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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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/