Some Companies Choose Microsoft's Cloud Service Because They're Afraid of Amazon (cnbc.com)

"In the cloud wars, Microsoft has been able to win big business from retailers, largely because companies like Walmart, Kroger, Gap and Target are opting not to write big checks to rival Amazon," reports CNBC: The more Amazon grows, the more that calculation could start working its way into other industries -- like automotive. In a recent interview with CNBC, Volkswagen's Heiko Huttel, who runs the company's connected car division, said the carmaker chose Microsoft Azure late last year for its "Automotive Cloud" project after considering Amazon Web Services... "If I take a look at all the competitors out there, you see they have capabilities in disrupting you at the customer interface," Hüttel said. "Then you have to carefully choose who is really getting down into the car, where you open up a lot of data to these people, and then you have to carefully choose with whom you are doing business."

Microsoft likes to tout the merits of its cloud technology, but the company is fully aware that taking on AWS, which has a commanding lead in the cloud infrastructure market, isn't just about offering the best services... Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that it accounted for almost 10 percent of sales in the latest quarter.

Comments

It's crossed my mind as well

[SuperKendall]

I've been looking at service providers, and at this point I would probably go with Microsoft primarily because I want real competition for Amazon in the server space.

It's difficult though as Amazon has some offerings like Glacier I'm not sure other even really offer - does anyone know of other companies provide something like that, that are also pretty reliable?

Re:It's crossed my mind as well

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, i literally googled "azure glacier competitor" and came with this as the top link

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/23/microsoft-launches-a-new-archival-storage-option-for-azure/

and i didn't even have to type in "competitor," google autocompleted it.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[Spazmania]

It's true that Amazon's new product process starts with writing a mock press release that explains who the customer is and why we think they want to buy the product. But if you think that means marketing, you have it upside down.

Amazon's process doesn't start with figuring out how to sell you something. It starts with figuring out what you want to buy. Then they figure out if they can make it. 'Cause if you already want to buy it, the only marketing needed is to tell you it exists. Customer obsession it's called.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

microsoft = software. amazon = marketing. some companies are smart because amazons IT will never compare to microsofts IT.

Errr, no.

The company I'm consulting with right now has done in-depth studies of AWS, Google, and Azure. They eventually want to have a setup where they can, at will, move their services between any of the big 3 providers.

They've been having all sorts of meetings with reps from all 3 trying to see what they can do, and I've no doubt that eventually they'll be able to do this (easily shift services from provider to provider).

In the most basic terms, this is the way things stand:

First off, in case you didn't know, AWS is IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service while Azure is PaaS - Platform as a Service. (No one knows what the fuck Google is yet.) These two approaches obviously have some serious implications as to how you deploy and manage your stuff, so you'll want to either know what the fuck you're doing or pay someone smart look at your operation and tell you which makes the most sense for you.

AWS is far and away the most flexible and "featurific" of all three. Whatever it is you want to do, AWS can do it. AWS also offers the most bang for the buck, especially at scale. AWS uptime and file persistence is beyond excellent, it practically borders on science-fiction. You could nuke 90% of the world and all of your precious S3 files would still be perfectly safe. Their overall security posture is outstanding. For the moment, AWS is king, end of story.

Azure is getting there, but it's got a long way to go. MS knows this and as a result Azure reps and dev groups will do ANYTHING you ask for. ANYTHING, including happily replicating any AWS features or functionality that you would need in order to get you onboard. And they'll do it on their dime.
For example, MS paid a 3rd-party dev team to build (from our specs) an entire service catalog for us in Azure, in the hopes that we may use them in addition to AWS. It was a piece of the puzzle that we needed and MS paid to have it built. Azure is hungry and motivated. Amazon should keep an eye on their rear-view mirror for Azure.

Google is in last place, and they aren't nearly as feverish about developing their cloud as you would expect them to be. We meet with them and it's always a little too relaxed. I honestly have no idea what they've done or delivered.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[brunes69]

IBM Cloud Object Storage is price competitive with AWS, even cheaper for many workloads.

https://www.slideshare.net/mob...

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[phantomfive]

Might want to look at IBM cloud, too. I would trust it over Google cloud.

