

The consumer guys at Microsoft are just plain wrong - michaelhoffman
http://hal2020.com/2013/03/05/now-i-get-it-the-consumer-guys-at-microsoft-are-just-plain-wrong/

======
mythz
Agreed with a lot of the article up until: "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN".

This is likely the result of spending too much time inside a Microsoft cocoon
and has no idea that most of the outside world isn't built on Azure, or even
windows servers. The only thing Azure is going to win at is being the
default/preferred cloud provider for Microsoft MVPs and other VS.NET devs
primarily based on a Microsoft tech stack.

~~~
meaty
Azure is quite scary good but the main problem is that people really don't
understand what it is. If they actually work through that, I fully believe it
will win.

We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it
is.

~~~
mythz
It's quite scary expensive. I got a better spec'ed server on Hetzner for
1/11th the cost of an Azure instance:

[http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-
istheserv...](http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-
istheservicestack-14819151/49)

~~~
meaty
Yep it is expensive, bit hetzner are unreliable, their kit performs poorly,
their support sucks and you can't deploy a sql server instance quickly (the
latter is quite useful if you use sql server).

~~~
mythz
Hetzner has never failed me, it processes 3k+ C# redis commands in <1s which
was 8x faster than my previous old Linux server of Leaseweb (costing 4x more).
Although my old Linux server did quite well with over 480 days uptime and
processed more than 10M commands.
<http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838> In cloud-speak, that's more
than 99.99999% uptime.

The current Hetzner server is looking good over 176 days uptime having
processed more than 9.7M+ commands:
<http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/>

There have multiple Azure outages within the same time-frame my Linux servers
have been happily chugging along.

It's trivial to setup PostgreSQL/MySql on Linux. I personally don't deploy my
own stuff on expensive SqlServer instances.

~~~
meaty
Uptime is not a problem. Stuff breaks. Being able to contact someone, get a
root cause of an issue and get help to mitigate it is what is important.

In our case, a trial with Hetzner found their support to be somewhat lacking
if something went wrong.

The azure outages didn't affect us at all.

Out load characteristics are somewhat higher than that. We can shift 10
million http hits an hour quite happily.

~~~
jrs235
"Stuff breaks. Being able to contact someone, get a root cause of an issue and
get help to mitigate it is what is important."

This.

This reminds me of the article about Heroku's "intelligent routing" and a
discussion about scaling/scalability and performance.

We pay more for mitigating and reducing risks. Cloud services, particularly
Iaas and Paas, such as Azure, AWS, GAE reduce (or are at least suppose to) the
downtime when crap hits the fan and also enable more flexibility, speed, and
agility in building out solutions.

The interesting part about the Heroku discussion pertained to the following:

Assume we have a straight forward, minimum layered architecture and that the
average response time is 1.45 seconds. Using average responses times is a bad
idea for determining true performance but let's continue for purposes of
illustration. To get this average lets say 19 out of 20 requests return in 1
second, 1 out of 20 takes 10 seconds (Please correct me if my math is
off/wrong). If we could add a layer that would shorten our long tailed curve
that would be an improvement. However, adding a layer will incur some
overheard. Lets assume for illustration purposes this layer will add 500ms to
every request but will reduce the worst case from 10 seconds to 5 secords. So,
1 out of 19 take 1.5 sec, 1 our of 20 takes 5 for an average of 1.675 seconds.
The average time is worse! However, the worst case scenario is much better.
We've mitigated the costs of the worst case.

Using cloud services and vendors that have expertise and the ability to
quickly address hardware issues is suppose to reduce the risk and cost when
things go bad. Yeah you might have hiccups here and there that put you down
for a few hours. But that is better than being down for days! It's really all
about risk mitigation.

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aneth4
Blah, blah, Microsoft sucks, blah ... "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN"..

