
Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place - pul
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-cloud-services-demand-up-775-percent-prioritization-rules-in-place-due-to-covid-19/
======
crazygringo
Wow.

First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by
remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video
streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what.

But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place
rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices,
or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in prices
contractually so that raising prices has little effect. But I'd always thought
that with AWS's spot pricing and so forth, that auction-style dynamic pricing
was a core feature of clouds.

~~~
burkaman
It would certainly look bad, and I think it would potentially be illegal in
some states.

[https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-
gou...](https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gouging-laws-
by-state.html)

For example, Georgia:

> Selling items or services determined by the Governor during a declared state
> of emergency to be necessary for public safety at a higher cost than they
> were immediately prior to the declaration.

Kansas:

> For any supplier of a "necessary property or service" to "profiteer from a
> disaster" by charging 25% or more than the pre-disaster price for such
> goods/services.

Louisiana:

> Selling goods/services during a declared state of emergency (within the
> designated emergency area) in excess of the ordinary price range immediately
> before the declaration.

Mississippi:

> Selling goods and services at above the prices normally charged during a
> declared state of emergency (or what was charged immediately preceding the
> declaration).

etc.

Also consider that raising prices would itself be a form of prioritization,
just prioritizing ability to pay over need.

~~~
dfee
I don’t know how I feel about this. In the general case, I feel like price
gouging during emergencies is unethical.

But, when there is a non-artificial supply and demand issue, I struggle with
the derivative effects of these policies.

My concern is that rather than simply evaluating on the consumers ability to
pay (and backwards-looking at prior statements instead of increased go-forward
costs), these policies add only one additional criteria: ability to threaten
legal issues. Thus, it’s only effect is to prioritize government agencies
alongside wealthy clients. And that’s just governments using force to get
better treatment. Which also feels unethical.

But maybe there’s a happier and healthier read of the situation.

~~~
Karishma1234fff
I find price gouging to be perfectly normal and perhaps even desirable during
times like these. If the toilet paper prices go up drastically people will not
be able to hoard it the way they are doing today.

~~~
hannasanarion
People will still be able to hoard things. The difference is that only the
rich will hoard, because everybody else never got the chance.

The normal market logic that high prices encourage extra production doesn't
apply during an emergency, when the demand is panic-induced and momentary, and
supply changes won't take effect until after the emergency is over.

The actual solution that makes sure everyone gets what they need and theres no
hoarding is rationing: limit the number that one person can buy. And that's
exactly what most grocery stores are doing.

~~~
prussian
How is rationing working? supply is still not enough and rationing on that
basis still doesn't prevent the "rich" from effectively paying straw
purchasers to buy the goods they want to hoard. Hell, it doesn't even prevent
people from repeatedly making visits to collect whatever is on the shelves.

I'm not convinced the US government, let alone any western government, has the
plan, manpower or infrastructure in place to actually take over distribution
of essentials in fair quantities.

~~~
hannasanarion
What do you mean? Rationing is working fine in the stores that are
implementing it, the problem is that so many stores aren't. My local grocery
is rationing paper products, milk, chicken, and eggs, and they're always
available if you visit before noon.

There is no supply problem for consumer products. The shortages you see at
grocery stores are exclusively because of panic-buying and hoarding, the
shelves are stocked right back up to full overnight.

------
spencerwgreene
The Microsoft blog post that the article is using as a source:
[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/).

~~~
enlyth
After reading this, it seems the headline is a bit misleading.

The Microsoft blog post states: "We have seen a 775 percent increase of our
cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in
place orders."

So it's not an overall increase, just in certain regions?

~~~
ineedasername
Yes, and they also say that if you're hitting quotas, you can try another less
congested region. If you have established workloads in a region though, I'm
not sure how quickly you can migrate a complex interplay of services to
another region-- are there simple tools to do so in Azure?

~~~
bowmessage
hopefully you are writing infrastructure as code - would be easy then.

~~~
mr_toad
I doubt they’re talking about their compute services. The increases are more
likely in Microsoft teams and Office 365. And as far as I know you can’t
choose a region for those services.