Re:It's crossed my mind as well

[ctilsie242]

There is competition to Glacier. Wasabi offers $5/TB/month, generally with no in/out fees, while Glacier is $4 per TB/month, and there are fees and waiting time. Downside to both is that when you store something, you pay for the object for 90 days, even if you delete it.

Backblaze B2 also is in the same area, but Wasabi works with the S3 API.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[Rob Y.]

That's probably the main reason Azure supports Linux. They're trying to lure customers from AWS - and those customers aren't going to go from one trap to another.

I always thought Azure was built to offer a cloud for Windows-specific code, that only Microsoft could support. And maybe it actually started out that way. They got enough developers to buy in to the dot-net server stack that by the time the cloud became the new platform those developers had nowhere else to go for a cloud service. They - and outsourced Office/Outlook 365 deployments would make for a decent-sized cloud business by themselves. But I guess not enough to compete with AWS. So, Linux - and dot-net on Linux was the only direction that made any sense for them. And I guess that's a good thing...?

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[_merlin]

I think they're still in that Ballmer "Developers! Developers! Developers!" mindset. They want to make Windows the preferred development platform, while allowing deployment to the customer's OS of choice. That's why they've got the Linux subsystem, cross-development in Visual Studio, .NET Core and SQL Server for Linux, and they rest of it. They have tools to simplify deploying to Azure from Visual Studio. They're trying to sell an integrated "experience" that requires the developer to use Microsoft's OS and tools on their desktop.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[Gunfighter]

First off, in case you didn't know, AWS is IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service while Azure is PaaS - Platform as a Service.

AWS also offers PaaS and SaaS options in addition to IaaS.

Re:It's crossed my mind as well

[AlwinBarni]

The best way is to try, most cloud providers have trial accounts.
Run your test for a while to check functionality and reliability to have an informed personal experience.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[Slashic]

First off, in case you didn't know, AWS is IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service while Azure is PaaS - Platform as a Service.

This is wrong, AWS is not only IaaS and especially excells in PaaS and serverless, it also provides some SaaS, going to AWS to do some "lift and shit" move to cloud on EC2s is the worst strategy ever. Azure also has IaaS by the way.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[mjwx]

microsoft = software. amazon = marketing. some companies are smart because amazons IT will never compare to microsofts IT.

Errr, no.

The company I'm consulting with right now has done in-depth studies of AWS, Google, and Azure. They eventually want to have a setup where they can, at will, move their services between any of the big 3 providers.

They've been having all sorts of meetings with reps from all 3 trying to see what they can do, and I've no doubt that eventually they'll be able to do this (easily shift services from provider to provider).

In the most basic terms, this is the way things stand:

First off, in case you didn't know, AWS is IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service while Azure is PaaS - Platform as a Service. (No one knows what the fuck Google is yet.) These two approaches obviously have some serious implications as to how you deploy and manage your stuff, so you'll want to either know what the fuck you're doing or pay someone smart look at your operation and tell you which makes the most sense for you.

Almost, Azure is pure PaaS, they want to sell you OS as a service, database as a service, web hosting as a service. Amazon is both IaaS and PaaS, they'll sell you raw compute resource as well as database as a service et al.

I think de-clouding will become a thing in the near future. Cloud is just going to become part of the cycle of management fuckery like the old desktop -> terminal -> desktop cycle. Every now and then a CxO who came up through sales is told about how much money they'll save by going to the Cloud at the golf course. Sounds good up until they get the first bill combined with declining customer numbers (meaning declining bonus values) and race to get things back on premises.

Cloud is the latest buzzword that non IT types use, but most people don't realise that cloud providers, especially Azure, are like low cost airlines. Very low cost of entry, but then they start charging you for every little "extra". Most cloud providers are 9 to 5, M thru F and if your business is different it's going to start costing more. It becomes a false economy like low cost airlines. Sure Norweigian can fly me London to LA for £350, but if I want a meal it's £50 more, if I want to pick a seat it's £50 again... so on and so forth. United on the other hand will fly me to LA for £400 which includes meal and seat selection. Budget airlines are fine when you fit into their rules but expensive if you want anything else. Cloud providers are the same, cheap if you fit into their rules, but want anything different and they'll have a bill in hand for it.

