
$500k of Azure credit for YC startups - sadfaceunread
http://blog.ycombinator.com/$500k-of-azure-credit-for-yc-startups
======
mbesto
_Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to
Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax
enterprise services._

Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement,
since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from
DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in
terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage
startups.

That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode _and_
Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your
services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills
to free services is a no-brainer.

EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka
sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.

EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then
this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their
platform: [http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-
detail/](http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/)

~~~
fsniper
I'm not very keen on office365.

Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so
far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or
frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients unread email
appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :)

And the shameless plug: Also your idea about selling migration services is
very interesting. If any one is in need of system administration, integration,
performance analysis, optimization, configuration management and devops like
services I'm here to help.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
Are you using the web app or the installed app? I haven't had a bit of a
problem with the installed version (The UI can be slow though).

~~~
fsniper
I'm a linux guy I do not need to touch windows or windows clients daily so
what I'm talking about is web ui.

------
felixrieseberg
We have a bunch of Microsofties at YC today, but reach out to Steve or me
directly at (founders@microsoft.com) if you're a Winter 2015 batch company and
for some reason not at YC today.

It's also worth pointing out that our $60k offer for YC companies is still
around, if you're in one of the older batches.

~~~
650REDHAIR
Not a YC company, but we'd love to buy you and Scott coffee or lunch if you're
free tomorrow. We (Fanout) received a boat-load of Azure credits that haven't
been used, but with all of the cool new Microsoft OSS developments recently we
think it'd be great to start working on Azure. My twitter/phone# is the same
as my HN handle.

~~~
felixrieseberg
Do me a favor and shoot me a mail at feriese@microsoft.com - I'm sure we can
set something up!

------
sz4kerto
This reminds me of the old joke:

Nietzsche: God is dead.

God (couple of years later): Nietzsche is dead.

pg: Microsoft is dead.
[http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html)

Microsoft (couple of years later): Here's some gift* for your startups. :)

(*: please don't start explaining that it is not a gift, etc. -- I know. :) )

~~~
drawkbox
The old Microsoft (Ballmer era) is dead though.

Microsoft in the last 1-2 years is like a new scrappy competitor who lost
market share on hubris. They are now willing to work how developers like to
work not forcing them into the corral. Azure is the new OS at Microsoft, lock
in higher up the stack but actually not as lock-in as before.

Microsoft went back to developer focus over biz/marketing focus and it is
working like it always has.

~~~
Galanwe
Can you give explanations on what actually makes you think that way?

=> As a Microsoft employee, i totally disagree. I would even go as far as
guessing that you either are talking about something you don't know, or are
just one of those evangelists that are paid to write such comments everywhere
on the web.

Microsoft is a desperately consumer/business-oriented company, with no
interest in technology whatsoever. If you don't get that, then you haven't
been paying attention

------
pallian
Just FYI - the $60k/year Azure offer is technically available for any startup
just willing to ask nicely (not limited to just incubators). My company,
[http://trippeo.com](http://trippeo.com) just qualified for it last month (we
get $5k/mo free hosting).

~~~
funkyy
Hi, great tip. Just fyi - your website is really hard on GPU. I am on Chrome
and after keeping it some time in a tab it started to be so brutal on GPU that
I had to shut down as my browser was unusable... Maybe possible memory leak?
Only active plugin I have is uBlock.

~~~
pallian
Hmm thanks for that. Are you by any chance on a chromebook using Chrome? We
noticed this issue with chromebooks... but for Macs and Windows using chrome,
it seems to be fine (at least from our tests). Can you shoot me an email at
adarsh[at]trippeo?

------
aceperry
Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My
experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used
it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent
missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so
I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.

~~~
photorized
You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was
a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that
had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use
than AWS, for example.

~~~
jread
It was a multi-region, multi-hour outage on Nov 18. To my knowledge AWS has
not experienced a multi-region outage. That said, they are learning from these
events and improving stability.

~~~
aceperry
I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed
periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many
years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of
hotmail went off the net.

I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers
a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their
datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and
didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well.

Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud.
While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see
them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller
competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything
critical.

~~~
antics
I work on infrastructure at MSFT. Collectively we stably runs hundreds upon
hundreds of thousands of machines in clusters that are tens of thousands
apiece, at scale workloads that only 2 or 3 other companies total have ever
seen. So, when I say that it is very hard for me to reconcile your assertion
that we lack "basic competence" in cloud management with the facts of the
situation, I hope you will understand why. It makes me think that you have not
thought carefully about what you are saying here.

