Microsoft Expands Azure Data Centers To France, Launches Trust Offensive vs AWS, Google (thestack.com)

Microsoft announced on Monday that it plans to build its first Azure data center in France this year as part of its $3 billion investment for building cloud services in Europe. The company today also launched a new publication dubbed, Cloud for Global Good with no fewer than 78 public policy recommendations in 15 categories such as data protection and accessibility issues. TechCrunch adds:The new expansion, investment and "trust" initiative were revealed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was speaking at an event in Dublin, Ireland. He said that the expansion would mean that Microsoft covers "more regions than any other cloud provider... In the last year the capacity has more than doubled." As a measure of how Microsoft and Amazon are intent on levelling each other on service availability right now, the news of the French data center comes one month after Amazon announced that it would also be building a data center in France. Nadella, of course, did not mention AWS by name but that is the big elephant in the room for Microsoft. Nadella said today that Microsoft has data centers covering 30 regions across the globe, "more regions than any other cloud provider," with the European footprint including Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella, currently on a whirlwind tour of Europe, says that Microsoft has now invested over $3 billion in cloud infrastructure in Europe, and will extend that to governance-friendly French data centers in 2017. The company has also released a new publication calling for 78 policy reviews in 15 sectors of Cloud, including an overhaul of the verbose and opaque way that end-users are required to click legal agreements over data, some of which are specious and others of which are critical: "Because data is now collected and used in so many different ways, people can be overwhelmed if constantly presented with privacy choices and requests to consent to data collection. Requiring express consent in every situation could also make it difficult to understand which situations raise serious privacy implications and which are trivial."

Comments

cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares.

Trust offensive

[OneHundredAndTen]

Most fitting: Microsoft is offensive vis-a-vis anything and everything to do with trust.

The last mover disadavantage

[HBI]

Why does Microsoft insist on trying to catch up in sectors where vendor lock-in is already apparent? Trying to translate your AWS applications to what Microsoft has in Azure is hard, as hard as a Windows to Linux transition was 10 years ago.

This feels like Zune or Windows Phone writ large.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Because only about 10% of the market has converted to cloud. There's still about 15 years left to go.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[HBI]

I'm not entirely convinced the move is inevitable.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[kbonin]

This is, like almost all of Microsoft's public announcements, a marketing move. They're trying to convince the millions of straggling PHBs to move to Azure instead of AWS. This effort spans many fronts, including back room short-term discounts on Azure pricing, EA/SA licensing, Office 360 migration discounts, etc...

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[Rob Y.]

Because 'The Cloud' has become as much a marketing buzzword as the real thing that it is, you will find companies embracing Azure to run their traditional Windows desktop apps 'in the cloud' using some combination of Azure and Citrix.

Those companies bought in to the Windows desktop paradigm and built database-centric client/server applications that in hindsight should have never been built that way - but that's what they have to sell, and if it will sell better if it's hosted 'in the cloud', then that's what they'll do. I've seen this approach taken first hand. It sucks, but if you can't do a rewrite, it's the best alternative to self-hosting a big database app and managing deployment to the desktop.

In any case, this is a Microsoft-only market, since Amazon or Google can't do this cost-effectively if they have to pay for Windows on all their servers. I don't know how the cost of Citrix figures in to this kind of deployment, though.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[subanark]

Last time I checked the price difference between Linux and Windows is about the same for AWS vs Azure. Microsoft doesn't discount Windows on Azure, it would open up a lot of antitrust lawsuits if it did.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[PCM2]

Trying to translate your AWS applications to what Microsoft has in Azure is hard, as hard as a Windows to Linux transition was 10 years ago.

Maybe if you designed all your applications around AWS PaaS services -- in which case you'd be no better than the Windows developers of yore. But there ARE other ways to do it. You CAN get mobile backend services from other vendors and run them on the cloud of your choice. There are ways to run VMware workloads on the cloud of your choice. There are things you can do with containers. In fact, a lot of customers are suspicious of putting their eggs in one cloud and they have already built out the same thing on somebody else's cloud, if only for DR. If you built your applications in a shortsighted way, then sure, it's the same problem that has always existed. Nobody should be surprised when it's hard to migrate a J2EE application to .Net, either, but it was you who made that bed, not Oracle.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[PCM2]

In any case, this is a Microsoft-only market, since Amazon or Google can't do this cost-effectively if they have to pay for Windows on all their servers.

This is not a Microsoft-only market. AWS was there first with Amazon Workspaces, and Google will likely announce something soon. VMware has vCloud Air, and IBM Softlayer also runs VMware's stuff in its cloud.

Basically, because of Microsoft's cloud-unfriendly licensing practices, many customers are forced to bring their own, existing Windows licenses to the cloud to run their desktops in the way you describe, so that portion of the playing field is pretty much level.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[hairyfeet]

Sigh....because the board of directors at MSFT are a bunch of morons that are a half a decade behind the curve?

They let a CEO whose idea of innovation was "hey lets just copy Apple!" go only to....replace him with a CEO whose idea of innovation is "hey lets just copy Google!" with both not having a single fucking clue as to what made Apple and Google successful in their particular niches and even more importantly what made MSFT successful in its niche.

