Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

I see your points but I think your characterization of this attitude as lazy or stupid are overly hostile.

I'm not going to defend the mindset but I can see some appeal in having one company to deal with. Anyone who's ever faced a problem where multiple vendors are blaming each other for your ongoing woes knows how frustrating that can be.

The flip side is that you end up in a scenario where two or three vendors can blame each other for problems. With Azure, if SQL has a problem, Microsoft has to fix it, and can't blame any other vendors, driver, hardware, or network issues.

Edit: Also, really? You don't think there's any benefit to integration? That's like Microsoft's whole deal - make their stuff work well with their other stuff. Sure, it creates lock-in, but it's also a feature users want. I want my various programs to easily work with each other in obvious ways, and not have to worry about compatibility issues.

That's an odd quote, especially when most competitors provide windows virtual machines, and azure provides linux. Also, I doubt msft cancels your account if you use mysql instead of sql server.

...but I honestly agree with the sentiment. I will pay money to not deal with sysadmin headaches, which is something you get a lot of using a hodgepodge of technologies.

C#, .Net ASP, Visual Studio, and Azure are all very good development products. I know, because I tried them myself. Or ask the Stack Overflow guys. It's called thinking for yourself. As for your appeal to the recieved wisdom that everything MS does must suck because Graham said so, let me point out that their monopoly gives them very little advantage when it comes to catering to developers. No one has to use their servers, languages, DBs, etc. So they have to do a good job.

There are a lot of people building on top of MSFT platforms. ASP.NET, C#, etc. may not be sexy, but a lot of people use these languages/platforms regularly. Probably more than any particular web-based language. Being able to your desktop skills and move them to the "cloud" with tight integration in Visual Studio helps leverage a large existing developer ecosystem.

I wonder if the $1B number doesn't also include internal marketing "funny money" microsoft is using to seed the business. There are companies who have been given large stipends of free services to wet their appetite for the platform.

Most likely the software sales are Windows Server licenses and the Azure tools needed to make a private cloud. A lot of companies have policies that prevent them from using public cloud servers.

The numbers are fishy, but if they are growing by XX% (1) a year, expect MS to reach that pretty soon. Love it or hate it, getting all your tech needs from one company has its advantages (and disadvantages).

1. Azure subscriptions have risen 48 percent in the past six months, said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s vice president for marketing for the server and tools division. That unit, which encompasses Azure, has posted nine straight quarters of sales growth of at least 10 percent, he said.

Even if they did, they probably don't add to the 1B figure as they are free

Microsoft's wet dream customer.

I'm an MS dev with a little Django, Rails and PHP experience and I'm always sort of overwhelmed with the choices I have non-ms environments.

Recently I wanted to get a simple laptop for Python development and I don't know how to begin selecting the right tools for the job. I see myself having to make all sorts of evaluations I'm just too inexperienced to make. Which OS? Whats PyPy good for? Is it supported on Ubuntu? Oh I can use this command to install but I don't see an apt get example? Does that mean it won't work?

When I read about and fire up EC2 instances I feel the same way. How do I configure them? Which one is best, etc.

With Visual Studio and the Azure tooling built in a lot of decisions are just invisible to me and I sort of like it that way.

Of course I understand the benefits of open source and having a variety of options is important but I'm ok with giving up a little control and power to just get things done.

I think its the same reason we use Stripe instead of getting out own merchant account and all that rigmarole.

Isn't Heroku similar as in Heroku makes some choices for you on how to do things?

A viewpoint that fails the "right tool for the job" test. Sometimes it is a Microsoft platform, sometimes not.

There is a major segment of tech that build careers on brand, not skill, and thus the quality of their solutions equally bottlenecked.

Having worked in India for more than 3 years, most developers I knew hadn't ventured outside of the MS ecosystem. Xerox's business services divisions (who made this statement) likely satisfy large enterprises working on MS technologies for Customer Care, HR, Payroll using the readily available workforce in India.

It's only interesting until the need arises to go elsewhere. Then it becomes really bad, since MS doesn't make it easy after you are too used to not paying attention to the pitfalls of lock-in.

What most people on HN miss (being the developers we are) is that having one relationship with a vendor is hugely preferable for non-development reasons. Billing (simpler, also savings in bundling), unified support (why doesn't x work with y!) and so on mean that going to a vendor isn't just the lazy choice it looks like.

