering. I know that right now most people dip their toes into Azure with IaaS because its historically more comfortable for them.
I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well.
Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud. While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything critical.
If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.
Again, this was a couple of years ago. Also, I attended an event that MS held to show off Azure, and a large percentage of participants couldn't spin up an instance within 10 minutes, some of them didn't even start up. The MS people running the event had a direct line to some techs in the datacenter, but they still couldn't solve the problems. I talked with some MS partners/users who told me that Azure was terrible in their experience and even some MS execs admitted as much in private conversation. It sounds like Azure has improved since then, but I really have to wonder how much improvement has occured.
Honestly, aceperry, I'm not seeing where any of this reflects poorly on our ability to operate x million machines, and the fact that you present it as evidence that we are not "competent" at provision our cluster effectively for our customers is worrying. I am starting to wonder if you know anything at all about the trade, because literally nothing here is relevant to your case. Even the hearsay you have about the DC vendors being incompetent is not really useful here, because it does not impact our operational capacity at all.
What am I missing in your statement that should cause me to worry?
It's also worth pointing out that our $60k offer for YC companies is still around, if you're in one of the older batches.
In the BizSpark Plus days, your company would receive $60K of hosting but could only use it to pay 100% of your bill in the first year of BS+. In the second year, you could use it to pay 50% and then in the third year you were paying full price for Azure. It was a pretty good deal, but if you are already spending $30-60K (or $250-$500 K) on infra in your first year or two, you're in a select breed of companies.
3 Years
Is this sentence constructed poorly or did a private comment slip in?
I was accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program last year so I get $150/month free Azure credit. Azure is very nice to use. So far, I have just been using Ubuntu Linux VPS instances (similar to AWS EC2) and everything works similarly to other providers I use like AWS, IBM BlueMix, Digital Ocean, and Google's cloud services. Really, these are all very good services, so use the one you can get for free or at a low cost.
I used to be pretty much down on Microsoft, but now they are doing a lot of stuff right in my opinion: providing solid Linux support on Azure and providing an unbelievably good deal on the family edition of Office365. It seems like they are buying themselves into the cloud market, but with all of their cash on hand, that seems like a good strategy!
Anyway, if you have a business idea you want to try then look into BizSpark.
EDIT: correction, it looks like it's actually 5 users: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/niallsblog/archive/2014/08/22/activa...
https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-computing/...
That's can't be the only reason to choose (or ignore) a particular platform, because:
- 100% is not commercially feasible
- with rare exceptions, a little downtime won't kill you