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Comment by johnnycarcin | Hacker News Reader

Came here to post this. To me it shows the gap between Azure and the non-enterprise world. Azure did this awhile back, as well as the managed k8s thing, neither of which got much run on HN.

Perhaps Azure needs to work on marketing? Is there a legitimate reason Azure isn't getting more traction in the non-enterprise world? I mean that as a totally serious question, not in a dickish way. Is it because it has the Microsoft name attached to it or just because AWS has so much traction?

As always, full disclosure that I work at MSFT as well.

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We run AWS, GCP and Azure.

Devs in my team can pretty much chose their favourite cloud to deploy things to. Everyone always picks AWS, it's just the easiest to navigate and feels like everything links together well.

I think the only things we use Azure for is the Directory, and Functions to run some PowerShell.

As AWS is the industry standard, I feel that a lot of people like to stick with what they know too.

I'm in the unfortunate position of being curious about the one thing that folks are best advised not to share, your security/compliance stack. Based on what I've seen to date, nothing handles all three equally well, but I'm curious if you've found anything that gets close.

We use quite a lot of custom built tools and Splunk to funnel the logs from everywhere, so we can use their AI/ML to detect anomalies etc.

> Is it because it has the Microsoft name attached to it or just because AWS has so much traction?

Yes on both counts.

Also, the perception is common that Microsoft = Windows Server, to a very high degree of bias. Thus, if you don't operate on that platform, you'd immediately disregard Azure. A lot more work is needed to convince non-Windows operations & developers to buy into Microsoft's offerings around Linux. Emphasis that that says nothing about the quality of existing offerings, rather, the issue is of perception. The perception is that Linux is and will always be a secondary concern with Microsoft; and potentially worse, skepticism over whether Microsoft will invest into and support Linux over the very long term. If one buy into that skepticism or doubts Microsoft's commitment to Linux, AWS is immediately a superior choice as a long-term platform bet.

I work for Pivotal and have observed that Cloud Foundry, which has had a boatload of success in this space so far (including on Azure, we won Azure NA consumption partner of the year in 2016 AND google Cloud partner of the year), but you wouldn’t know this from HN posts and comments. It’s some strange big relic from 2012...

HN has strong biases towards things that are startup-targeted or individual hacker targeted: open, inexpensive or new and small, or ubiquitous. Kubernetes and AWS in general get a lot of play compared to Azure , GCP or VMware (or even OpenStack these days). Nothing wrong with that necessarily, just a cognitive bias of the up voters.

"Perhaps Azure needs to work on marketing? Is there a legitimate reason Azure isn't getting more traction in the non-enterprise world? I mean that as a totally serious question, not in a dickish way. Is it because it has the Microsoft name attached to it or just because AWS has so much traction?"

The problems of support and network effects go two ways. People perceive that Azure favours Microsoft tech, and may not support other platforms as well, which may or may not be true. More definitely, the tools and libraries for non-Microsoft languages tend to support AWS as the cloud of choice by having more features and being more heavily-used and tested with AWS than GCP or Azure.

Azure is doing a lot of address this but creating repeatable infrastructure with Hashicorp tools like Packer and Terraform just required way too many steps. However, they are much closer to competing with AWS than GCP.

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