back to article Microsoft's Azure cloud feels the pinch in price war with Amazon's AWS

Sales of Surface, falling 26 per cent year-on-year, wasn't the only wrinkle in Microsoft's third-quarter trading period. Management beat the cloud drum for Wall Street on Thursday, talking across-the-board growth. Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 commercial saw the biggest revenue growth, according to Microsoft – 93 per …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So Microsoft are massively wining the war by growth, but it's costing them in $. I'm sure they can afford it...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Current annual cloud run rate at Microsoft is now $15 billion. That means it just overtook AWS!

      https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q3/press-release-webcast

      https://www.statista.com/statistics/250520/forecast-of-amazon-web-services-revenue

  2. RudderLessIT
    FAIL

    I think the author is confused

    The services provided by AWS and Azure are very similar. They both offer trial periods; free VMs (teeny tiny) and documentation galore (on how to expand your footprint).

    I am sure smarter people than me can also talk about the technical pros & cons, but I think my point has been made: They are two companies offering essentially the same services.

    For some people Azure makes a lot of sense and for others, AWS is definitely the way to go.

    Saying Azure is Bad and AWS is Good is plain biased and worse, it's not even based on experience (just reading other people's posts).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I think the author is confused

      Yeah, but it isn't pure commodity. Azure's reliability is pretty bad. AWS is better. Google is the best.

      1. adamsteiner1

        Re: I think the author is confused

        Hmm - do you have any sources to back that up?

        May have been true 2-3 years ago, though in the last year and normalising over number of regions (Azure has more regions than AWS and GCE combined if you count actual regions, not AZs) Azure has been strong. https://cloudharmony.com/cloudsquare#compare-azure:compute-and-aws:lightsail-and-google:compute

        1. dinsdale54

          Re: I think the author is confused

          The SLAs offered by all the main providers are pretty poor. All offering around 99.95% service availability. Vendors would be laughed out of your typical large enterprise if you offered that.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I think the author is confused

            "The SLAs offered by all the main providers are pretty poor. All offering around 99.95% service availability. Vendors would be laughed out of your typical large enterprise if you offered that."

            Apples and oranges. 1) The cloud providers are talking about total system uptime, not one component. For instance, a system may be down but if the EMC storage array doesn't take it down and is still functional, that isn't an outage as far as EMC is concerned... even though the users are down. 99.95%, and AWS/GCP usually do far better, is solid for total system uptime. Very few on prem environments would hit that number... minding that there is no such thing is "planned downtime" in the cloud. Downtime is downtime. Planned downtime should be known as an "architecture design outage." 2) It is easy for EMC or Cisco to say their system is built for 46 nines of uptime because they have nothing on the line. If your system doesn't meet their uptime metric while in use... better luck next time, they owe you nothing. If AWS, GCP or Azure don't meet that uptime standard, they start paying. Try writing into the contract that if on prem provider misses stated uptime levels that they owe you money, never going to happen.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I think the author is confused

      "Saying Azure is Bad and AWS is Good is plain biased and worse, it's not even based on experience (just reading other people's posts)."

      I'm not sure people dislike Azure so much as they dislike Microsoft... which, if you are a student of history, is understandable... and Microsoft will definitely try to use Azure to drag the cloud generation of IT back. I don't much like AWS either, but Microsoft will definitely try to long game Azure into a way to sell Windows and MS SQL licenses with a bunch of .NET... and marginalize open source. Yeah, I know they are pretending they like open source now, but that is insincere. They are a proprietary licensed software company. No one way that want open source to win so they can make IaaS margins instead of proprietary software margins.

    3. Sandgroper

      Re: I think the author is confused

      "The services provided by AWS and Azure are very similar. They both offer trial periods; free VMs (teeny tiny) and documentation galore (on how to expand your footprint)."

      I have worked with both of them. The similarity between the two is skin deep. One is very pretty, the other is solidly engineered...

  3. nilfs2
    Windows

    Microsoft playing catch as usual

    And people like to play along with them, after all, nobody have ever been fired for being a sheep and buying Microsoft crap. Fancy UI over reliability is the way to go.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Microsoft playing catch as usual

      "nobody have ever been fired for being a sheep and buying Microsoft crap."

      It is strange, but MSFT does win over IT departments because they provide a ton of work for them. All that extra admin which wouldn't be necessary with better systems. Not a joke. If you have two admins who manage mainframe, *nix , or cloud in a room and 12 MSFT admins, who is going to win the vote? Even if the two admins manage as much or more workload as the 12 MSFT admins. They ironically build an army of support based on their inefficiency.

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