If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be
happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.

~~~
aceperry
Not sure what you mean by where my info went wrong, but my friend worked at a
MS datacenter a few years ago, so I don't know what has changed. At the time,
almost all of the techs working at the DC were contractors, not MSFT
employees. They were severely understaffed and getting cut back constantly.
There were a few different companies doing the contracting as well, and all of
them were under the threat of losing out to a lower bid company. The competent
techs were getting outnumbered by incompetent techs. That and the fact that MS
couldn't even renew basic registrations and certificates didn't surprise me
with my poor experience with Azure.

Again, this was a couple of years ago. Also, I attended an event that MS held
to show off Azure, and a large percentage of participants couldn't spin up an
instance within 10 minutes, some of them didn't even start up. The MS people
running the event had a direct line to some techs in the datacenter, but they
still couldn't solve the problems. I talked with some MS partners/users who
told me that Azure was terrible in their experience and even some MS execs
admitted as much in private conversation. It sounds like Azure has improved
since then, but I really have to wonder how much improvement has occured.

~~~
antics
I take your points to be the following. Correct me if I'm wrong. (1) Morale is
low among our DC technicians, (2) many of the tech vendors are incompetent,
(3) one time hotmail forgot to renew a cert, (4) you had a bad experience one
time with an Azure demo.

Honestly, aceperry, I'm not seeing where any of this reflects poorly on our
ability to operate x million machines, and the fact that you present it as
evidence that we are not "competent" at provision our cluster effectively for
our customers is worrying. I am starting to wonder if you know anything at all
about the trade, because literally nothing here is relevant to your case. Even
the hearsay you have about the DC vendors being incompetent is not really
useful here, because it does not impact our operational capacity at all.

What am I missing in your statement that should cause me to worry?

------
mark_l_watson
Great offer.

I was accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program last year so I get $150/month
free Azure credit. Azure is very nice to use. So far, I have just been using
Ubuntu Linux VPS instances (similar to AWS EC2) and everything works similarly
to other providers I use like AWS, IBM BlueMix, Digital Ocean, and Google's
cloud services. Really, these are all very good services, so use the one you
can get for free or at a low cost.

I used to be pretty much down on Microsoft, but now they are doing a lot of
stuff right in my opinion: providing solid Linux support on Azure and
providing an unbelievably good deal on the family edition of Office365. It
seems like they are buying themselves into the cloud market, but with all of
their cash on hand, that seems like a good strategy!

Anyway, if you have a business idea you want to try then look into BizSpark.

~~~
city41
You can actually get $600/month in Azure credit. Your BizSpark account allows
up to 4 users, and each gets $150/month.

EDIT: correction, it looks like it's actually 5 users:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/niallsblog/archive/2014/08/22/activa...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/niallsblog/archive/2014/08/22/activating-
your-5-free-azure-accounts-on-bizspark.aspx)

------
kriro
Free stuff is great but I wonder if there'll be any subtle nudges to use this
for the next badges. "Your hosting estimates seem high, why don't you just use
Azure"? "Well we considered it but long term we'd rather use another hoster
for reasons X,Y,Z"..."Well yeah but 500k more runway is a lot."

I'm probably worried over nothing since YC investors are smart and tend to
leave tech choices to the founders but I'd like to hear some feedback on this
from people that pitch in the future.

Either way Microsoft seems to make pretty good decisions lately (from my
humble POV). Seems like they are essentially playing the same power law as
(other) investors, hoping that the next XXX will be run on Azure.

On a somewhat realted note...I worked in IT in Africa for a bit and it was
pretty strange how locked into Microsoft server stuff they (Africa is big but
it was true for all countires I had work relations in) are. I naively assumed
that Linux/BSD would be more wide spread there but my very subjective
conclusion is that MSxx-certificates are really widespread there and piracy is
kind of tolerated so it's easy to learn. It was a little bit harder than
expected to find Linux admins for example. I've always wondered if this was
active corporate policy or just an "accident".

------
vyrotek
Azure has been great for our start-up
([http://iactionable.com](http://iactionable.com)). We've been with them for
over 4 years. There have been ups and downs but we're fans of C#/.NET and it
was a great fit for our team. We store and crunch a lot of real-time data with
ServiceBus Queues and SQL Server. It has scaled well so far. We also went
through the BizSpark program which REALLY helped jump start things.

We were invited up to Redmond in the past to meet with teams from various
Azure services and participate in private previews of some cool features.
They're really working hard to make a great platform.

Satya, please don't have them mess things up with the next portal release! The
whole sideways scrolling gives me a headache.

------
h43k3r
I read somewhere that Satya Nadella is an active reader of Hacker News.

