Microsoft Wants To Buy Love In Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Wants To Buy Love In Silicon Valley

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37 pointsRoyaleagle29 comments

I'm one of the open source engineers spending a fair chunk of time helping YC companies that are making use of this deal.

Personally, I don't think that money buys love. It gets us attention, but I believe that we'll only win people over by providing an awesome cloud solution. Furthermore, I'm hoping that doing so much of our development out in the open on Github allows devs to see what we're doing, that we care about it being awesome, and that we're not afraid to sit down and quickly put out a repo with code if we run into a company that needs something.

If anybody has questions, I'm happy to answer them.

In my corner of the valley it seems to be working. Keep it up!

I have a question: when will XNA be open-sourced? There are tons of people that want a sequel and MonoGame could use a quality boost.

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

Also C# on XBox One had been promised like a year ago but nothing happened:

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

What is the point of User Voice then?

A huge sticking point for us right now is that Azure has no data warehousing capabilities. You're basically limited to "spin up a huge, expensive VM and install SSAS on it and make sure you have an expert DBA around that knows his way around all the little nuances of MS-SQL and SSAS".

It is honestly, in my opinion, Azure's current biggest failing. We use cutting edge features and marketplace offerings when we can and the space seems ripe for disruption with companies like Birst, Spotfire, and others really going on the offensive. Microsoft has one of the most mature Data Warehousing offerings for the traditional environment, and it seems crazy that after 5 years there's nothing built into Azure for it.

All that said, do you know of any plans, timelines, or similar services to a fully hosted SSAS-like Data Warehousing solution?

This might be what you are looking for, but I think Azure Marketplace has Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc.

AWS does offer some very special purpose data stores like DynamoDB and SimpleDB but I have not used them much.

I may have to look into the Cassandra one, since there is apparently a Data Warehousing framework called Spark that is built on top of it. The others are not suitable to OLAP processing or data warehousing I believe.

Azure has multiple database-as-a-service offerings including SQL (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/), DocumentDB (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/documentdb/), and Redis Cache (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/).

Those aren't OLAP replacements though, right? You would still need to manually build an OLAP db from the lower level to report on them. Maybe I'm wrong since I haven't used Azure...

You're right, Azure SQL is very limited in terms of being quite different from non-hosted SQL offerings. You can't just throw OLAP on top.

Azure is a PAAS, right? OLAP should be one of the native offerings from Microsoft.

Google has BigQuery and AWS has Redshift.

Yes they should. It's literally the only big thing lacking IMO at the moment...hell they even have a fully automated machine learning pipeline offering that can auto-generate APIs from trained models...But no OLAP :-/

For what it's worth, I am in BizSpark and I have found using the Ubuntu VPSs to be totally hassle free. One question: on AWS, I used to use cron jobs to take snapshots of Postgres, etc. data stores and stuff them in S3 as an ad hoc twice a day backup. Is there something similar on Azure?

I've never been a huge fan of the "snapshot and pray" school of backups. This tool does it right and supports S3 and Azure storage (equivalent to S3).

https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e

Also: Azure SQL is $15/month and includes restoration of the database to any point in time in the last 14 days. I LOVE Postgres but finally gave into this value proposition.

Thanks, I am looking at Azure SQL right now.

Last time I used Azure websites was a year ago - the command line tools were fine, the UI had a lot of random 500s - but the main thing was having to commit all my generated resources because Azure wouldn't run gulp or grunt. Is that sorted out now?

Hi Felix, Azure SQL is very, very different from a regular MS SQL Server environment.

It is a lot more restrictive and thus many tools (such as your own SQL Management Studio) do not work well with it.

Is there any plan to make these two siblings more compatible with eachother?

Furthermore, Azure SQL is very unclear about its performance guarantees. Your DTU's have no mapping to anything in the real world which we can compare. Are there any plans of addressing that?

I couldn't agree more.

I tried to get an Azure WebSites with an Azure SQL instance of Wordpress working. Getting PHP to run on Azure WebSites was easy/pleasant, getting Azure SQL to talk to PHP was an absolute nightmare and then even once that is done you have issues with instance naming and paths.

To be honest I completely gave up. I spent three days on the above setup, and never did get Wordpress working. Then after I gave up I spent one afternoon setting up the same thing using an Azure VM.

I like the concept of Azure Websites, but Azure SQL is just "meh." It isn't compatible with MS SQL which is a big problem frankly. A lot of stuff supports MS SQL out of the box, but it seems like Azure SQL is something else entirely.

PS - Azure does have an MySQL compatible offering, but it is by a third party. Nothing by MS themselves. So the pricing model is awkward.

I'm really starting to love what Microsoft is doing and I feel like they are trying hard to court non-MS developers. Part of me badly wants to jump back to the MS world. The Surface Pro 3 looks like an ideal machine for me and I do miss Visual Studio.

But I just can't do it without real POSIX support.

I'm just invested in a POSIX world. I want native BASH, fork, a git that isn't 5x slower (last I tried), and a real terminal.

So, Microsoft... if you're reading this, can you please, pretty please, add a nice officially supported not-going-anywhere POSIX layer to your OS? It's the reason I switched to OS X, and it would be the reason I'd switch back to MS.

It's almost the only thing you're missing from my side of the developer culture.

So much this. I'm really proud of Microsoft for the strides they've made lately, but like you, I switched to Mac specifically because of the underlying UNIX layer. Too much of our world is in POSIX land, and I like it that way.

Alternatively, I'd be happy if .NET were truly cross-platform, so I could use my Mac to develop apps for the Windows Phone I'm typing this from (without a VM).

I realize this does not meet the implied requirement of not having to relearn a bunch of stuff, but PowerShell certainly qualifies as a real terminal, just different.

Can one start a Powershell remotely in the same manner as ssh?

There's powershell remoting for this.

You can also SSH into a Windows box with powershell server, it's expensive though. If Microsoft just purchased it and made it an add on, I suspect a lot of Unix people would be pleasantly surprised by how rad powershell is.

Link for anyone interested: http://www.powershellserver.com/overview/ssh/

And support for UTF-8.

The Microsoft of late is definitely generating positive impressions all around and I can't say I disagree with this.

The major selling point of Microsoft Azure for me is that RDMA over Infiniband is supported on select machine types. This type of networking technology is necessarily for important classes of applications (HPC) as well as for new types of infrastructure (e.g. memory clouds). Yet, so far RDMA networking in Azure is only available on their Windows VMs. I've seen mention that Linux support is in the works, but the last time I checked a couple months ago it was still not supported.

Microsoft promoted Azure this weekend at hshacks. More than 1000 high schoolers attended this hack-a-thon at PayPal HQ.

Upon hearing the word "server" one kid next to me enthusiastically shouted, "Use Azure! It's easy and I'll help you set it up right now". Nothing beats a testimonial from a peer.

I'm very happy with the direction Microsoft is going in. This is another example of their willingness to put their money where their mouth is.

Now, if only I could use Linux commands on the Windows terminal...

cygwin does most of that job. I've even used it in production at times - it's great for writing Nagios plugins in bash.

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