Azure surpasses AWS as the public cloud of choice | Hacker News Reader

Azure surpasses AWS as the public cloud of choice

computerworld.com

18 pointszephyrfalcon10 comments

Ah, this is from back in March.

The consensus opinion then was that the surveyed folks were corp IT oriented, looking to transition purely Microsoft-centric workloads to a cloud provider. In that specific scenario, Azure is a solid choice. For non-Windows workloads, it's generally far more debatable.

Disclosure: I write a weekly newsletter (lastweekinaws.com) that focuses on AWS; I'm much less familiar with Azure.)

Everything we've needed to do at my shop just works on Azure and we can do a lot of it from visual studio. AWS might have the same features but we haven't hit a wall yet were we needed to go looking, and frankly I think my corporate overlords are just more comfortable with Microsoft considering the number of other products of theirs that we use.

"More than half of the Azure users were from enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft’s cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises"

From the actual study (or press release for the study) "The final data set comprises 235 IT operations, application development, and informa- tion security professionals. All respondents are from companies with 500 or more employees, with roughly half from companies with 5,000 or more employees."

And the actual statistic is "• 66% are using Microsoft Azure, compared to 55% using AWS." So what does "using" really mean? For example, it could mean that lots of large organizations to use Azure on trial/small projects, while still using mostly AWS on serious projects. Or the opposite.

This is one of those studies run to promote a service, and it's really unclear how accurate it is (not statistically, but logically). It appears that MSFT has been successful with very large organizations, but other data I've seen says that AWS has about 80% of the entire market revenues and revenues is the direct measure of value. If someone is paying money for your service they find it valuable.

I've also heard whispers of Azure credits being handed out in huge quantity provided large enterprises buy enough Office365 licenses. I'd not be at all surprised by that, but I'm likewise unaware of any companies who have an Azure presence without at least something also running in AWS.

I've heard whispers AWS gives big customers like Netlix considerable discounts ;)

"Under an EDP, AWS will give price discounts to large customers that commit to a full year (or more) and pay upfront, in many cases with minimum volume increases. One AWS partner told Deutsche Bank that they’re aware of one EDP payment of $25 million." https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/07/17/5-ways...

AWS comes right out and talks about volume discounts on their pricing page, even.

They just don't talk about what the discounting looks like at… higher tiers.

There is a big difference in giving big discounts to customers who purchase your product in high volume, and giving away a product for free to customers who buy an entirely different product.

In the first case it supports the idea you have a popular product, in the second case it looks like you have to bribe people to use your product.

I'm skeptical Azure is remotely as popular as AWS for professional web development, and none of the data in this"survey is clear enough to change that.

Yeah, I'm skeptical, too. Especially of surveys which ask respondents about the future. I.e., here they asked them if they used, or _planned_ to use whatever cloud platform. This is problematic because you rarely get good results from asking people about what they might do (e.g., choose to use Azure over AWS).

And like you say there is likely to be bias which relates to the composition of their survey sample.

All in all, the more accurate conclusion is that for those surveyed there was more interest in Azure over AWS (since the way there questions were framed it's very hard to even tell exactly what proportion are already using one or the other). Interest may, or may not, map to future choice. Respondents may signal interest in Azure, yet pick AWS when the rubber hits the road.

When AWS has an outage half the internet goes down.

When was the last time you noticed an Azure outage?

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