
Azure cracks, AWS strong: Covid-19 stress-tests the cloud - ceohockey60
https://interconnected.blog/covid-19-stress-tests-cloud-azure-aws/
======
godtoldmetodoit
> Since Microsoft’s other businesses are either hardware or office software,
> with the exception of maybe XBox’s gaming, it generally lacks operational
> experience in running “always on” services and preparing for unanticipated
> traffic surges.

Uh, as a former Microsoft equivalent of a SRE this is a utterly ridiculous
statement.

I was in the Windows division on a team handling all the incoming telemetry -
we definitely knew how to prepare for traffic surges and keep our services
"always on".

Has the author never seen Office 365? Bing? The entirety of Azure in general
that has dozens if not hundreds of publicly facing always on services?

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> we definitely knew how to prepare for traffic surges and keep our services
"always on"

Okay, but as a heavy customer of AWS for 10 years and Azure & GCP for 6
years... there's some very valid criticism of the capacity planning and
elasticity.

I hit capacity, provisioning and scaling issues all the time in Azure regions.
And many times the cause is not obvious because most services seem to be
unaware that the resources are exhausted, and fail with seemingly unrelated
errors and partial failure.

edit: and to be fair, I'm not saying it's easy to build something like Azure
or that I would do better. And I have a huge list of cases where Amazon's
product engineering is terrible compared to Azure's. But... the problems I've
seen all week in the UK aren't imaginary. I've had no such problems on Amazon.

~~~
godtoldmetodoit
I don't disagree with anything you are saying here, but I was heavily taken
back by the statement the author made as it felt right out of the early
2000's, ignoring the last 20 years of Microsoft's shift to services and the
cloud.

Azure clearly prioritized massively increasing their geographic footprint
without the availability zones that AWS almost always deploys when they enter
a new region, and I have no doubt they run leaner with less compute available
then AWS.

When I was on the telemetry team about 3 years ago, we were in the early days
of transitioning from the internal only "physical cloud" that the Bing team
had created years before into Azure, and it was full of pain for a service our
size at that time.

------
luhn
> One misleading headline that’s been pushed out by Microsoft and
> unfortunately picked up by various tech media outlets, is the “775%
> increase” in Azure cloud service usage in geographical areas that are most
> committed to some form of social distancing or shelter-in-place policy.

It's way worse than that. The original statement:

> We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that
> have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders

The updated statement:

> We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly
> users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in
> place orders have been enforced.

Somehow an increase in usage of a single feature of a single product in a
single country was miscommunicated as an increase in demand for all of Azure's
cloud services. Microsoft's PR team royally screwed up on this one.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-
microsoft...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-microsoft-
cloud-services-continuity/)

~~~
NicoJuicy
This "single feature" is video-conference and is used by almost every Office
365 business customer. In chat propositions, it's Slacks biggest competitor.

There is no feature bigger in bandwidth than this one.

I believe the numbers are similar in Europe.

By reference, I think it's similar as having a Netflix business appear from
nowhere.

~~~
tw04
>By reference, I think it's similar as having a Netflix business appear from
nowhere.

Only without all the edge caching devices Netflix has had a decade to deploy.

------
samspenc
> limited to places where shelter-in-place is in full force, which at least in
> the United States, is only a small part of the country with densely
> populated urban areas: New York, California, New Jersey, Michigan, etc.

Ummm, it is NOT a "small part" of the country that is under "shelter-in-
place". By geographic area, maybe, but California, New York and New Jersey
alone include some of the largest cities by population and population density.
And there are now several other states with large populations (Illinois,
Florida, Washington, for example) not listed here that have shelter-in-place
as well.

UPDATE: I found an interactive map that shows which states have statewide
shelter-in-place orders in the United States; it looks like all the states
with the largest populations (and more than 50% of the country's total
population) are covered, which is actually significantly larger than I had
actually thought before I looked this up:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-
stay...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay-at-home-
order.html)

~~~
madhadron
By population, New York + California + New Jersey is 22% of the USA.

~~~
altoidaltoid
and have 6% representation in the Senate...

~~~
virtue3
That's what the house is for.

The senate is there so the larger states don't trample over, say, Idaho.
Majority rules does NOT work for the USA. You have to think of us as the EU
with member votes for each country (country being state). This nation is not
supposed to be about the federal government, it all went to shit around 9/11
and has continued to do so.

~~~
bobthepanda
> it all went to shit around 9/11

Not really. You could argue that it's been like this for a while. Depending on
what you want to judge, there's

\- Johnson's Great Society (Medicaid and Medicare, urban renewal, War on
Poverty)

\- Eisenhower (Interstates, the first nationwide public transportation
network)

\- FDR (The New Deal, Social Security)

~~~
TheCoelacanth
I would go even earlier

\- Fugitive Slave Act (Federal government uses military force to kidnap people
who were, according to the laws of the state they were in, free citizens and
force them back into captivity)

~~~
madhadron
I'd go even further:

\- The Constitution, which was a coup that displaced the old confederation of
states.

------
uji
A better comparison would be between Azure and GCP, both of them provide
office suite (SAAS) to customers.

Google recently released its side of the numbers
([https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-
cloud/how...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/how-
google-cloud-is-helping-during-covid-19))

~~~
all_blue_chucks
AWS also provides office suite to customers: WorkMail, WorkDocs, Chime
messaging, etc.

~~~
reallydontask
Are they even in the same league as O365 and G-suite, usage wise?

Only asking because I'd never heard of these services before

~~~
cc81
Are G-suite even in the same league as O365? I have no numbers and might be
incredibly biased by location but I feel that all the "boring" office
companies in Europe has moved towards Office 365 as a natural step.

