The Growing Case for a Microsoft Azure Slowdown [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Growing Case for a Microsoft Azure Slowdown [pdf]

dadavidson.bluematrix.com

36 pointssoydcom33 comments

I thought the AWS console was bad but the Azure console takes the cake.

The whole thing is full of weird terms and workflows. For example, I tried setting up a simple static site with CDN and abandoned frustrated after a couple of retries.

IMO Google has the best cloud dashboard of the three big ones. You don't need to read a book or take a course to understand what's going on.

Yes, as a developer I prefer to work in Azure over the others, so I wouldn't say it's an unimportant issue.

Maybe there are more greenfield and small devs. going to Azure, and more mature/ported solutions that just scale in containers and need raw CPU/network on AWS/GCP?

It's funny that you mention setting up a static site with CDN on Azure, because I just did that for the first time about an hour ago. After a couple initial hiccups related to not selecting the proper Storage Account type, the rest of the process was a breeze.

What part did you get stuck on?

Sorry, I don't remember the details.

I was making a benchmark of static hosts and wanted to include Azure but simply desisted. I had no problem setting it up on any other provider.

GCP is pretty easy for simple stuff -- I had good luck just w/Firebase for auth and simple back-end. The Azure learning curve seems to be steady, while AWS at least to me has more (initial and subsequent) hurtles to overcome.

DigitalOcean is even easier- the reason for GCP appearing to be simpler is because they only have a fraction of offerings and features. But I find GCP confusing, and like Azure Portal much better - maybe because I have used it longer.

Of course, the Azure portal can be a beast as well -- if you're the impatient, fast context-switching kind of person that doesn't like to design their dashboard up-front, I can see that it may be frustrating for some.

I don't use AWS, so I cannot compare. But I've been using Azure for ~2 years and have no problem doing what I need to do there. Surely, they can make the portal and UI more consistent (e.g., Azure Data Factory and Azure DevOps does not seem to reside in the same UI theme as the other Azure resources such as Logic App or Blob). Again, this is just my experience and I am sure for anyone who just started using it, Azure portal can be overwhelming and confusing to use.

I'm not a software developer, but I set up two static sites in a so-called serverless fashion on AWS using only their products (Here's one of them, just as a shameless plug: gameboyessentials.com).

They are reasonably consistent with their nomenclature and their error messages, but I definetely felt I was using a jackhammer to put screws in drywall. The amount of settings and types of setups per product is staggering. You definetly need to read a how-to to figure out what to do. You cannot figure it out on your own.

In terms of UI, the fact that every separate product uses a different view model is bonkers. I understand that letting each product reflect its own functionnality is important, but a list of checkboxes should not have three different ways to display them across three different products (Route 53, S3, CloudFront). Oh and those naming schemes, jeez. Who thought Route 53 was a good idea?

> but I definetely felt I was using a jackhammer to put screws in drywall

That's a great metaphor to describe this. :)

> I thought the AWS console was bad but the Azure console takes the cake.

at the start of quarantine, the azure console was just dying on me regularly. we couldn't get the instances we needed, and apparently neither could the service running the console.

I mostly wish Google would have of their web performance evangelists meet with the GCP team. It has some nice features but it's so slow with all of the background network activity (no progress indicators, naturally) and all of that JavaScript revs up my CPU fans more often than my compiler.

I agree it's kinda slow. Not 100% sure but I think it's an old AngularJS project.

It's definitely Angular and doesn't appear to have been optimized much: it needs ~16MB simply to load the console and they really need to think about how represent network activity since most of the views make dozens of API calls and are either blank or display a spinner until most of them complete.

They definitely know about it — every time I've used it with someone from Google in the room they've apologized — but it's one of those things which I think their management doesn't prioritize because they either don't use it much or only do so over very fast network connections.

I have the exact opposite experience...

I can't stand the GCP console... especially the networking UI's

I'll take either AWS or Azure's console any day... though really I spend most of my life trying to avoid the console and just automating somehow.

Required Disclosures

Tom Forte, CFA (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst), and/or members of his/her household, holds a long position in securities of Amazon.com, Inc.

Amazon is up 60% TYD and is the second largest company in the world. It would be more surprising if someone didn't own AMZN.

>It would be more surprising if someone didn't own AMZN.

That's only true if you include ETFs/mutual funds/pensions, but I don't think you need to make a disclosure in those cases.

i don't have a strong opinion myself, but i think you could make an argument that if you've got an S&P500 ETF, disclosing that you own any of FAAMG would be reasonable since they're all >2% of it.

in this case owning some S&P500 ETF in significant quantity would be to his credit: MSFT would be 6% of holdings, to AMZN's 4.49%.

That argument seems to work both ways: if you have an index fund, juicing MSFT would be offset by the loss for the other ones since you own a fraction of all of the major players.

I found a lot of factual inaccuracies within this report which leads me to believe this either an attempt to tarnish the Azure brand or (as someone else pointed out) the author of this has invested in it’s competitors. For example, they state the following which is trivial to show as completely false:

> Amazon is already building an ecosystem around its own chips, while Microsoft has yet to deploy any custom chips in Azure.

Hmm... actually don't think that's inaccurate. What customer-facing homegrown silicon does Microsoft offer? I know they have "custom" Intel chips (as do all the major cloud providers), but AFAIK they don't have anything like Amazon's Graviton (which is on its second generation) or Google TPU (on its third generation). They also don't offer Xilinx FPGAs to customers AFAIK. I know they are hiring in custom SoC development, but they nothing customer facing in Azure yet.

"They also don't offer Xilinx FPGAs to customers AFAIK"

They do have Intel Arria (Altera) FPGAs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/how-...

Edit: And some evidence that it's a custom setup: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

Yup. You're totally right.

> Tom Forte, CFA (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst), and/or members of his/her household, holds a long position in securities of Amazon.com, Inc.

GitHub and Azure for sure are the best services from MS. But while the former is easy to use, and I would say the lowest friction for getting developers building and deploying, I think AWS is easier for developers than Azure. Look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storag... and see the power Azure offers, it's impressive, but it's also confusing. AWS is simpler and still effective.

I think a lot of Azure fast growth was migrating existing corporate IT workloads. These are Windows servers, SQL Server databases, etc and Azure is a great place for those.

But if you are building a new app, I am not quite sure why you would choose Azure unless you are afraid of Amazon.

Interesting that they cite the CockroachDB team's work for showing the poor network performance in Azure vs AWS and GCP.

Both AWS and Azure will still grow, but with macro situation as it is, a slowdown is almost expected therefore prices in.

Is it just me or do I find their app instances to be way underpowered compared to google and aws.

"Furthermore, our proprietary measure of obligated dollars year-to-date"

How is running a search through a free government database/website proprietary?

I also can't find a single mention of Office which is a "cloud" monster itself.

Haha, I took the headline much more literally, as O365 performance has been a weird crapmare the past six months, with all sorts of flakiness, timeouts, and errors.

PDF warning

Who reads the comments first to check see if there's a PDF warning?

I am at least n=1 in that I came to the comments first, as I always do, and upon reading this warning have opted out of clicking on the link because I’m on my phone. Not exactly life shattering save as I would have just noped out after clicking on it anyway but eh, appreciated none the less.

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