

Microsoft Wants To Buy Love In Silicon Valley - Royaleagle
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/10/microsoft-wants-to-buy-love-in-silicon-valley/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google has BigQuery and AWS has Redshift.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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pjc50
Can one start a Powershell remotely in the same manner as ssh?

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nailer
There's powershell remoting for this.

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

~~~
nailer
Link for anyone interested:
[http://www.powershellserver.com/overview/ssh/](http://www.powershellserver.com/overview/ssh/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

