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Comment by gaukes | Hacker News Reader

> Even if you believe that Amazon may have started as the front runner, it’s clear our team worked hard to catch up and surpass them by investing in our technology and listening to the DoD.

Is MSFT actually ahead?

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Define "ahead". Is AWS cutting edge? Maybe, but does your business need cutting edge? Likely not. I see an enormous shift in the market towards Azure from clients of all sizes, for a variety of reasons (cost, married to AD/O365/etc, not wanting to give a competitor [Amazon] dollars). Azure definitely has the momentum, it's their race to lose against AWS.

Disclaimer: Thoughts and opinions my own, not that of any employer past, current, or future.

Microsoft can offer fully-integrated solutions with their already incredibly popular software. So that's a distinct advantage.

Azure is less friendly as a technology practitioner (compared to working with AWS), but I fully appreciate the value you describe. Does AWS have Active Directory as a first class citizen? Office 365? Outlook/Exchange? No.

AWS does offer AD as a first class citizen... More than Azure.

AzureAD is not Active Directory, and unless something has changed a lot in the last year (maybe it has?), Azure does not offer anything that looks, smells, and feels like on-prem AD in the cloud.

Azure Active Directory Domain Services is full-fat AD, but they market it towards only using it for services in Azure. But you can set up a VPN from Azure to join on-prem stuff (or to replicate existing AD to Azure).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-doma...

That's good to hear! I really wanted "hosted AD" from a cloud a few years ago, and Azure definitely did not offer this... or they marketed it so poorly I could not find it anywhere. :(

AWS has straight up guides for do's/dont's, and various ways to integrate their AD service with yours, including multiple scenarios such as running them as the masters of the forest, with read-only's on-site, and vice-versa.

This was immediately after they mentioned 95% of Fortune 500, etc. so I assumed market size.

But, maybe that was the intention without giving any details.

We’ll never know until office is separated out in MSFT reporting I guess.

It’s also very carefully worded.

> More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies run Microsoft Azure.

For example, I worked at a large media company and we had a couple Azure services spun up related to our email service.

But the bulk was on AWS, which handled our business workloads — eg, serving video.

Is Microsoft counting my former employer among that 95%?

Maybe not on the raw technology for edge cases, but in terms of actually supporting DoD business needs it is for sure. I have worked for two branches in the past 4 years assisting in migration to Office365 and certain legacy database systems into Azure. The vast majority of legacy IT in the DoD essentially supports AD/Office/Exchange which is far easier to migrate.

so identity federation isn't a thing? and is cloud the same as office ? because the former is all about supporting separation on the latter.

disclaimer: former aws, and always oss, and actually used aws/azure/gcp in anger

Microsoft is losing big time to Linux and open source. They are basically being forced to implement Linux inside Windows, because Windows sucks at automation and scaling, and Linux is now the dominant technology in enterprise. Vendors like Microsoft don't sell software because it is superior, they do it because they can buy the signature of whoever can make the decision.

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