That is of course not true and I'm sure there are plenty of G-suite companies
but for the large ones it seems very common that they have just followed
Microsoft into the cloud.

------
Havoc
Doesn't seem like a particularly balanced article. Plus some downright bizarre
statements. GCP is "not big enough to be stress tested on the same level."???
Even smaller operations are subject to stress proportionately and I'm using a
hell of a lot of google hangouts conferences...

~~~
smt88
Do major Google services even run on GCP? My understanding was that they
don't...

~~~
saberience
No, this is why GCP is fairly crap when comparing to AWS. Google doesn't
actually use GCP for building anything so they have less incentive to actually
make it better, that or it means they don't understand the issues with it.

At least with AWS you know that Amazon dog-foods the hell out of it and have a
major incentive to improve it.

~~~
DangitBobby
In what way is GCP crap?

------
gigel82
Where exactly are the "cracks" of which the author speaks? There are some
links in the article pointing to generic MSDN help articles but I'm not seeing
this claim substantiated by data (reports of downtime for example).

No one is saying online services and cloud providers aren't affected by the
surge in traffic but I'm not seeing where the cracks are, so I'm calling the
title BS (or clickbait at best).

Hate on M$ all you want, the worlds' enterprises run on their software (and on
their cloud).

------
sgt101
"It’s safe to say that AWS runs a much bigger, if not more critical, chunk of
the digital world than Azure" noooo... it isn't. It's just that the people we
know use AWS. Most people use office, sharepoint, outlook and exchange -
especially exchange.

~~~
scarface74
AWS even admits that only 5% of enterprise IT spend is in the cloud.

~~~
moooo99
I think its safe to say that more consumer services are using AWS than Azure,
things like Spotify, Netflix, Snapchat, etc. But when it comes to large
enterprises, I'd bet that Azure is first place by a significant margin.

Given that these enterprises power a significant chunk of the worlds supply
chains, manufacturing processes and so on, I'd say that the piece of the
digital world that Azure offers is way more critical.

~~~
scarface74
Amazon always brags that they have twice as many Windows VMs running as Azure.

I’m by no means a Windows hater. I’ve never developed on anything
professionally besides a Windows computer - these days .Net Core, Python and
Node. But once I started working with AWS, I avoided deploying to Windows
servers like the plague. Anytime you add Windows to the mix you basically more
than double your cost between Windows licenses and the increased hardware
required over running Linux.

All that to say, no one chooses to use Windows on AWS. So if there are that
many Windows instances on AWS, they are more than likely old enterprise
workloads.

------
dkhenry
I have had a Service Down Ticket open with Azure now for four days with out as
much as a call back from them. Just today I finally got the automated email
saying they acknowledge my issue. My system is totally dead in the water on
Azure.

On the other hand amazon just called me to make sure everything was ok. Their
system has been a rock.

------
curiousgal
The entirety of French universities are using Microsoft Teams for their online
classes, that's a very serious workload. Previously almost no one used that
tool.

------
blntechie
Very subjective article trying to pass off as an objective report.

------
tinyhouse
One thing that probably helps AWS is that they have experience preparing for
peak usage given Amazon's peak traffic (and others) on some events during the
year, such as black Friday, Prime Day, major holidays, etc.

~~~
scarface74
Please don’t start down the false road that AWS came out of excess capacity
that Amazon had.

You didn’t state that explicitly, just making sure that no one rose thinks
that.

------
purple-again
Eh. A legion of non remote, non technology, companies were forced to quickly
thrust themselves into the web. Want to bet how many of those companies were
already running as a Microsoft shop? Nearly 100%.

I would love to see details on the total requests placed on AWS and Azure
during the time frame of COVID. My instinct tells me that Azure got hammered
driven by those microsoft shops scrambling to get into the cloud while AWS had
only a small increase, driven by technology companies (a small portion of
companies) where the devs have final say and prefer AWS.

~~~
tw04
100% echo this statement. I have dozens of customers who went to VDI in Azure
as their immediate work from home solution. I can't think of a single one that
went to AWS. The article makes a bunch of baseless claims to get to an
unproven conclusion.

>It’s safe to say that AWS runs a much bigger, if not more critical, chunk of
the digital world than Azure.

Based on?? If o365 goes down for any extended period of time, most of the
fortune 100 can't do business.

> it generally lacks operational experience in running “always on” services
> and preparing for unanticipated traffic surges.

Ya... Microsoft lacks experience running always-on services... they'd only
been managing hotmail for a decade before AWS was even in beta. They have no
experience running always-on services _AT ALL_.

~~~
mastry
I have seen the same. One of our clients stood up 25,000 Azure VMs (Win 10) in
a single day. No problems so far.

~~~
tw04
> No problems so far.

Wait until they get the bill :) I will say, it's amazing how quickly they find
budget for that back-burnered VDI project after the first month of billing.

------
naringas
Seems to me like microsoft probably: underestimated their customer's potential
demand and/or oversold their cloud capacity.

------
xkgt
MS has more user facing SaaS offerings than Amazon, so both are not impacted
the same way due to the lock down. What is the AWS equivalent of Teams &
Office 365? Chime and work docs? The comparison is apples to oranges.

------
afpx
Except for EMR

~~~
contol-m
Could you explain further?

~~~
afpx
When we started using EMR, we'd never exhaust the number of available
instances (in both spot and on-demand). Now, we frequently do. And, for the
last 3 weeks, it's been close to impossible to launch a huge cluster.

