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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

I would never, ever underestimate Andy Jassy. I consider him on par with Jeff Bezos, in terms of leadership and execution, if not superior.

source: worked at AWS 2008-2014.

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Here is AWS's core weakness going forward...they compete with their own cloud customers. From video streaming, to online shopping, to groceries, to logistics...why would I (as a business consumer) want to fund my own competition? Azure competes with none of its own customers, outside of perhaps AI. Amazon is AWS's biggest enemy. Azure and GCS are going to catch up on features, and customers are going to start fleeing when they realize they are helping to fund their own demise and biggest competitor. Then there will be margin pressure. The next 10 years in the cloud are going to be interesting...and while people seem to think the Cloud already has huge adoption, it's just beginning; and I think Microsoft more than any other will be the biggest benefactor.

Totally agree. It's truly interesting to think how the cloud will evolve (private vs hybrid vs public). Not to forget the shift towards the edge for IoT use-cases (which will grow rapidly in the future)

GCP may catch up on “features” but with Google’s horrible reputation for both poor customer support, and abandoning products, any decision maker should have second thoughts on choosing GCP over AWS or Azure.

I don't disagree, I think Google will suffer in the Cloud game because of their reputation to 180 and kill products. But I do think they will continue to gain ground in both customers and features. As I said though, Azure will likely benefit the most. The main reason Google will remain in the race...imo is because there is still a deeply seeded hatred of Microsoft amount a big enough part of the community.

Decision makers spending five and six figures per month on infrastructure don’t generally make decision based on “hatred” of a company.

Decision makers more often than not make choices based on some variant of “No one ever got fired for buying $x” and $x rarely equals “anything made by Google.”

Possible, but from the inside as a Microsoft Partner, it feels like most of the world is just starting to move to the cloud, and when they do, they go Azure, because they are already dependent on Exchange.

If you're already locked into msft, then yeah msft makes sense.

But one thing people often forget is that AWS is cheaper than everyone else. This matters to most companies.

Also, Azure is a pretty miserable dev experience for many of their services. Many of AWS smaller services aren't great, but better from what I've used/general sentiment.

> AWS is cheaper than everyone else.

Can you provide a source for this please? I recently priced out AWS, Azure, and GCP for GPU workloads. I found that AWS and Azure were approximately on par, whereas GCP was significantly cheaper:

AWS p3.8xlarge: $12.24/hr [1]

Azure NC24 v3: $12.24/hr [2]

GCP n1-highmem-32: $8.311/hour [3]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p3/

[2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...

[3] https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

That's just the single box though. What about the storage and managed services?

I agree with you that Azure is a catastrophically miserable dev experience, but it's a mistake to compare price based on list prices. I've worked with companies who are based in India whose Azure cost through a CSP was like 40% of list. I've also had customers get huge, huge discounts offered to them to use Google Cloud. I don't know how low Amazon goes.

> But one thing people often forget is that AWS is cheaper than everyone else.

GCP is, AFAIK, usually cheaper; but AWS is more established, and the “no one ever got fired for being buying...” player of public cloud (which has to chafe MSFT, since they pretty much displaced IBM in that role for on-prem.)

The thing there is that almost everyone is already dependent on Office. Breaking that is nearly impossible.

haha look at you two go

Why would someone choose Azure over AWS because they currently use Exchange? An Exchange server can easily be ran inside an EC2 instance inside AWS.

It's kind of all linked together. If you use Exchange, the natural evolution to the cloud is moving to Office 365, which then entails a bunch of knock-on effects. Once you are linked in to the Azure ecosystem, it is hard to break out.

Many IT departments are desperately trying to get away from managing their own Exchange server.

Odd, I'm seeing more and more people trying to find ways to escape Exchange, and not having it as a driver towards anything. Nobody likes being driven by artificial lock-ins.

What are some viable alternatives? OpenLDAP?

I don't think OpenLDAP is going to help you with setting up enterprise email services. Perhaps for authentication?

Alternatives for Exchange usually go in the direction of outsourcing (which ironically can mean: still Exchange, but not in the ball-and-chain on-prem way). Cloud options exist, but for people who for whatever reason require something to physically exist at a specific location (which is weird for email) commercial offerings are plenty (i.e. Zimbra, Zarafa, IBM's stuff, Red Hat's stuff, Oracle's Stuff).

Andy Jassy is definitely in the genius realm. He sees where the cloud is going before anyone else and sets his team in motion to capture those opportunities when the time is ready.

How is he superior?

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