Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

I think its less of tailoring for AWS and more that AWS is worlds ahead of Google and Microsoft in their commercial offerings, and especially their government offerings. For instance Google Cloud does not have a High certification from FedRAMP which would rule it out being used for any workload that involved weapons systems which generally are FISMA High. I think what was dome was less writing it for AWS and more just writing it to have the requirements you would want out of any public cloud offering. The problem is most companies have been providing a "good enough for government work" solution and now they can't fulfill the RFP. ( Amazon is in this boat too, there are tons of services that haven't been cleared yet, and GovCloud is expensive and only exists in one region, in that respect Microsoft has been ahead, but they have their own problems)

View on HN

How is AWS worlds ahead Microsoft in their commercial cloud offerings? I work with both and to me they seem very similar.

At the most basic level performance is way below what I have seen with AWS. It was taking about 20 times longer to load data into a database cluster in Azure then into AWS. Additionally Azure is _just_ getting Availability zones online. Previously if you wanted high availability you needed to use multiple regions. I have yet to be able to create a kubernetes cluster using the UI, and I am not even sure how Users work since they have this odd hybrid Active Directory setup that may or may not be users.

On the flip side It was painless to use both GCP and AWS and even second tier cloud providers like Digital Ocean or Packet.net are simpler to use then Azure. My standing advice for anyone is only use Azure if you are 100% in the Microsoft ecosystem using .NET and Visual Studio to develop your applications, and you plan on using their professional services to help you out when you hit problems

I use digital ocean, aws , heroku, azure almost weekly. For ... I can’t remember. Years. I think your opinion is bias and I don’t share the same sentitiment. But like you it’s just my opinion. Cloud providers bounce back and forth on features. Not everyone is right at that given point for the client. But I have seen the converge over the years, with each service having plus and minuses.

The ability to extend you own AD to parts of Azure, and call Microsoft directly when something is broken, is immensely valuable compared to AWS.

Azure is mainly for .NET though, but they also have first class support for Node.js, which integrates directly with stuff like application insights.

I use Azure professionally, but I use a range of things personally, and I think I’d never pick anything but Azure for enterprise if my shop was mainly Microsoft. If you aren’t primarily Microsoft, I’d pick AWS.

dkhenry 3 hours ago [-]

> At the most basic level performance is way below what I have seen with AWS. It was taking about 20 times longer to load data into a database cluster in Azure then into AWS.

Eh okay. I have a VM running IN Azure which is much faster than one running in AWS.

Azure is has a competitive advantage in SAML SSO and authentication for AD users.

Yea and don't forget IBM. They are really big in India.

Microsoft “won” the European market though, by being extremely quick to adopt European policies and offering really, really great support. I took AWS a while to get out of the legal grey area, and their support is still pretty mediocre because they rely too much on automation, which may be more efficient, but being able to call Seattle directly is a tremendous selling point for governments. Also having office365 helped Microsoft sell Azure quite a bit.

Google on the other hand are still in the legal grey area, and they’re even more automated than AWS.

I say “won”, because there isn’t a clear monopoly in Europe, and AWS allied themselves with a bunch of lobbying powerhouses like Deloitte and EY, but I’d say Azure is still far ahead.

AWS is still by far the largest cloud provider in Europe so I think its a bit early to say Microsoft "won". Microsoft has a bunch of gains mainly on the back of their strong non cloud product portfolio ( Office365 ) and their well established sales team, but even with those advantages they are still very far behind in terms of market share

We were talking government not private sector. I have no clue who’s ahead on private in Europe. :)

Microsoft's great strength is the integration with the business (the Microsoft EA and Cloud Services agreements are powerful weapons to drive business) and technology (they can scale those offerings). They can make the first hit of Azure free by "discounting" something else. Everyone who is a potential customer of Azure has a contract already.

But that strength is also a weakness. They have at least 3 US Office 365 offerings (Commercial, "Government Community", and Federal). It's harder for them to hit compliance targets, because their customer scope is so huge. The security needs for XBox are different than the Army. I think AWS and in many cases GCP has a better story there.

The support equation is irrelevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com