~~~
impish19
Microsoft employee here. Can confirm. He has mentioned HN a couple of times in
talks.

------
markolschesky
How long do companies have to utilize the $500K?

In the BizSpark Plus days, your company would receive $60K of hosting but
could only use it to pay 100% of your bill in the first year of BS+. In the
second year, you could use it to pay 50% and then in the third year you were
paying full price for Azure. It was a pretty good deal, but if you are already
spending $30-60K (or $250-$500 K) on infra in your first year or two, you're
in a select breed of companies.

~~~
MatthewMcDonald
>How long do companies have to utilize the $500K?

3 Years

------
forrestthewoods
I hope all startups are made aware of Microsoft BizSpark. You get a pretty
spectacular line up of freebies. And freebies that stay free even after you
graduate. Free copes of Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio,
Office, etc. It's damn near everything. A++++ would recommend.

[http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx](http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx)

~~~
robotnoises
Note: for anyone interested in this program, make sure you have the following
before applying (in addition to a well-written proposal for your business)

1.) A working website, at least a landing page explaining your product/idea.

2.) An email address @ the same domain as the aforementioned website

If you have those two things you have a pretty solid shot at getting approved.

------
imperialdrive
That is some serious credit... I should share that having access to Azure MFA
(formerly PhoneFactor) alone has been worth the R&D time. Their support,
although a little tough to nail down 1-on-1 time with, is very friendly. I
chose that word carefully, it's not super professional, but I actually had a
good time going through a migration with them, for what's it's worth.

------
theuri
May be helpful to clarify/reword - sounded like $500k _total_ from the
headline, but is actually $500k per company. Sweet deal...

------
rebootthesystem
If Microsoft truly wants to transform they need to launch an intensive secret
project. Let's call it "Project Redmond". The goal of the project would be to
develop "Quantum", the next Microsoft OS. Quantum aligns MS with Linux by
effectively building Windows on top of Linux as well as all the tools
necessary to, as automatically as possible, migrate existing Windows code into
Quantum.

With a move like this Microsoft becomes THE Linux company as the millions of
non-tech and tech businesses who are Windows based migrate to Quantum over
time. They could make the underlying souped-up Linux OS FOSS and sell the
Quantum OS layer (or whatever works).

I am thinking in terms of the next 50 years, not 5. In the long term I just
don't see how the existing MS model can prevail. A move like this Quantum OS
concept would instantly align them with web development and provide a solid
alternative to Apple on developers desktops and perhaps even Ubuntu at the
server level.

~~~
guardian5x
You describe Embrace, Extend, ... I don't think Microsoft has to stop doing
Windows. Its fine to just be open to everything out there as well.

------
moe
Is there anything in the fineprint to stop the startups from reselling those
credits?

Passing them on at a 20% discount would make for a sweet ~$400k runway
extension.

~~~
mmahemoff
Considering MS's long track record of offering discounts and freebies to
startup (in the form of BizSpark and many other programmes), we can happily
assume Redmond's considerable troupe of lawyers has anticipated that loophole.

------
nullspace
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups
would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this.

For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be
doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.

~~~
onion2k
3 years of technical investment is pretty much enough to stop you leaving
unless something goes _very_ wrong. This $500k is a small price to pay for a
client who goes on to be the next AirBNB or Dropbox. Even just the prestige of
having a company like that to draw on for testimonials would justify the
spend.

However...

For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack
experience. 5 or 6 of those will burn through $500k in no time compared to the
equivalent on a more open platform.

Whether or not to use Azure is certainly NOT obvious.

~~~
dangrossman
> For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack
> experience

Why's that? Azure's just another cloud hosting provider. You don't have to run
any kind of Microsoft software on the servers.

~~~
morganvachon
Exactly, and Microsoft is happy to host your own custom Linux-based
environment if you want complete control over your stack:

[http://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/documentation/articles/virt...](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-create-upload-vhd/)

edit: looks like phonon below beat me to it by a few minutes.

------
milesf
How is this any different than their previous "free" access to server products
for a few years? The idea being build it at low cost, then flip the company?

------
andhofmt
Azure also offers a small business "BizSpark" program.
[http://www.devfactor.net](http://www.devfactor.net) is hosted on Azure thanks
to BizSpark, where it gets $150/mo for three years. It was enough to handle
the front page of Reddit.

------
garazy
Might help to compete against Amazon as they and Akamai have the lions share
of YCombinator sites - [http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-
reports/Y-Combinator/hostin...](http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-
reports/Y-Combinator/hosting)

------
grandalf
This is pretty cool but I'd still prefer to use Google Apps and Gmail. The MS
office web apps are pretty poor in comparison and unless you're a dedicated
windows shop or have a lot of ex-finance people there is little benefit to the
office suite.