Re:It's crossed my mind as well

[pnutjam]

Backblaze B2 is pretty competitive with glacier, from a cost perspective. It's also much more user friendly.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[Spazmania]

You have it upside down,

Every action is marketing. And none are.

Marketing is promotion. Actions taken in the course of promoting a product or brand to the public are marketing. Nearly identical actions, taken for a different purpose, are not.

Suicide out of fear of death

[Dirk Becher]

The only explanation.

Is that really so true anymore though

[SuperKendall]

microsoft = software. amazon = marketing.

I don't think the data really bears that statement out, Amazon's cloud services are used by a lot of services with a very heavy load (like millions of users load), and on top of that you know Amazon's IT is not too bad because of how generally reliable Amazon itself is (never mind that little hours long flub last Thanksgiving).

To my mind, what has Microsoft really done at the scale that Amazon handles regularly? In terms of proven ability I trust Microsoft a bit less, though Azure has generally seemed to work pretty well for people I know that have used it.

Re:Is that really so true anymore though

[Spazmania]

It'd be more impressive if they did it _well_.

Re: Is that really so true anymore though

[brunes69]

Yes it is true that AWS is used by many public sites, some with millions of users. Netflix is an example everyone always points to.

However when you REALLY get into things what you will learn is there is a huge, huge difference between running a public website for millions of users, and an Enterprise back office workload. The per user stat is meaningless because one workload is mostly lightweight web tier and the other is a heavy duty number crunching back office application.

  Companies like Lyft are not deciding to spend billions of dollars building their own cloud to move off AWS, because it is fun. It's because AWS is honestly not that great at Enterprise scale workloads, and it costs a metric fortune to do said things on it.

Re: Is that really so true anymore though

[Cyberax]

AWS is a business, so it wants to get some profit. Theoretically, if you run your own datacenter you can run it cheaper because you don't treat it as a profit center. That being said, these days it'll probably require company size that is great than that of Lyft.

And this is even without getting into data locality and resilience.

Ethics do matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a small business, with about 20 employees. We use Microsoft Azure because for our needs there is virtually no difference in service, I like how Azure more easily integrates with Office 365 apps we use, but there's another reason there too. I have known people who worked at Amazon and hate it. I don't approve of how they treat their employees; that is the antithesis of the culture I am trying to build in my own company.

And to be honest, it's the same with Lyft and Uber. While in some cases a rental car is more expensive than Uber and Lyft, I told my staff I will happily reimburse for a rental car but not for ride-sharing. I think Uber and Lyft both are undermining worker protections while making their revenue by skirting municipal transportation law and Uber's management staff ethics problems is the exact opposite of how i run my company. I'd rather my staff pays more and rents a car or takes a taxi.

While we're small and that's my own choice on things, to be fair these companies do not publicly act like good members of society and at least for some business owners like myself that's now how I want to do things. I'll put my business first and work with a company I don't agree with if that's the only choice that i have, but in today's markets there's rarely so few choices that you have to work with someone you despise.

Re: Ethics do matter

[cyber-vandal]

I never thought I'd see the day where Microsoft was the ethical choice.

Re: Ethics do matter

[Wraithlyn]

Ne neither.

It really is becoming a different company under Nadella. Seriously, spend some time reading about how he's changed things at MS in the last 5 years.

To pick another recent example, I never thought I'd see the day when MS released the Halo games, for PC, on ***STEAM*** instead of trying to make it an Xbox Store exclusive.

They have finally decided it's better to play nice with others instead of trying to force platform lock-in everywhere. The Gates/Ballmer era is truly dead.

Re: Ethics do matter

[Rob Y.]

If Microsoft was ever really good at something, it is being a quick follower. They're smart enough to recognize when they've lost - or are about to lose, and turn on a dime - pouring a huge amount of resources into getting on board the next big thing early enough to catch the wave.

Windows Mobile fans thought it was better than Android (and maybe even iOS), and they were plenty disappointed when Microsoft pulled the plug. But Nadella knew he'd lost - even before their best kit came out.

