Hey, I'm an Open Source Engineer with MSFT (and the msft dude for YC) - there isn't anything out yet, but we have always released SDKs for pretty much anything we build.
Looks like it supports data relay to MapMyFitness Suite of Apps, which I would think could then relay it to HealthKit if there is not already a direct export from MS's iOS App.
Companies like AWS, Google, and MSFT have representatives that consult with YC founders to help them with engineering goals. I suppose to up-sell them on scaling with their platform.
> Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy.
And it's pretty expensive.
Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
I think there is a case for an open stack, but I think unless you pick a real dog of a platform good people can make it work well. It comes down to a "can I get good people for stack X?" as much as "Does stack X work or cost too much?"
Just like in the case of Trello if you already have the experience you can probably save money if you use what you already know how to use. In almost all other cases open source stacks are cheaper.
Stackoverflow and Trello are always held up as the shining examples of how the Microsoft stack is able to hold its own. That's great, I even know people that insist on running their web servers on Apple hardware. Whatever floats your boat. But if you're running a competitive business, if you're going to be using a lot of CPUs and if you will eventually (or already) be faced with lean and mean competition then you are probably better off on an open stack.
Try to imagine Google, Amazon, Ebay, DropBox or AirBnB on the Microsoft platform. And note that two of the above are re-selling their linux based platforms to other users at a profit.
Btw stackoverflow uses plenty of CentOS, I guess licensing from RedHat was too expensive?
Big names mean nothing. You are not Google, they have very different requirements to you and their scale is much larger than your startup will ever be.
Microsoft aren't stupid - the costs they charge for Azure are largely competitive, and the benefits it provides are tangible.
Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business. Certainly I don't think it's desirable to make a permanent choice when you are still a startup.
Of course you'd use CentOS, unless you had need of the specific features that licensing it gave you.
> Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business.
We're definitely in agreement there. The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.
> The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.
So, would it be fair to say "So if you're comfortable using the Linux stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it", or was that your parting jab against MS?
Yes, it is possible (and common) to run Linux or one of the BSDs for free. But at large scale, a lot of people opt to pay one of Red Hat/Oracle/SuSE/Canonical/etc. for their free Linux ANYWAY. Buying Windows also means buying support. How much of this cost advantage goes away if you're paying Red Hat et al support fees?
The fact that you guys are even talking about "buying windows" and "buying support" when talking about buying into the Windows Azure stack shows that you most likely haven't used it much, if at all, and aren't quite sure what you're talking about.
I haven't used it much; I have used AWS a bit more, and there I recall you had to pay more if you wanted an instance on Windows or on RHEL proper rather than using CentOS or Debian. Those costs probably do add up to a lot more as you scale up (although it's silly to look at that in isolation). But he's comparing using Azure to self-hosting on your own hardware, I think.
Yeah, you don't pay extra for Windows itself on Azure, costs the same for a 2012 R2 DataCenter VM as it does for a small 2008 worker role, as it does for a Linux VM. You would have to pay for software like Oracle or SQL Server though, obviously.
Also, we don't have to worry about managing VMs at all so we don't generally think about those sorts of things except for a couple of very niche uses like our chat bot or QA testing VMs.
This will factor in, but you can't make such sweeping statements - many parts of different stacks have their own intrinsic advantages.
Certainly, a silicon valley company of 10-20 employees will likely have costs of over $1000 a day - any software or hardware licensing will pale in comparison to this until the product is big.
I read it as saying that the benefits of not basing your business on a proprietary platform are lower than the benefits of going with a stack that you already have some expertise at. You may read differently.
Trello is based on Node and Mongo on Ubuntu; there's no Windows in it. Kiln and FogBugz are based on C# and SQL Server on Windows and Java and Python Debian. Stack is based on C# and SQL Server on Windows and Redis and infrastructure on CentOS. This isn't about saving money or not; its about using the right tool for the right job, factoring in cost of tooling and cost of development. I think you're oversimplifying in your analysis
Even Apple was running iCloud off AWS and Azure before they ramped up their own data centers. I don't think you can get any more competitive than Apple in the tech world.
eBay's frontend is mostly Java on Windows. Many thousands of servers running Windows. Their search grid was on Solaris but has migrated to Linux in the last year or so (2013?).