So instead of what we should be seeing, which is MSFT focusing on their core strengths and making Windows more desirable and useful in more application we now have our third Windows stinkbomb in a row, where not a week goes by where we aren't hearing of horrible crashes and BSODs like its fucking 1993 all over again and what is MSFT doing? Adding more spyware to their OS while trying to badly ape Google cloud which we all know will end up failing and costing the company billions....sigh.

Can we get Bill back PLEASE? Getting Steve back sure did wonders for Apple and Bill and Steve may have been assholes but they were assholes with a focus and direction, the Ballmernator and Nutella aren't even entertainingly bad, they are just sad like a cheap Chinese knockoff of an iPhone.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all but inevitable. While some workloads will never leave for the cloud, economies of scale will have the last word, and most businesses will realize that running their own datacenters isn't their core business - even though running APPS will continue to make an impact on the bottom line.
Meanwhile, both AWS and Azure already allow you to encrypt your cloud data using HSMs.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[HBI]

You assume quality of service in the infrastructure. I don't think that's a safe assumption. The weak link is that your workers and the jobs they do will be dependent on a connection to a public network which can and will be interdicted. These issues will become more and more common as time goes on. I think the demonstration that Akamai couldn't handle the Krebs situation illustrates the problem clearly, for those who can see ahead. No amount of encryption or firewalling can fix that problem - network segmentation will be the ultimate answer, which will present its own issues for a distributed workforce. That environment will chill attempts to move infrastructure to the cloud for a long time.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of your knowledge workers' jobs are already virtually dependent on the internet, even with their applications running on-prem. Just ask sales, customer support or your software development team to go one day without the internet.
Also, both AWS and Azure allow dedicated network connections into their infrastructure.

Too much catch up

[hsmith]

Been usin AWS for years and dug deep into azure. Their services are so far behind AWS in every measure it isn't feasible for them to catch up. On cute a new region.

Re:Too much catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what they said about Windows, Internet Explorer, MS Word and MS Excel.

It is not only about how good your product is. Leveraging your other advantages is just a important.

Re:Too much catch up

[The-Ixian]

Except that MS is a juggernaut of a company, is hugely profitable and is working in their primary skill set.

Does Amazon even make money yet?

Azure has already surpassed all other cloud services companies including Google.

So I would not count them out. Their offerings may be behind AWS, but I would expect that lead to narrow dramatically in the coming years.

Re:Too much catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Amazon even make money yet?

Err... yes. Largely driven by their hopelessly profitable AWS division.

Azure has already surpassed all other cloud services companies including Google.

Apart from Amazon, of course. Amazon's marketshare is greater than the next 3 (Google, Microsoft, IBM) combined.

Re:Too much catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious to hear some specific examples. With the exception of a managed MySQL service, everything else I was doing on Amazon I had no trouble doing on Azure, and their IDaaS (Azure AD) beats AWS' Directory Service (which is essentially regular-AD-in-the-cloud).
One critical area which AWS wins hands down is the price/performance ratio. MS really need to cut their prices if they want to compete.

Re:Too much catch up

[batkiwi]

Which services are behind?

The only one that I've had come up is RDS. Azure SQL is great if your application supports SQL 2016, but if it's mysql/etc you have to spin up your own linux server and run mysql on it (Azure DOES have a template for that at least) whereas on AWS it's a pure PaaS offering.

The cost calculator on AWS is years ahead of the Azure one, but that's not a day by day use thing.

Azure's CDN capabilities are more flexible than AWS, and I'd argue HDInsight is better than EMR.

AWS kinesis beats Azure's event hubs right now.

The inbuilt user management is much easier in AWS, being PKI based instead of Azure AD based.

There's other pieces I've missed I'm sure, hence wondering what services you've used in AWS which are lacking in Azure?

France, Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France?

[burni2]

I mean, they have laws giving their secret service similar access to data centers .. and they also have "NSL" equivalent gag orders.

So, this was only the second worst decision.

Re:France, Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France?

[hcs_$reboot]

Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France

You must have been sent by Elon and you are now living on Mars. Have you been to France recently? Have you even left your village, or home, recently? Been in France in summer. People are gathering as usual. Maybe a bit less. But besides that, life in normal in France! Stop watching apocalyptic dramas...

Re:France, Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France?

[burni2]

You missed the point the SoE gives also extended rights for covert operations, normally not found in a gathering crowd but in a data center.

Start reading the backgroundstory we are talking about datacenters and not about public gatherings.

Re: France, Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why the are building a french center for their french users.

Sounds like MS wants to 3 EU

[jsepeta]

After all the legal actions from the EU v Microsoft, by announcing a $3B investment in cloud infrastructure, Microsoft is aiming to reduce oversight and legal controversies.

Re:Sounds like MS wants to 3 EU

[Anonymous Coward]

Most probably, they are getting out of UK due to the ongoing brexit.

Extraterritorial: All Your Data Are Belong To US

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.justsecurity.org/20780/case-watch-microsoft-v-united-states-extraterritorial-reach-electronic-communications-privacy-act/

Microsoft protects your email, UNLIKE GOOGLE!

[GerbilSoft]

Microsoft is the only company that will never read your email, unlike EVIL GOOGLE who reads everyone's emails to steal personal information!

Horsefucker.org

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I kinda like HORSEFUCKER.ORG free webmail.

Trust?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we trust ANYTHING cloud that is not self hosted these days - and even then....

Regions

[manu0601]

It is weird to call nation-states regions. Perhaps that explains why they dodge tax paying: they did not notice there were some states, laws and taxes there.