They're not playing nice, they're merely smart enough to understand that they don't have the power to not play nice any more. And hell, that sure beats the old days, but it hardly makes them the ethical choice. Call me when they stop blackmailing Android device makers...

Re: Ethics do matter

[Wraithlyn]

they don't have the power to not play nice any more.

So... they ARE playing nice? ;)

I understand the impetus for change is not coming from some pure bastion of altruism and the goodness of their hearts. If the ruthless Gates/Ballmer tactics were still working, they'd still be doing them.

And I'm sure they are still doing many evil things, it takes a long time to turn a ship of that size. But changes are definitely afoot. Kindly indulge me and google "nadella culture" and read some articles about how he's changing things internally.

(And also, I'm not the guy who called Microsoft "the ethical choice", and I'm not defending that wording. But there are concrete signs they are "less evil")

Re:Ethics do matter

[zennling]

I have known people who worked at Amazon and hate it

I work with azure and I hate it - does that count?

Re: Ethics do matter

[iampiti]

Yep, the reason they started to write software for Android and iOS was because they recognized their software would become irrelevant if they didn't. The PC is no longer king of computing so staying out of smartphones is suicide. Since Windows Phone never managed to capture any significant marketshare they had to port their software to Android and iOS. So competition turned out to be good.
Alas, they're still very strong on PCs so that allows them to do crappy things to customers in Windows 10 (telemetry, forced install of useless Apps, automatic updates, frankenstein UI...) and still have people "choose" them.

Re: Ethics do matter

[mjwx]

I never thought I'd see the day where Microsoft was the ethical choice.

I get the joke... But MS isn't evil by intent, it's evil as a matter of consequence. MS just want more money, so their evil stems entirely from that. If they wanted to be truly evil they'd have all kinds of dastardly things like forcing us to use Sharepoint to access Exchange.

Re: Ethics do matter

[pnutjam]

If they wanted to be truly evil they'd have all kinds of dastardly things like forcing us to use Sharepoint to access Exchange.

Your a monster... it's not enough to put imaginary people in your head through such an tribulation, now you've done it to ones in my head?!

Also if your company is afraid of the public cloud

[williamyf]

Microsoft's Azure Cloud offerings can be used Public, Private and true hybrid cloud types. Unlike amazon, which is 99.9% public cloud at the moment. And google, which is 100% public cloud.

Which means that, as your strategy shifts, you can go from Public cloud to hybrid clud to private clud with the same software stack.

Many companies are afraid of cloud technologies in general, and even more so about public clouds, and use this technology out of necesity, rather than desire. Other companies like the cloud, but would be deligthed to get everything inhouse if, for examle, what started up as a small project, grows so large that is cost-effective to do so (think DropBox).

While is true that there are SW layers that let you deploy in a "Cloud stack agnostic" fashion, those add a layer of complexity, appeal to the lowest common denominator, and show a technological lag.

Realisticaly, only Azure and OpenStack* can claim an uniform software stack between public cloud, private cloud and true hybrid cloud...

* There are others, like VMware, but their public cloud offering is marginal at best.

insert free advert for MICROS~1

[najajomo]

insert free advert for MICROS~1

Re:insert free advert for MICROS~1

[najajomo]

> Lame joke. So played. Welcome to irrelevancy, user.

They've done very well for a company that built itself on a bought-in Operating System and got IBM to pay for it :]

Aaaaaand they're stupid

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Not buying cloud services from Amazon is NOT going to keep them from disrupting your business or intruding on your business. "Who buys from us" is not a factor in how Amazon makes decisions as to what they're going to do next. And I'd bet that goes for Google and Microsoft too.

You should buy the best cloud service that fits your mission, period. If that's Amazon, great. If it's Azure or Google, great.

Buy whatever makes the most sense for what you need to do, and then move on to the next thing on your list.

Re:Aaaaaand they're stupid

[Solandri]

Not buying cloud services from Amazon is NOT going to keep them from disrupting your business or intruding on your business.

Actually it will/did. Until the last couple years, AWS was what was keeping Amazon afloat. Amazon's online retail business was losing money. So Amazon was using profit from AWS to bolster and support their online store. Their online store is finally beginning to make some profit, but the bulk of their operating income continues to come from AWS. It made more money than their store last year, despite having less than 1/8th the revenue.

