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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Who chooses to use Azure? Mostly MS shops. I see no compelling features for a FOSS shop.

They allow you to have native RDMA[1] for your VMs, something neither amazon or google will give you. As an oldhat Linux/Unix guy, it is somewhat amusing to think of Microsoft's cloud offering as the high perf one, but the facts don't lie. If you have true HPC style workloads such as bioinformatics, oil/natgas exploration, finance, etc, the extra node to node communication bits are necessary. The QDR fabric they have has a native speed of 40 Gbps. It is a shame they don't have FDR (56G) or EDR (100G), but still is quite impressive depending on your app. This also could be a game changer for large MPI jobs.

In short, there are reasons, they likely aren't ones that matter to you, but they exist (as I type this from my RHEL7 work desktop!)

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/wind...

As someone who works at MSFT in the Azure space I can tell you that the statement of "Who chooses to use Azure? Mostly MS shops" is inaccurate in my experience. Of all of the customers I've worked with, most of their architecture is at least 50% linux/OSS, typically more like 75%. I've honestly yet to see a customer moving to Azure who has more than 50% Windows based systems. Almost everyone I've worked with only uses Windows Server for their SQL Server services, outside of that it's RHEL, CentOS or Ubuntu.

With that being said, the typical appeal of Azure (and likely other cloud providers) are the PaaS services. Those typically do have Windows VMs sitting behind them, although we are starting to make Linux an option on most of those.

It seems likely that most people who use SQL Server were at least Microsoft shops at some time in the past, though; otherwise why are they using SQL Server?

Very few people start a project using SQL Server if they're not otherwise using MS stuff.

Usually, again this is just in my experience, it's typically tied to a single service that makes up a larger system. So they might have some data in MySQL that has an API fronting it that is managed by one team. Then they have another service that uses SQL Server fronted by another API and managed by a different team. Both of those APIs are used by something larger.

Sometimes it's because a long time ago the service was done by a whole different set of people and now some other group has inherited it and just doesn't want to port it to something else even though everything else they use is open source. These are typically the groups who go to the Azure SQL PaaS service because they don't want to manage something that they don't really care for.

There is a ton of fragmentation out there :)

We'll see this change as SQL Server on Linux matures.

Why?

Postgres is free and usually good enough. If you are going to pay, Oracle is generally better. The ground that mssql wins for a non-microsoft shop is verrrrry small.

Most people who have paid for Oracle would be perfectly well catered for by Postgres, it's true. Postgres gets you say the most-used 50% of Oracle for 0% of the cost. SQL Server gets you the most-used 90% of Oracle for 25% of the cost. The companies that need 100% of Oracle a very few and far between. Oracle's entire business model is based on people not realizing this...

SQL Server is way cheaper than Oracle and very fast. The features it has built-in now across all editions make it very compelling compared to Postgres, even if it's free.

As a .NET developer, I am provided with a MSDN sub by my employer and it comes with a monthly Azure allowance I can spend on whatever.

So somewhere down the road, even if I quit and decide to work with FOSS, for me the reason might be familiarity - which is not unlike the reason a lot of people insist on using other Microsoft products.

So you are a professional, self-deceived (edit:that was an autocorrect from self-described!! I'd have downvoted me, too.) developer-on-microsoft the definition of an "MS shop", even if you later choose to diversify your platform.

Some places don't have a choice but to be a Microsoft shop - if your customers use Microsoft, your product had better run in their ecosystem.

I thought we were over the MS hate last decade?

While I personally feel the performance of Azure is bad vs cost, and the management portal is a mess UI and performance wise, it's a decent product. Nothing like deploying your app from scratch from Git in a couple of clicks.

I also filed a support call the other day and got truly exemplary phone support within a few hours from someone who definitely knew their stuff.

Versus open source AWS? Google Cloud?

Why would you want to go with Azure over AWS or Google? Or Digital Ocean?

Like GP said, I can see very few compelling features to adopt Microsoft's platform. Is there a killer feature I'm unaware of?

edit: clarify. And "burn, karma, burn"

well, i think "for a FOSS shop" is important context in that comment (simply asking "why use azure" is different). aws and gcp run plenty of bits that aren't "FOSS" in any respect, just like azure.

Does Azure have a killing feature that appeals to a non-Windows shop?

What makes one a "FOSS" shop? I use tons of FOSS in my products but I prefer SQL Server and ASP.NET for my backend. I also do most of my code editing from Windows and sometimes I use my Mac. I rarely use Linux to edit code or do anything desktop-related, but I still use it to run Redis instances.

I'm still a FOSS shop. The people developing all their FOSS on Macbooks using a proprietary OS are still FOSS shops too.

The world isn't black and white.

Anyway, the thing I like about Azure over AWS is that it's more organized and simpler to deal with. Azure is focused on high-quality while AWS pretty much throws spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. That's why AWS has 3 of every type of service.

Why wouldn't you, other than hatred of MS.

Also, many companies that are competitors to Amazon in some form or another. Those tend to be the larger customers in my experience.

Source: Am MSFT dev on the Azure side of things.

Azure's UX is less of a tyre-fire of complexity than AWS, on the other hand it breaks more.

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