Microsoft Cloud Strength Highlights Second Quarter Results

Says the guy who worked at AWS.

Our cloud projects are spitted 50/50 across both cloud systems.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/cloud-surface-are-th...

It's very clearly not inflated. Azure is the #2 competitor to AWS at this point. Their quarterly results have been telling the tale of this build-up for the past two years.

AWS just grew by nearly 70%, and is quite a lot larger than Azure. It's not surprising that Azure would continue to grow so fast.

There seems to be a lot of confusion here about the Microsoft report. Nowhere in that report did they split out Azure sales, only "commercial cloud" ($9.4b annual run-rate) and "intelligent cloud" ($6.3b sales). The sole thing they were specific about regarding Azure, is 140% sales growth.

Office 365 makes it easy to setup the organisational IT (login based on your own domain, email, storage, document collaboration, chat). Add Power BI if you need fancy (realtime) analytics and charts.

Then you create a private git repository (using the same login) for your startup product and configure continuous deployment using Visual Studio Online and Azure. Most of the Visual Studio Services are node-based now, so it's cross-platform and you can deploy to Linux too.

It's also easy to add other services if you want (Slack, Zoho, Google).

All this is managed with a single login, paid with only two bills (Office 365 and Azure are separate). The Azure bill can be lowered if you get into BizSpark.

This all saves a lot of work, a single person can create and manage a very advanced infrastructure without too much effort.

> bad stability problems

The cloud is inherently unstable. If you have this problem it means that your architecture isn't ready for the cloud. This is why software developers are interested in consensus/fault-tolerance in the first place. Azure might be more unstable but at the end of the day the degree of stability is completely moot. If your software isn't designed for the cloud bad things will eventually happen. It doesn't matter if it takes hours, minutes, or days.

That is the reason we chose Azure: Reliable Actors/Services are a huge boon when it comes to writing software that correctly deals with cloud conditions because they are architectural patterns that are built for it.

This is why Netflix uses chaos monkey[1]. Even the Azure SDK ships with a chaos monkey script. If fault tolerance is not a concern of yours then cloud should be your very last concern. We tried slapping on-premise architecture on the cloud (evaluating AWS, RackSpace and Azure) and we had some degree of stability problems across all of them.

[1]: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Chaos-Monkey

I'm a bit torn. I like Azure, the interface is much nicer than other cloud providers in my opinion, the hosted SQL works well for my needs, being able to run for free is very nice... I'm loving the grouped SQL billing. Basicly, instead of paying seperately for each SQL database you host, you can pool all of your databases together and they'll share a billing pool. So, if one of your customers needs less performance and the other happens to use more, there's no change in what you pay.

But I have encountered stability and speed issues, especially in the beginning. Not on the VM's themselves, mind you, just in the management side of things. Most of these issues seem to stem from the backends, the frontend is pretty slick but it can only do so much when the response time of backends is so slow. Also, it's a bit ridiculous to get an unknown error when you try to add an endpoint to a firewall, because the previous endpoint operation (Adding a different endpoint) was still in progress.

Nowadays it seems to have stabilized and improved a lot and I'm hopeful it will continue to get better.

Anyhow, Microsoft's revenue is exploding in this space mostly because it lumps in Office 365; not really because of Azure itself, which I think is a great product. Azure has a few short falls that are annoying...still preferable to AWS though.

AWS is still very popular with extremely popular apps which drive its revenue lines. Netflix, Tinder, etc all use AWS. However from my experience with Azure they could lower their cost if they had Azure installs, AWS likes to keep instances up and spinning which eats into your costs (and they are enormous) Azure has better auto-scaling and it shows. I can't bare to imagine how much Amazon makes off of Netflix's AWS usage, you'd think they'd want to get off of their competitor's platform...but I guess it costs a lot to migrate.

Could you point out any program or OS that could guarantee neither of these? Based on what I have seen all major OSes and programs have these issue regardless of whether it is closed source or open source.

Besides how do expect them to quantify such unforeseeable events on their accounting statements?

Why?

>Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: ...risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities..

>Security breaches and data loss may expose us to liability, harm our reputation and adversely affect our business. >Our business involves the production and distribution of enterprise software technologies, as well as hosting applications. As part of our business, we (or third parties with whom we contract) receive, store and process our data, as well as our customers’ and partners’ data.

>While we take security and testing measures relating to our offerings and operations, those measures may not prevent security breaches and data loss that could harm our business or the businesses of our customers and partners. Advances in computer capabilities, new discoveries in the field of cryptography, inadequate technology or facility security measures or other factors may result in data loss or a compromise or breach of our systems and the data we receive, store and process (or systems and the data received, stored and processed by third parties with whom we contract).

>These security measures may be breached or data lost as a result of actions by third parties, employee error (such as weak passwords or unencrypted devices), malfeasance or vulnerabilities or security bugs found in software code. A party who is able to circumvent security measures or exploit inadequacies in security measures, could, among other things, misappropriate proprietary information (including information about our employees, customers and partners, our customers’ information, financial data and data that others could use to compete against us), cause the loss or disclosure of some or all of this information, cause interruptions or denial of service in our or our customers’ operations, cause delays in development efforts or expose customers (and their customers) to computer viruses or other disruptions or vulnerabilities.

>A compromise to these systems could remain undetected for an extended period of time, exacerbating the impact of that compromise. These risks may increase as we continue to grow our cloud and services offerings and as we receive, store and process more of our customers’ data. Actual or perceived vulnerabilities may lead to regulatory investigations, claims against us by customers, partners or other third parties, or costs, such as those related to providing customer notifications and fraud monitoring. While our customer agreements typically contain provisions that seek to limit our liability, there is no assurance these provisions will be enforceable and effective under applicable law. In addition, the cost and operational consequences of implementing further data protection measures could be significant.

>Moreover, because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access, disable or degrade service or sabotage systems change frequently and often are not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures. Any loss of data or compromise of our systems or the data we receive, store or process (or systems and the data received, stored and processed by third parties with whom we contract) could result in a loss of confidence in the security of our offerings, damage our reputation, loss of channel or strategic partners, lead to legal liability and adversely affect our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flows.

And their investor site is worryingly running on Cold Fusion of all things.

So I guess you'd not use Linux too, since Red Hat is one of the major contributors to the Linux kernel and server apps?