Wait, what? Either this is off the mark or I'm missing a major initiative that
could change the internet and save Microsoft. Is there a great article
lingering about explaining why Azure is going to win?

~~~
crag
Oh I think Azure will do well. And win in the Enterprise market. Look, outside
the bubble of the bay area startup land - the world is different. MS Office is
everywhere; SharePoint is everywhere; Windows Server is everywhere.

MS is positioned very well. In the Enterprise world. Not consumer world.

Outside of the xbox (nd that has it's issues as well) MS has already lost the
consumer market.

Consumers don't buy PC cause of Windows. The get Widows becuase it's the
default OS on the PC they are buying. Most care-less what OS is running as
long as they can check their email, play a few game and look at
look/listen/create media.

~~~
meaty
Yep the consumers buy a laptop because it is pink or cheap which usually ends
up running windows as its the only thing at the price point. When they buy a
tablet, they buy a shit no brand one running an ancient android release,
realise it sucks and just go and buy a shit windows laptop.

Less than ten percent of consumers are not moronic enough to buy something
better the first time.

The businesses buy windows because its good enough and already works for what
they need and they don't want to learn it all again.

I live in an expensive bit of London where people can afford i-this and that
and everyone still had cheap pink laptops running windows. Phones are
different but there is a definite shift towards blackberry and windows phone
around me from iPhones. Most people whinge about their iPhone these days.

------
epeus
Microsoft has a very dedicated set of devs that like .Net, and for them Azure
is lovely. I doubt if any of them are on Hacker News though. These will be the
people this chap is talking to, so he won't see the existential threat of
Cloud to microsoft.

~~~
thaiphan
There are also official SDKs for Windows Azure in Java, Python, JavaScript and
PHP. You don't need to be a .NET developer to think it's a swell platform to
develop for.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
And node.js <http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/>

------
runako
Lost me at "Let me make this clear, AZURE IS GOING TO WIN the cloud computing
infrastructure and platform battle." without providing any further
justification for this bold claim.

------
nemothekid
Does anyone who actually uses Azure want to chime in? I admit that I may live
in a bubble, but if Azure is going to win, and I have heard almost nothing
about it that gives it the edge over the Heroku/AWS/GAE triumvirate, I would
certainly like to know.

~~~
krautsourced
I haven't used it myself, but I think in the enterprise market it actually is
being used quite a bit. I have heard good things from people who used it, but
am at a loss at giving you a concrete example. Maybe it's worth giving it a
go, just to form an opinion...

~~~
dasil003
Wasn't Apple using it for iCloud? Or was that just a rumor?

~~~
qntmfred
they were

------
krautsourced
I'm not entirely agreeing with everything here - there was a lot of
communication going on through the Windows developer blogs, with (at times
ridiculously long) postings on the state of Win8 development. The problem was
however that this was a total one-way communication. The hundreds of comments
(some angry, some reasonable) below were ignored. I don't think there was a
single positive response to ditching the start button over the metro
interface. Yet still they did it (and it's shit, as expected (imho)). Granted,
there was a lot of whining about dropping the Glass look as well, and I have
to admit that the new win8 theme looks quite nice now that I see it in real
life. The fact however that the first thing I do is put a shortcut to a
shutdown batch file on my desktop, so I don't have to jump through hoops to
find that menu, says it all. I ditched win8 within days.

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vellum
So according to the author: 1.) Successful platforms keep devs in the loop,
2.) Azure keeps devs in the loop, 3.) ∴ “AZURE IS GOING TO WIN”

I’d like to see some data to back up his claims that Azure “has the Big Mo”
and that it’s displacing Amazon + Salesforce.

~~~
dasil003
The piece isn't really about that though. Despite being an extreme claim, it's
really just a tangential opinion. I think the piece can stand pretty well even
if you disagree with this, but I would certainly be interested in a separate
article on the topic.

------
JanezStupar
I don't think that MS failed to ship SDK's because of some strategy. I believe
that they simply weren't ready for release.

------
skc
There are many of us here I think.

But lets be honest for a minute, HN isn't exactly the right place to speak up
about cool stuff you're doing with Microsoft tech.

------
clark-kent
Is there anyone using Azure with no Microsoft Technology on their stack? I'm
really curious about this. I know there maybe some former .Net devs that are
doing node.js on Azure. But is there any pure Linux/LAMP/php/python/ruby devs
choosing Azure over AWS and others.