Yes, as far as I know Apple hosts their iCloud jointly on AWS and Azure.

Which is a great strategy for disaster recovery or failover I think, considering both the cloud services are the largest and are owned by financially stable companies that have been around for a while.

Please everyone, not all at once.

I played around with Azure and Heroku for node.js hosting and found that Azure wasn't as painful to setup and didn't trip up as often as Heroku (though my statement should be read as more of a criticism of Heroku than an endorsement of Azure)

I'm hosting some (really) non-critical stuff on a Ubuntu image on it.

It seems fine. The manager interface is actually pretty good IMHO, but Linode is really cheap and running Linux on Azure is (I think) still a "beta" feature. I get the hours free though BizSpark. I was thinking of setting it up as a slave/mirror of our main sites for use as a fallover backup. It's been pretty reliable but I haven't done any benchmarks or really tested it in any way.

If I had need or inclination to use the Microsoft stack, though, it would definitely be a serious contender.

I run several services on it. .net/C# compute services. No VMs. No complaints.

different question: if you aren't why not? Amazon hasn't exactly been the picture of reliability and Heroku has had some important unanswered questions raised about its dispatch system.

Working on a project right now that will deploy on Azure Platform (not VMs). It's pretty nice to be able offload the OS to a third party and just deploy your app bits, knowing they're going to take care of OS, patching, and in general, server management tasks.

On the VM side, they're still catching up, I think. For instance, you can't get multiple IPs routing to a single VM, so if you have multiple SSL sites, you'll need multiple servers in general. (SNI isn't available on IE for XP which is a deal breaker for many people.)

But that's probably a reflection more of the mindset of people wanting dedicated servers and thinking "cloud VM" is the same thing, instead of people trying to build distributed applications.

I've worked with/for 3 companies all built completely on Azure. I was hired by 2 of the 3 companies to help them switch to Azure. The third is my own startup which has been on Azure since Microsoft launched it.

It really is a fantastic platform.

non-production

building a new service on Azure here, started 3 monts ago, switching completely from LAMP to .NET. I love working with VS and I'm getting to know Azure setvices better day by day, so far so good.

I'm running an "established Internet business" on Azure. I moved from VPSes to Azure last year when the "Azure Websites" feature was available. It has saved me money over the VPS instances, actually increased performance a bit at the lower price point, and has dramatically lower administration overhead since I'm using it as PaaS.

The only thing negative I could say is that I have a hard time logging into the portal sometimes, due to some weird interaction between my primary MS account and one of my clients' Office365 organizational accounts. So, I sometimes have to switch to an incognito window to log in and use the portal. It's a nuisance, but trivial.

Otherwise, I couldn't be happier.

You massively underestimate enterprise/corporate use.

It seems pretty reasonable to me. If Msft makes $1 billion on 20% of the market, and Amzn makes $3.8 billion (high-end analyst estimate) with 71% of the market, the math roughly matches.

I think you underestimate the penalties for lying about something like this in a publicly traded company, false statements about sales is securities fraud.

You do know that Microsoft is dominant in Enterprise and that that is where most IT dollars are spent.

The more surprising thing to me is that Microsoft isn't burying Amazon. But give them 2 years.

It's clearly a puff piece. Having said that, there are a lot of MS server customers and I can imagine Azure being a compelling option if you don't want to do a rewrite.

It's true if you bend the rules a bit... Read the article and you'll notice this gem:

> Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview

That is a really vague statement that could mean all sorts of things (Office 365, Windows Server licensees, etc).

I don't think either Hotmail or Office 365 use Azure in non-trivial amounts, or atleast they didn't in my time there until 2011.

Mongo in Azure VM: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/common-tasks/...

Sometimes you only need to have 2 - if they are like Nestle or Exxon ...

Aren't Azure's prices exactly the same as Amazon's?

Microsoft's prices for Azure are actually very reasonable, and I generally find their tools easier to configure and use in real life. Microsoft makes some horrible products, but I actually really like Azure a lot.

Thank you for contributing such a thoughtful and valuable comment to this discussion. It really serves to improve the signal to noise ratio and raise the level of intelligent discourse here.

It's not "the azure SSL certificate", it's more that there are a great many of them being used internally between many systems.