~~~
bratsche
But you also get access to the non-web versions of the office apps, which are
not poor.

~~~
grandalf
True if you're in the 1% of users who need features that go beyond what Google
Apps does and prefer to manually deal with the versioning mess using some ad-
hoc convention.

------
photorized
This is huge for Microsoft, because this is how Azure is finally starting to
get accepted by the startup/VC community. They never had difficulty selling
Azure to the enterprise, but for startups - AWS had always been the default
choice.

------
jorgecastillo
Wow amazing, I am not the biggest Microsoft fan & I would never have what it
takes to be part of a YC startup, yet just reading this got me all excited.
This is truly great for those startups that qualify!

------
pdknsk
Makes the 1-year $100K credit by Google look not so good now.

[https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/](https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/)

~~~
alwaysdoit
It's still pretty good if you're not in YC, of course.

------
efiftythree
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS
offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the
Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing
easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure
Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.

~~~
aceperry
"the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing
easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services"

How do you figure that? Pricing on cloud services can be tough to compare so I
really question anyone who presents blanket statements like that.

~~~
efiftythree
I probably shouldn't have used such a initiative word like "will". That said
scaling out PaaS compared to scaling out IaaS, specifically on Azure, is
almost guaranteed to be less expensive from an infrastructure standpoint. Less
actual VM's to manage also translates into less overhead from maintenance
activities.

At the very least it will be interesting to see if more people adopt the Azure
Websites PaaS offering. I know that right now most people dip their toes into
Azure with IaaS because its historically more comfortable for them.

------
ing33k
Our Startup is part of BizSpark and I have no doubts in saying that its great
! . Big win for MS and Equally a good deal for YC Startups.

------
kevinschumacher
WOW that is a lot of credit. How does Azure stack up "in the real world"
compared to Amazon, Rackspace, Google?

~~~
junto
Uptime for 2014 compared here:
[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-
computing/...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-
computing/which-cloud-providers-had-the-best-uptime-last-year.html)

Azure had 39.77 hours of downtime, whilst Rack space had 7.52 and the winner
(of the selected cloud providers was AWS with 2.41 hours.

I'm not sure how those figures were calculated though. These cloud providers
are multifaceted. I'm not sure which parts if each's services were analysed.

Also, it is worth considering that one serious problem can distort these
averages. AWS has a much more stable long term history.

In my opinion the competition is a good thing and Microsoft seem happy to
support whatever framework or OS you want. Their node.js support is supposed
to be pretty good.

The marketplace also enables you to get things like MongoDb clusters, etc
which is competition for SQL Server. They seem to be interested in supporting
customer interests rather than the old fashioned MS tech or die philosophy
from back in the day.

~~~
ewzimm
Those figures are a combination of downtime across all regions globally. So it
doesn't mean that any individual servers were down. The largest downtime was
in Europe, with had 5.97 hours last year.

Factors for downtime were an update bug in November and weather. The bug is
very unlikely to happen again. Outages due to weather really don't tell you
much at all other than that they were unlucky. Overall, I would say the
downtime numbers are not very useful.

[http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240238379/Microsoft-
Azur...](http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240238379/Microsoft-Azure-had-
more-downtime-than-main-cloud-rivals)

------
philip1209
This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the
credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably
be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If
they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a
reasonable expense.

------
greatabel
Ms has a terrible records of abandoning Ms-related tech followers by
technology renewal: vb->.net，wp7 !-> wp8. To many developers,ms is irrelevant.
And after using onedrive/Office365 for a long time, the experience is
poor:sometimes even on a wp/lumia,bugs like file loss and page broken is
usual。

------
eob
This would be against the spirit of the offer, but I wonder if there is any
easy way to arbitrage that credit into cold hard cash with low effort.

E.g., boot up a bitcoin mining cluster (though this particular idea would
obviously yield low return since it would be running on off the shelf
hardware)

~~~
photorized
Build a startup quickly, then sell it. :)

------
minimaxir
This seems like a Catch-22. If a startup is successful enough to get into YC,
wouldn't they have a stable tech infrastructure already?

This would only benefit YC startups who already use Azure. (Unless the
switching cost from AWS/Rackspace/Google is low enough nowadays.)

