back to article Amazon.com just became a 90,000-seat Azure case study

Amazon's purchase of US luxury healthstuff retailer Whole Foods will also see it using rival Microsoft's Azure cloud – at least for the time being. We know this because Microsoft offers a case study about Whole Foods' use of Azure. The retailer is a big user of Azure Active Directory Premium, which it used to create a hybrid …

  1. jake Silver badge

    Gut feeling?

    Bye-bye Azure.

    Whole Foods WWW presence has been worse than useless for years. Don't believe me? Go look for yourself. The new PTB will rip it out by the roots & start fresh.

    1. Knoydart
      WTF?

      Re: Gut feeling?

      Where does the article talk about Wholefoods web presence? The article talks about staff log on, not customer eyeballs - I'm sure Amazon can set up a nice web shop for Wholefoods without too much of an issue on its AWS infrastructure.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Gut feeling?

        The staff in charge are the same ... Or were last time I had a contract with WF. Which admittedly was a few years ago.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Gut feeling?

          Amazon will not be using AD or probably any of WF's tech. Kind of the idea. WF has strong retain brick and mortar branding, locations everywhere which can be distribution centers for Amazon same day food delivery, but little to no online or tech background. Amazon has little to no brick and mortar retail, but has the tech background. I doubt they will be taking any pointers from WF on tech.

          1. orly_andico

            Re: Don't go Windows, and if you do, keep your options open

            AWS offers a fully-managed Microsoft AD for its own customers.

            https://aws.amazon.com/directoryservice/details/

    2. Brenda McViking

      Re: Gut feeling?

      I can just imagine Jeff Bezos at home doing his weekly grocery shop via his amazon echo: "Alexa, buy whole foods, confirm purchase."

      Oooops!

  2. Mephistro
    Devil

    I guess we're about to learn exactly...

    ... how easy it is to migrate from one cloud solution to another.

    Stockpiling popcorn, just in case! 8^)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I guess we're about to learn exactly...

      No great admirer, but I think asking Amazon engineering to migrate an LDAP to another LDAP will be a trivial project. I'm sure they roll huge new groups of employees onto their homegrown systems all the time.

      1. SlavickP

        Re: I guess we're about to learn exactly...

        The thing is, Azure AD is not a LDAP directory service. Entirely different APIs and integration mechanisms.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I guess we're about to learn exactly...

          Not that familiar with AD, but I'm sure... It's MSFT. They tend to avoid any standard.

  3. Griffo

    PLease Realise

    AWS is actually one of Microsoft's largest customers. In fact I believe they are the largest SPLA customer on the planet. There's a hell of a lot of co-operation between the orgs, despite what people may believe.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: PLease Realise

      That is true (actually also confidential), but that is not because Amazon itself is a major Microsoft customer. Amazon, internally, uses as little Microsoft as possible. It's not like Amazon.com runs on Windows Server. They have a huge agreement because AWS acts as reseller of Microsoft licenses for any customer who wants to run Windows Server, or whatever, on AWS... which is not at all the recommended path, but AWS isn't going to stop them if they want to buy IaaS for Microsoft licenses.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There are a lot of these situations. LinkedIn still runs Google G Suite, not O365.

  5. Lusty

    Azure AD

    I think the author and several commenters have misunderstood what AAD premium is and does. The AWS active directory is just that, an AD. It's not the right AWS service to compare to since AAD is used to quickly and easily connect to third party SaaS (well one of its uses anyway). With the Amazon AD offering you'd need to engineer that integration yourself. I believe AWS has a directory service that has SaaS integrations but it's not the AD offering which is literally just AD as a service.

    1. Griffo

      Re: Azure AD

      Correct. The base directory service is basically 1 of about 100 features in AAD. It's actually a security and identity platform, if people want a (bad) comparison think of comparing it to IBM's TIM/TAM. Comparing AAD to AD is like comparing a GNU/Linux distro with the Linux kernel.

      Apart from the directory it has sso, user self password resets, self service group management, MFA, B2B identity federation, B2C identity federation (Facebook etc), application proxying etc.

      https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-editions#comparing-generally-available-features

  6. Steve Crook

    Is this a ploy?

    To knock Microsoft out of the cloudy business by buying up their customers?

    1. OnlyMee

      Re: Is this a ploy?

      I presume that is sarcasm, but anyway plot is to expand Amazon's retail business. What tech Whole Foods use or used is probably the least relevant thing in this. Generally, I think right now Amazon should just try to buy everything. Why their own highly inflated stock can be used as "cash" in these acquisitions and it must be clear to Bezos that stock price won't stay at its current level so instead use the stock to buy other businesses while you can.

      They also just bought Souq.com allowing them to enter middle east and Arabian speaking markets

  7. Christian Berger

    Back in the olden days...

    Windows 2000 included a RDP server, so you could just get a small cluster of Windows servers and have your users log into them. Even a modest server could easily support 30 users working at the same time... so I don't quite see why one would go to a cloud service for this.

    1. Bunsen

      Re: Back in the olden days...

      I think you need to re-read the article. It says the catalyst was the move to WorkDay SaaS; they would primarily want the SSO capability AAD offers.

      You don't install SaaS on roll your own VM's

      http://www.dummies.com/programming/cloud-computing/hybrid-cloud/what-is-software-as-a-service-saas-in-cloud-computing/

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