StackOverflow isn't running on Azure: if anything, that article should make it obvious how much they're saving by not using cloud, with OS being unrelated.
You do realize that Azure has about as much to do with windows as AWS, right? I use Azure to run a completely open source stack based on node, postgres, and python. I also have a long term windows server in AWS. Azure is every bit as open as any other "cloud" based stack
Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable. Compared to that doing a startup on an open source stack using dedicated machines eventually turns out much cheaper. It's like getting hooked on drugs.
The most cost effective way as far as I can see is to hire a sysadmin on a freelance basis until you need one full time, own your own hardware (or lease it by the month until you can afford your own hardware) and pay flat rate for bandwidth. Anything else will sooner or later come to haunt you and then you will need to migrate to some new platform. At that point in time you will learn the true value of the words 'lock-in'.
The biggest problem for a startup is getting out there, and getting transaction and revenue. Not penny pinching over what servers your going to use. You want to use as much pre-made stuff to give you the biggest head start as possible.
When you take off, you can raise money to pay people to move you over anyway.
Choosing your tech stack with care is one of the more important choices. You're locking yourself in for years to come and mistakes can be very costly to fix.
Getting transactions and revenues are obviously also important, the whole trouble with doing a start-up is that you have to do so many things right.
If YC has shown us anything, it's that companies can successfully pivot at nearly any point of their lifecycle and still be successful. It's also shown us that they can fail at pivoting and have it be nothing to do with the stack they chose.
If you're worried about lock-in then design for portability. Portability means using open standards rather than open source. The neat thing is that with a well-designed site or service you can switch vendors easily. Cloud is a commodity - who cares who the provider is?
Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs.
Obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but for a straightforward SaaS app (a few servers, a db server, a queue and a load balancer in a few datacentres around the world) one good sysadmin/devops guy costs far more than a set of AWS instances that essentially scale themselves.
Having dedicated people necessary for that 'control' is beyond the budget of the majority of startups.
Exactly plus at scale AWS doesn't do everything either, a sysadmin or at least consultants are still needed to navigate the gotchas and help with how to better provision the stack. AWS instances don't just scale themselves.
There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility afforded by cloud providers to increase the number of instances temporarily to deal with the peak makes sense.
The only good use-case I know for AWS and it's ilk is if you need a 10,000 node cluster for a few hours to do some heavily compute intensive work which does not require a very large amount of data to be imported and exported afterwards. This is a pretty limited number of use cases but for those situations it absolutely rocks. Anything else I'd run the numbers very carefully.
I don't think that is correct. There are thousands of startups on AWS (an IAAS cloud) that don't run 10K node clusters. While they cost may be high, it is pay as you go. I have a rack full of computers at home and I still have some things served by AWS. The PAAS model (e.g. Heroku, Bluemix) is becoming popular today but those are often hosted in IAAS clouds.
>Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
From another post by you:
>Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable.
Since you claim to have a lot of info on this can you give any, even one, real world example of you just said happening?
Otherwise I am going to call BS on it.
Perhaps you're starting something that is going to take down NewEgg.com ? You're clearly missing the forest for trees here. At work we run a large mix of Windows Servers, SQL servers, Linux, Drupal, MySQL, Moodle etc. running fairly traffic heavy and top ranking public health sites and all said our licensing and hosting costs are about 2% of our annual budget.
Are you actually asking me to disclose customer information and taking my (obvious) refusal to do so as calling BS? Interesting. Look, I have no skin in the game, if you're happy forking over tons of money for stuff you don't strictly speaking need then more power to you.
All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know.
It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.
Except you're not forced into using Microsoft SOFTWARE when using Azure. Like many others have pointed out, you are free to use Linux variants as well.
It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft.
I really wished that companies like Microsoft, Google and so on would not have a 'HN guy' (and would not have non-disclosed HN guys either, Felix is at least above board on that), it can make it a lot harder to figure out what is a genuine user experience and what is product placement.