~~~
shk
Many startups in YC actually launch during the 3 months they are here. Being
successful before entering YC is only true for a small percentage of the
companies.

------
bobbles
Ahh suddenly it all makes sense.

I wondered why my company after 18 months of effort to get going on AWS with
certain apps has had a shift to get on Azure 'without compromise' in 2 months.

I doubt these sort of offers are only going to start ups, Microsoft is taking
on web services hard core.

~~~
nathangrant
This is something we may start to see. I think they are aggressively targeting
AWS customers with lower pricing and getting companies (including my employer)
to begin the move to Azure.

------
empressplay
In case anyone here missed this, Microsoft gives a bunch of free stuff
(including an MSDN subscription) to any new startup through their BizSpark
program:
[http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark](http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark)

~~~
icelancer
I have had no end of problems getting signed up for this for my startup. It
was a month of back and forth arguing then I eventually gave up and paid
$200/month on Digital Ocean and stuck with Linux. Very frustrating. Anyone to
talk to there that can help outside of generic customer support?

~~~
klausjensen
I signed up two companies recently, and it was literally a matter of filling
out the form (<5 mins) - and waiting 3-5 days for a "WELCOME" e-mail.

Not saying you did not have a bad experience, just offering mine. :)

------
rl3
I wonder if Azure competitors will increase their free offerings to YC
companies as a result of this.

The PaaS front is of particular interest. For example, it's not immediately
evident that Heroku even offers anything similar, beyond a small free tier
available to anyone.

------
patternpaul
Reach out to me if you need help with the PaaS side of things for Azure. I am
currently a DevOps lead at my company and we deploy approximately 35+ micro-
services to Azure about a few hundred times a day. I'd love to talk!

------
hinicholas
I'm not sure how Azure intends to compete in this space. I've used Amazon,
Rackspace, Google Cloud, Azure, and a bunch more.

Professionally, for simplicity I'd choose Rackspace or Google. For Scalability
and price I'd choose Amazon. For personal projects I love Digital Ocean.

I dislike Azure's control panel and VM setup, and find their VMs slow. I'd
only really consider them if I planned to implement a project that required
leveraging the entirety of the Microsoft technology stack.

I can't see technology companies embracing Virtual Windows Server RTs and
MSSQL Servers. Startups enjoy technologies that are easy to manage and scale
with smaller teams. Enterprise level companies still need inhouse dedicated
hardware for security.

Azure is kind of an oddball in the virtual hosting space.

~~~
hudo
I compared mid-size VM on Azure and AWS, and I got almost 50% better hdd and
cpu perf on azure.

And with Win Server, I run ASP.NET and PHP and Node, it works nice. Db (pg) is
on linux.

~~~
VSpike
I recently had to compare AWS and Azure for my company. I limited my
comparison to AWS c3 and c4 class instances versus mid-range A and D class
instances.

I did some of my own quick benchmarks here
[http://browser.primatelabs.com/user/82525](http://browser.primatelabs.com/user/82525)

For comparison, on-demand prices are (Linux / Windows):-

* AWS c3.xlarge - $0.239 / $0.376

* AWS c4.xlarge - $0.264 / $0.430

* Azure Standard A3 - $0.24 / $0.324

* Azure Standard D3 - $0.46 / $0.732

I also did some quick disk benchmarks
[https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B096UguGrNHAfmZjM1VQ...](https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B096UguGrNHAfmZjM1VQMFd3SURqRXlaX3hDazNuUUVnTVJjT2Z3b1VpZVNPYkpiajZqTmc&usp=sharing)

My tests are very limited I realise, but it looks to me like the AWS boxes
represent better value for the money there, even in the on-demand range. Azure
used to offer 6-month and 12-month plans but they removed those. Now you need
an enterprise agreement to get anything other than published rates, and you
need a big spend to qualify for that AFAICT. AWS reserved instances therefore
make their instance rates even more competitive, if those make sense for you.

I sent all this to the company trying to push Azure to us hoping they would
have better data to refute my simple benchmarks, but they didn't really have
any coherent response beyond talking about the "other advantages" of Azure.

I also looked at:-

* [https://cloudharmony.com/reports/editions/state-of-the-cloud...](https://cloudharmony.com/reports/editions/state-of-the-cloud-compute/premium/state-of-the-cloud-compute-0714.pdf)

* [http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/microsofts-unwanted-win-cloud-...](http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/microsofts-unwanted-win-cloud-downtime)

Beyond that I looked at the excellent data at
[https://cloudharmony.com/cloudscores](https://cloudharmony.com/cloudscores)
(great site by the way). Their service is not live yet, so I scraped the data
into Google Sheets and compared it there. AWS seems to beat Azure on most
cases.

You can see my sheet here:-
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19jltGybjXN3-PnKXAwQX...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19jltGybjXN3-PnKXAwQXtuS6AyMYd_K2yKf1J8QcIwE/edit?usp=sharing)

(Data entirely owned by Cloud Harmony). Sorry, I can't find a way to let
viewers change the filter on the data.

As far as "other advantages go":-

* If you use Win Server 2012 + HyperV in house then there's a good reason to use Azure because of tight integration.

* If you're using SQL Server it's potentially a good fit too. (MySQL on Azure is recommended via a DB as a service they offer from a 3rd party which seems very pricey).

* If you're starting out and are using Visual Studio tooling then the tight integration with Azure Websites, Web Roles and Worker Roles would be pretty nice since the build/test/deploy process would be pretty slick. Re-engineering an existing system to fit the PaaS could be hard, depending on your architecture (it would be for us).

------
maxbrown
Any idea on the LCV for Azure of the average YC startup? I know the average YC
startup is going to be a cut above, but are a large percentage of them going
to break the $500k in an early stage?

