Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

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If you are a purely-Microsoft shop (AD/Exchange/Visual Studio), using Azure could give you better integration within their ecosystem (i.e. native Azure tooling within Visual Studio). I realize AWS has similar tools and plugins, but there is something nice to having first-party support down the entire vertical. Making your Microsoft account rep responsible for everything really does help to consolidate business administration concerns.

If you are not a Microsoft shop (i.e. >50% of your stuff runs on Linux), I would almost say avoid Azure because of how focused it is on their stack. I know you can run arbitrary Linux on Azure and generally get everything done, but AWS (and all other non-Microsoft cloud vendors) always seemed more friendly/cheaper for non-Windows/Office concerns.

So, it's not just about the cloud platforms and their respective costs per feature consumption unit. It's also about your business and the ecosystem required to support and operate within these cloud platforms.

As Microsoft is proud to boast, the majority on instances on Azure are Linux based.

The tooling that matters to me (az cli, terraform, vscode, kubectl et all) runs absolutely fine on Azure. I use Linux to create and manage Linux and open source infra on azure every day.

The majority of complaints I hear about azure tend to revolve around their AzureRM templating, which is admittedly terrible, but irrelevant since terraform exists (and cloudformation is not much better imo).

Also a lot of people dont/didn't like their portal. I don't frequently use the portal, and besides have you seen the aws portal? It's woeful.

One benefit of azure is they name their products logically, like "azure virtual machine" instead of "magic beanstalk" or w/e

Majority of our issues with Azure revolve around some of their services, which are still slow to evolve, due to their pre-cloud underpinnings.

An example of such service is their Azure AD B2C service, which is their competitor to AWS cognito. We have been using it and as a baseline login service, and it works fine. However, the service doesn't see much upgrades. Their "user flow" templates, which control the logon process, have been in preview for years.

Yes, Identity Server 4 exists but it would be nice to have decent competitors to Spot Fleets, ECS, Cognito, etc.

Looking at my resources globally is easier in Azure as well. Having to click on each region in AWS to see all my instances makes my head hurt.

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