Unless the Microsoft stack is something you already have experience with you're much better off using non-proprietary stack software. Anything coming out of Microsoft will sooner or later cause a bunch of licenses to be sold somewhere down the line or monthly invoices for metered usage to appear so make sure you know exactly what you're getting into. $50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
Great job on completely derailing the topic here with unrelated flamebait by confusing HN with YC.
Hint: HN is a message board, YC is a startup accelerator. They are NOT the same. And yes, there are plenty of startups that do quite okay on the MS stack and for many it may not be a good fit. Your post adds nothing new to the discussion.
>It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft.
But luckily we have you to talk down Microsoft.
>$50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
And paying $50K for hosting when you have no money can just shutdown a startup instead of increasing its costs by 1% down the line. Hosting is the biggest cost for a startup most of the time, it can't be "free" like founders time.
Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN, YC related founder or not they are better off using what is most cost effective for them. This will rarely translate to 'microsoft'.
Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
$50K for hosting through 'Azure' or some other cloud company typically translates into a few grand from a dedicated hosting provider, by far the most cost effective hosting solution available to start-ups and successful companies alike.
>As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN
Felix said he's the MS person for YC. You misrepresented it as HN a couple of times. Please read your post again.
>Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
But we do have you to counterbalance me.
>Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
What? What is the biggest cost for a startup in the initial phase when founders are not taking salaries? Rent for sleeping? Ramen noodles?
Which large company has the biggest cost as hosting? Even 50k/yr is like 1/3rd of a Silicon level salary. It's like you got it completely backwards.
Anyway, all this unrelated to the topic at hand and does not belong here. There were numerous HN threads with this discussion and please write your thoughts as a blog post and you'll have my upvote.
Again, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band? If not, /thread, I am out.
I assume that these days MS is mostly pitching Azure which pretty happily runs Linux VMs. It feels like any YC team (the guy said he's the "the msft dude for YC" not HN) worth their salt will need to learn how to navigate evaluating vendor promises sooner rather than later anyway (not to mention the mentoring/advice they should be getting from YC if they're not so experienced, or the fact that $50K is what, only 25% of a fully-loaded FTE cost anyway?).
The "much" better off is an assumption. If I remember correctly, Fogcreek primarily uses a Microsoft stack; so did lot of people who used to hang around in the Business of Software forum run by Joel Spolsky. Most of them had bootstrapped companies rather than use a lot of VC money to buy expensive tools. Most of them did quite well making money with their business. Using open tools is not a criterion for both technical or business success.
Joel Spolsky - former Microsoft Product Manager? Yes, it's not particularly surprising that they would use Microsoft Products - their incredible familiarity with the product would offset any downstream licensing costs.
Small business usually get everything for free (or nobody bothers to check in on their licensing status, at the very least, they run on a massive discount using "developer editions").
Very large businesses have so much bureaucratic overhead, that unless their core business is Software/service (I.E. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc...) - the cost of software licenses is minor, and anything they can save by going with something "Standard and Supported" is worth the offset.
But, anybody interested in trying to run their small-medium business on something like Oracle Enterprise edition on their 16 Core Server will quickly start taking a second look at Postgress/MariaDB once they see what the annual licensing costs for Oracle are. Partitioning and Optimizer are only worth so much...
Fogcreek is run by ex microsoft people that had extensive experience with the stack before starting fogcreek, it made excellent sense for them to use what they already knew how to use.
I'm not talking about their consumer arm at all. No idea where the Zune came from, I was talking about their $50K credits for using their cloud platform.
Is there any way to make iOS integration work better? I know that Apple Jails things and limits the BT. I am just hoping that a tweak will allow iPhones to use Siri with the cortana integration, and allow canned responses for SMS.
Also, my notifications have been spotty, but I may reset and start over, because my friend with a band is not having that issue.
It's a shame there's no way to communicate feedback to the Band team that I can see on the website! I picked one up and like it so far, but it'll be a real disappointment if I can't ever use the mic for Google Now. Not expecting Cortana-level integration, it would just be silly for the mic to go to waste.