~~~
staunch
If the next Dropbox builds on Azure, instead of AWS, it would all be worth it.
From Microsoft's perspective it's a pretty cheap bet that will probably not
pay off.

The oldest tactic in the Proprietary Platform Handbook is giving away free
stuff to hook people early on.

In this case Azure can run Linux VMs, so I wouldn't worry much about using
them for that. Linux lacks lock in.

------
sadfaceunread
In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax
enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for
enterprise services at $5k/mo.

------
anonbanker
The fact that HN doesn't view Microsoft's known complicity with NSA programs
(partner of PRISM data collection since before 2007, _NSAKEY[1] before that)
as a human rights violation is troubling, to say the least, but it's
absolutely unnerving that anyone would trust them (including YC members) to
store sensitive data post-Snowden.

Does anyone actually trust cloud services in Five-eyes jurisdictions anymore?
Is there a company in those jurisdictions that people could use that is _more_
dangerous to trust than Microsoft?

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY)

------
rjurney
Company scrip
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip)

~~~
whyaduck
That doesn't seem like a germane comparison. Scrip was given in lieu of
compensation - I don't think that describes the deal MS is offering here.
Without this program, YC companies wouldn't otherwise be receiving anything of
value from MS, would they?

~~~
rjurney
Just saying, it isn't free. There is lock-in, and with Microsoft... do you
really want to be locked in?

~~~
blumkvist
You are not just saying.

You are just hating.

------
reagan83
"The relentless nagging from partners to grow faster we throw in for free."

Is this sentence constructed poorly or did a private comment slip in?

~~~
jameshk
I think it's meant to be in there.

------
gadders
I'm applying to YC next year. My startup is offering Azure hosting at a
discount.

Not sure how long we will last though...

~~~
zongitsrinzler
Great idea!

------
forgotAgain
If you have the money, it's a great way to prevent being voted off of the
front page of hacker news.

------
rajacombinator
That's a pretty impressive offer. As an AWS user, it would get me to look at
Azure at least.

------
dlu
I'm surprised Dropbox or someone similar hasn't tried this already

------
gregimba
Bitcoin mining startups?

~~~
err4nt
What a colossal waste of electricity though, think about the impact mining
leaves on the world, is it worth the digital gold?

------
hristov
Does Azure offer Linux images nowadays?

~~~
grennis
Do you want me to bing that for you?

------
aledalgrande
When a free HoloLens?

~~~
aledalgrande
Hater apparently doesn't want a HoloLens

------
orliesaurus
This smells like desperation from 100 miles away

------
Nux
How do you call a startup running on Windows? A shutdown. LOL!

------
higherpurpose
Figures that the HN server would die at the same time of an Azure
announcement. Azure isn't exactly best known for its uptime.

~~~
photorized
True, Azure did have a major outage in November 2014, significantly more than
the other popular providers:

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-
computing/...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-
computing/which-cloud-providers-had-the-best-uptime-last-year.html)

That's can't be the only reason to choose (or ignore) a particular platform,
because:

\- 100% is not commercially feasible

\- with rare exceptions, a little downtime won't kill you

------
rjurney
"ITS A TRAP!"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA)