So it would've been stupid for competing online stores to use AWS. They would've literally been bankrolling their competition. I get what you're saying about picking the best product. It works when the company you're paying keeps financial and operational separation between their divisions (e.g. Samsung Semiconductor giving preferential treatment to Apple over Samsung Mobile because Apple was paying them more). But Amazon was literally using money made by AWS to bankroll the growth of the Amazon store.

You have to have a migration strategy anyway.

[drinkypoo]

If you want to be able to survive even foreseeable problems, you have to have a migration strategy away from whatever cloud provider you choose. Picking not-amazon is a reasonable strategy for keeping your cloud provider's interest, so long as you can pick another not-amazon (or Amazon, for that matter) if your current provider goes south.

Re: Also if your company is afraid of the public c

[brunes69]

IBM.

Re:Casting out devils by Beelzebub

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You know, it sounded stupid and dodgy and dangerous to me when I first heard about the push to "move to the cloud", but honestly, it makes perfect sense.

It's just turning computing power and storage into a commodity service. Not having to staff your own experts in every field to keep your stuff up and running is a huge plus. Safety, security, monitoring, doing updates, provisioning- let someone else who knows what they're doing do all that shit while you get on with your business.

I thought the whole cloud thing was overblown, and I was wrong. It makes so much sense on so many levels, it's kinda silly not to take advantage of it.

Are there some things that I don't want stored in the cloud? Yep, a few things, but everything else may as well be there.

Cloud is the "coming thing" that's already arrived. It's only going to become more so because it works and it makes sense. It's the new replacing the old, just like it always does.

In 30 years the young'ns of today will be the oldsters and they'll be complaining that "No one needs a million petabytes of personal storage! When I was your age all we had were 2TB disks, and we were happy to have them!"

Re:Also if your company is afraid of the public cl

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Microsoft's Azure Cloud offerings can be used Public, Private and true hybrid cloud types. Unlike amazon, which is 99.9% public cloud at the moment.

AWS has an entire private 'internet', if you will, that's not public. My company uses it for HIPAA data and medical transactions. I don't know the percentages, but I'm pretty sure it's way more than 0.1% of their cloud.

Re:Also if your company is afraid of the public cl

[guruevi]

The point of the cloud is and always should be that you are provider-agnostic hence you don't use the plugs that AWS or Azure provides but write your own middleware for it or use something more generic (eg SSH w/ something like Ansible) to provision.

Modern implementation have forgotten why hosted virtual servers were attractive to begin with and locked themselves into Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon all over again.

Re: Also if your company is afraid of the public c

[williamyf]

You should check AWS outpost out

I KNOW about AWS outpost. That's the 0.05% I was talking about.

Re:No such thing as a private "cloud"!

[williamyf]

That would just be your servers on your premises in your intranet.

The whole (retarded) point of "cloud" services is, that you don't know where you data physically is and who has access or control over it. ("Amazon"? Yeah, but /who/ "at" Amazon?)

There is more to a cloud than just having servers in someonelse's datacenter.

You can have your servers in your premises and even use virtualization, and yet not have a private cloud in your premises, for instance:

Are your workloads in your servers in your premises elastic? Automaticaly? No? Then you do not have a private cloud...

Can you move an internal workload from server to server in your premises? No? Then you do not have a private cloud...

Can the project leaders inside your organization self-serve a virtual server automaticaly? No? Then you do not have a private cloud?

Is your internal datacenter scalable? No? Then you do not have a private clud.

Are you treating your internal workloads as pets instead of catle? No? Then you do not have a private cloud...

I think you should be able to get the drift from here.

Short memory is to blamei vis a vis Microsoft

[zkiwi34]

Microsoft has NEVER been trustworthy or not to be feared. Amazon might not have started that way, but has come to the point where it is neither nice nor trustworthy.

Re:Short memory is to blamei vis a vis Microsoft

[phantomfive]

Microsoft has NEVER been trustworthy or not to be feared. Amazon might not have started that way,

Amazon was patenting "One Click" back in the 90s. Now I know some people will say "that was not obvious," but it was obvious.