------
gundmc
Why would Microsoft be disproportionately affected by this? Are we expecting
similar decrees from AWS and GCP? Or was Microsoft operating with less runway
before this began?

~~~
salex89
Working with all three of them, so here's my two cents: 1\. Mostly
traditional, "legacy" companies have been hit hard by this. Ones that don't
have culture or technology of work-from-home. Those companies use some
Microsoft products. Also, Microsoft has been poaching them heavily, handing
out trials, bundling licenses and so on. A lot of them don't actually buy
stuff from Microsoft, but through 3rd party vendors which have incentives of
their own. Some of the end users don't actually want to use AWS, also.

2\. I actually think Microsoft has much less runway. From what I understand,
AWS has more modern infrastructure and backend, and they shuffle resources
easily around, between services, and I think they have much more in reserve.
Microsoft has concentrated much more on the sheer number of regions.

3\. Azure has a strange way of handling quotas, if you ask me. Up until now,
once you provision a VM, it is deducted from a quota and stays like that as
long as it exists. It has never been an issue to actually power it on (unlike
AWS), once you have it. It's not billed, but we always thought it stays like
that. Since last week, you can see failures not only when provisioning VM's
(even within your quota) but also when starting them. Nevertheless, I also
think a lot of users had larger quotas allocated then they actually use. So
they just started creating more VMs or other resources (because they could),
and the thing came crashing. I think that's just poor planning on Microsoft's
side.

But the thing I'm mostly pissed of is the status page. VM's are failing left,
right and center and everything is nice and green on the status page. Once you
open a ticket, they send you an incident-in-progress report.

~~~
sneak
> _But the thing I 'm mostly pissed of is the status page. VM's are failing
> left, right and center and everything is nice and green on the status page.
> Once you open a ticket, they send you an incident-in-progress report._

Status pages parroting lies in service of marketing should incur more
liability for companies than they do. How does a society discourage vendors
from doing things like this?

~~~
ajcodez
It should eventually fall under consumer protection laws. Failing to report
incidents on a status page is like failing to mention trans fat on a package
label.

~~~
alasdair_
It’s more like actively claiming “contains zero trans fats!” On the packaging
when in fact the product is full of them.

~~~
ip26
Which they do. Your tortillas with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil? Yeah,
it's less than 0.5g per serving so they get to say 0g.

~~~
alasdair_
>Your tortillas with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil? Yeah, it's less
than 0.5g per serving so they get to say 0g.

Personal favorite: Tic Tacs are 94.5% sugar yet Tic Tacs can be marketed as a
"sugar free" food.

"The Nutrition Facts for Tic Tac® mints state that there are 0 grams of sugar
per serving. Does this mean that they are sugar free?

Tic Tac® mints do contain sugar as listed in the ingredient statement.
However, since the amount of sugar per serving (1 mint) is less than 0.5
grams, FDA labeling requirements permit the Nutrition Facts to state that
there are 0 grams of sugar per serving."

[https://www.tictac.com/us/en/faq](https://www.tictac.com/us/en/faq)

------
ineedasername
How much excess capacity would a cloud provider typically have (as in %) to
accommodate normal peak loads and still have a comfortable margin?

Or maybe that's not something providers reveal, so let me as the sys-admins of
this thread: For on-premise resources, what is your % margin of excess
capacity reserved?

~~~
thanksforfish
For specific ec2 instance types the excess capacity is sometimes zero, which
customers sometimes see. I've needed to swap instant types to get a deploy
unstuck or to scale up in the past when capacity didn't exist.

Because of that I always recommend that a project reserve instances to ensure
capacity exists when you need it. It's also cheaper, but that risk is
important to mitigate.

------
raghavtoshniwal
It would be interesting to know how many standard deviations is 775% extra
demand from the norm. More than six standard deviations is rarer than a 1 in
506797346 event.

~~~
Simon_says
Samples getting 6 standard deviations away from the mean can happen 1/6² ≈
2.7% of the time. You might be assuming properties of the distribution that
aren't true.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality)

~~~
yread
Isn't that an upper bound? It says that it happens _at most_ 2.7% of the time

~~~
Simon_says
Yea, it's an upper bound. The actual percentage depends on the distribution
and can be anywhere from 0-2.7%. The Wikipedia link has more details.

------
Mountain_Skies
The difficult question is how quickly can capacity be increased and given
uncertainty about how long this demand increase will last, does it make
financial sense to do so?

------
oneplane
I wonder if this is because a lot of companies suddenly have to make a change
they didn't feel necessary in the past and now rush to compensate for a lack
of planning.

While it technically doesn't matter where you run, there are a lot of choices
that have a different answer depending on if you ask your vendor or if you do
your own checks and research.

Scaling purely because you needed to scale up would be a different story, and
then you're expect overall service demands to go up that steep. This seems
more like an unpreparedness peak to me.

------
smcleod
Office365 and AzureAD has been even more unreliable than usual over the past
week or so, plenty of "an error has occurred" pages and delayed mail - as
usually Microsoft didn't update the status dashboards (the ones you can see
without being able to log in anyway), The other client I work with uses GCP
and Google Mail/Docs for business which I haven't noticed any issues with.

~~~
leesalminen
GSuite and GCP had impactful outages for us this past week and were listed on
the status dashboards.

