
Sorry, Amazon, but Microsoft Is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor - polskibus
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/06/01/sorry-amazon-but-microsoft-is-the-worlds-1-cloud-vendor-heres-why-cloud-wars/#cc1cc7379287
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mankash666
I had to verify the numbers stated in this article from different sources, and
while I think the fair comparison is between Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud
unit" (which excludes Office 365) & AWS, the conclusion on financials in the
article is surprisingly true, if only by accident.

Much to my surprise, Azure/MS seems to be making a lot more money, raking in
$6.8B in Q1 2017 [1], vs AWS' $3.66B [2]!!

[1]:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-q3-fy2017-earnings-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-q3-fy2017-earnings-2017-4)

[2] [https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/27/aws-grabs-3-66-billion-
in...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/27/aws-grabs-3-66-billion-in-revenue-
in-q1-42-more-than-last-year/)

~~~
hrktb
The 6.8 in the article is for "Windows Server businesses", wouldn't it be way
larger than just cloud sevices ? Even without office, there still would the
windows server products in it.

~~~
ktta
So that'll include Windows Server licences in AWS, and GCE too wouldn't it?

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skookum
tl;dr: This is a Microsoft puff piece written by a PR firm. The ranking is
based on abstract things like "completeness of offerings" and "future vision".
There's a token revenue comparison as well in an attempt to give some
substance which compares all of Microsoft's "cloud" (that is to say inclusive
of things like Office 365) against Amazon's IaaS.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This has become annoyingly common and incredibly difficult to discern from
honest articles these days. Google in particular seems to prefer them over
actual blog posts of their own these days, and has major outlets like The
Verge and WIRED heavily publishing for them.

I feel like its already well-known people are supposed to disclose when they
are paid for an article, but there are non-monetary perks like exclusive
interviews/access which aren't clearly disclosed as conflicts.

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Xcelerate
Mostly a short fluff article; however, I have noticed that Azure does have a
few powerful features that AWS and GCP lack, most notably InfiniBand (fast
interconnects), which I have needed on more than one occasion for HPC tasks.
In fact, 4x16 core instances on Azure are currently faster at performing
molecular dynamics simulations than 1x"64 core" instance on GCP. But the cost
is extremely high, and I still haven't found a good cloud platform for short,
high intensity HPC tasks.

That said, Azure probably has the worst UI—slow, buggy, and their CLI doesn't
work with Anaconda installed on OS X. I had to hack Anaconda out of my path
temporarily while using Microsoft's 'az' tool. Also, their new resource
manager system is confusing. In terms of sheer compute capability though,
Azure is hard to beat.

~~~
robinhoodexe
> I still haven't found a good cloud platform for short, high intensity HPC
> tasks.

I would suggest contacting the nearby university with research groups using
HPC such as theoretical chemistry, bioinformatics or computational economics.
I would guess you could get a special deal for less than what you'd pay for an
AWS instance.

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claudiulodro
I don't think Amazon needs to be #1 in everything they do to achieve the kind
of worldwide market domination Bezos wants.

They are top five in many multi-billion dollar industries like eCommerce,
streaming video, eBooks, rockets, cloud services, and a bunch of other stuff
I'm sure I'm missing.

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gumby
The bulk of Microsoft's customer base is the global "Fortune 1000". They have
a cloud structure designed for those customers, and those customers are
comfortable working with MS. They are also large consumers of computing so
this makes sense (though TBT the article seems more like a market "research"
puff piece).

However most startups aren't in that ecosystem; when you start with an empty
buffer you don't have the same path dependencies that big businesses do. So
the Azure/AWS/Gcs calculus is different, not always in MS's favor. Even
Netflix, started by a former MS board director, is on AWS not Azure.

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arstaetro
".. Nadella has spurred Microsoft to go all-in and end-to-end on the cloud
across its enormous range of products and services that span everything from
IoT sensors to mobile devices to hundreds of millions of PCs to [b]mission-
critical servers[/b] and all the way in to the data center itself."

Which servers?

~~~
Thieum22
At least those - [https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-
ar...](https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-
architecture-2016-edition/)

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refresh99
They rated Google #6, lol. Clearly the author has little real experience about
this subject.

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polskibus
I found out recently that good chunk of this progress (esp. in their SaaS
space) is being fueled by open source projects, for example Power BI uses D3
3.5 and angular 1.5.

I hope they open source at least a part of their stack, for example the Azure
Service Fabric.

~~~
WorldMaker
Funny that you mention that: they announced the Azure Service Fabric .NET SDK
recently went open source and there seems to be some intent to open source
more, including possibly an open source version of the runtime:

[https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric](https://github.com/Azure/service-
fabric)

~~~
polskibus
The sdk is nothing much. Open sourcing ASF is still undecided.

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chr4004
He couldn't even bother to remove the spell checker line?

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johnsmith21006
Microsoft is really getting desperate. Saw similar propaganda recently with
Chromebooks. Guess going back to their old MO.