Re:Also if your company is afraid of the public cl

[williamyf]

brunes69 mentioned IBM, while an AnonCW mentioned Amazon Outpost, and JustAnotherOldGuy mentioned Amazon's VPC for HIPPA use*. And some other comments, so let's Clarify.

IBM's cloud is based on VMware and Openstack, both of which I mentioned in my comment. Problem is, IBM's public cloud offering is so small, like a drop in (huuuuge) bucket.

Some cloud providers offer you a "Cloud on colocation" where the servers are used only for your workloads, but is still servers on colo with cloud software installed, not a private cloud. A VPC is even worse, as your private cloud is running on servers were other workloads from other tenants are running, just that the network addressing and other things make it seem like a private cloud to you. That qualifies even less as private or true hybrid cloud.

Amazon lets you have a very specific box in a very specifc configuration for a very specific subset of workloads on premises. That's Amazon Outpost, and that can hardly be called a true hybrid cloud, let alone a private cloud.

The thing is, the Openstack public cloud market is highly fragmented, and OpenStack is a beast to set up and administer in your Datacenter (I shall know, I am technical trainer for OpenStack in the telco space), and the different parts of that Voltron are not cohesive enough.

Meanwhile Microsoft's Azure is the second largestpublic cloud in the market. And believe it or not, if you do not want public Azure cloud directly from microsoft (say, because you do not want to or can not deal directly with an american corporation), you can get it from telcos and partners. And if you get it in your private datacenter, you will find that the pieces are more cohesive and easier to administer than Openstack (but all of them still way behind of VMware, dare I say, the gold standard).

In the public cloud, the three biggest players are Amazon, Microsoft and Google (in that order). All the others are dwarfs in comparison (IBM included). The technologies that underpin those clouds are whatever propiertary stuff Amazon did to Xen (and moving away from xen), whatever stuff google is using, and Azure. Then you have a lot of small fish using Openstack (with KVM), Oracle (another small fish) using Xen, VMware doing deals with players big and small all over the place but reamining a small fish in the public cloud stakes nonetheless.

As I said, Amazon lets you have a very specific box in a very specifc configuration for a very specific subset of workloads on premises. Also gives you a VPC, or even a "Colocloud". So does IBM. But that does not qualify as private cloud or true hybrid cloud.
Google gives you nothing on premises. But of course they offer you a VPC.
Oracle hangs on in cloud because of predatory pricing if you run their software on other clouds, public or private.
Only Microsoft and openstack can claim a large public cloud presence (big in the case of microsoft, in the case of openstack, a really large shoaling of small fish) coupled with the posibilities of running your cloud on premises or true hybrid).

* for OldGuy: I am not a lawyer, and probably you are not one either. But your company's tech dept. should double check with your company's legal dept. if getting your HIPPA stuff in AWS (be it in public, colo cloud or VPC) is legal or not. The tech team probably checked before the project got started, but is good to re-check regularly. I know amazon is lobbying extensively for it to be legal, and I am a big proponent of cloud in general and public cloud in particular. But laws are somethinmes weird for us engineers, and maybe, just maybe, some of that HIPPA stuff shall not be in a VPC or Colo cloud. Also, laws change from time to time, and people (even lawyers) make mistakes. With things like HIPPA, sarbanes-oaxley and financial info, is best to err on the side of caution from the legal point of view. I hope is all legal and no changes are needed. JM2C, YMMV.

Re:Google crying in a corner

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Why does no one choose us!?!?

Probably because their customers don't want to risk having the product they're basing their company infrastructure on yanked at the whim of Google.

Azure is not just PaaS and AWS also offer Paas...

[jools33]

I'm sorry but Azure is not just PaaS, they also offer Iaas and AWS also offer PaaS.

that is just like this

[FudRucker]

choosing to bunk with the devil because they are afraid of the super-devil

Re:Also if your company is afraid of the public cl

[pnutjam]

This is the correct answer, minus the shouting. The parent is talking about owning the hardware/software running the cloud, not access to the resources.

Re:Also if your company is afraid of the public cl

[pnutjam]

We too have a "private access" section of our cloud, parent was talking about running the cloud on-prem.