~~~
what_ever
Looks like you are repeating the same comment everywhere without linking at
what kind of outages GCP had.

Disc: Googler

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
It made the front page, so most readers here are already at least passingly
aware of it.

~~~
what_ever
Sorry I should have been more clear in my comment. I meant to emphasize that
the outages were not related to COVID-19. So there is no point of repeating
the same thing everywhere as it is not relevant.

------
_sword
So that's why my OneDrive sync hasn't been working at all.

------
holri
There is no cloud, only other people computers. (c) FSFE

------
gameswithgo
video conferencing is way up online food ordering is way up buying stuff
online in general is up i imagine all video streaming and gaming is up

------
867-5309
I read and executed but did not write that percentage

------
hestefisk
Time to buy MS stock.

~~~
gruez
priced in

~~~
jbverschoor
No it's not.. The market is not sane atm. It's 100% emotion.

~~~
__blockcipher__
What makes you think that? Have you seen a discrepancy between your
projections of future cash flows and therefore your valuation, as compared to
the value the market is at right now?

~~~
dumbfoundded
I think it's safe to say the market isn't rational when Zoom Technologies is
up nearly 900% when it's completely unrelated to Zoom Video and not actually
operating.

There's a different HN post about it: [https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-
sec-really-wants-investo...](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-sec-really-
wants-investors-to-stop-buying-the-wrong-zoom-stock-2020-03-27)

~~~
noitsnot
I don't think you can really compare people accidentally buying the wrong
ticker to investors unable to place valuations based on virus uncertainties.
They were buying the wrong stock before the virus hit more than a year ago.

~~~
dumbfoundded
The wrong stock increased faster than the real stock. Volume matters too but
when the underlying causes are irrational, how can any pricing be logical over
any period longer than a few days?

------
dabeeeenster
Honest question; how do you define "demand"?

~~~
KennethSRoberts
Maybe start by clicking the link?

> In a March 28 blog post, officials said that demand for its new Windows
> Virtual Desktop usage has grown by more than three times. They also said
> government use of public Power BI for sharing COVID-19 dashboads is up 42
> percent in a week. (As is the case with Microsoft's overall cloud services
> figure, we don't have a base number for WVD and Power BI from which to
> calculate these percentages.)

~~~
dabeeeenster
It still doesnt define demand. Is that new sales or what?

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Utilization.

~~~
dabeeeenster
Their utilization has gone up 700%? Bullshit.

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

Seems to be a cherry picked statistic, not an overall increase in utilization.

------
greatgib
Good time to remind that 'the cloud is just some else computer' ...

~~~
lkbm
The cloud is someone else's collection of computers operating at a very large
scale. If my load changes in a way uncorrelated with other users', that's a
very good thing. If my load is correlated with other users', that's may be
bad. But it could still be good, because at that scale, they can justify
having robust contingency plans -- back-up supply contracts, extra engineers
around to ramp stuff up, or relatively unimportant stuff they can de-
prioritize. (If you're relatively unimportant, that's a bummer; if you're a
hospital getting priority, that's a plus.)

------
metreo
And 77.5% of the new demand turns out is from the Microsoft employees sent
home :)

------
techntoke
Leave it up to Microsoft to find out ways to profit more during a pandemic,
rather than open sourcing their software and platform to be used anywhere and
everywhere. People forgot what hosting is like without these massively
overpriced cloud services that nickel and dime for every feature. Want
encryption which basically costs nothing? Oh, you'll pay an extra $0.10 per
hour on top of your $.08GB of outbound traffic. God forbid you load balance
your service.

~~~
jedieaston
Office (/Microsoft) 365 is a pretty good value for what it is. It isn’t free,
but $20 per user per month for Windows + Office + Exchange + OneDrive + Azure
AD and support is pretty good.

Microsoft saying “Ahh! Crisis! Here’s the Windows Server codebase!” wouldn’t
help, since you’d have to still find a host and time to make sure your code
works on this upstream variant without all of the licensed DLLs that makes
Windows work.

~~~
techntoke
Google offers the same for less than $12 a month with unlimited storage for
large companies and $12 a month for everyone else. Plus you get an operating
system that is based off Linux and open source. Windows is a giant PITA when
it comes to deploying and setting up mobile device management.

Matrix offers free decentralized video/voice communication and there are lots
of self-hosted alternatives that often provide better features than things
like Teams. With NextCloud you basically get a free office solution that just
needs to be deployed. With Kubernetes you can quickly deploy a Nextcloud
cluster. These services should be free and open source because the goal should
be helping build a better world, not building better profits through backroom
deals with tax dollars.

~~~
freeone3000
You've just named and listed the services. Odd why people would choose
Office365 instead of hosting their own nextcloud distribution cluster in their
own colocation space.

