Quick, get the popcorn: Amazon Web Services says Microsoft's benchmarks for Azure are a load of stripe The cloudy database world was plunged into drama at the close of this week, as Amazon Web Services locked horns with Microsoft in a spat over benchmarks. In IT, there are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks. Vendors love quietly and sneakily crafting environments and test software that puts their kit in the best possible light …
.....due to asymmetry in nature your left ball is probably slightly different than your right ball, but both of them will get the job done they were intended for.
However, I would advise though not to run too many benchmarks for this purpose as it can become prohibitely expensive. I would advise exhaustive testing prior to running these bench marks.
"up to" == "less than"
0 is less than 87
-ve numbers are less than 87
You can make pretty much anything 3.4 times faster if you throw enough hardware at it.
The most expensive Azure instance available probably is faster than the cheapest Amazon one you can get. That is all this statement is really telling you.
From the looks of it, it seems like they are the kind of taxes you can't really avoid, like interstate taxon shipments or somesuch. Yeah, I note that Amazon paid $1Bn in federal income tax. Does anyone really think that Amazon's revenue does not warrant more than a measly billion in income tax ?
As usual, it's just PR to make Amazon look good.
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Yes, this is very significant. All those RSUs vest and they are typically* taxed as ordinary income at an individual's marginal tax rate at the time they vest. So you pay federal, state, local, and FICA taxes.
* unless you opt for Section 83(b) Election (which most people don't) in which case you had better stay at the company long enough for the stock to vest or you have paid a lot of tax upfront (on the day of the grant) and the shares never vest.
Yes and no, if the margins are high enough and there is competition, prices shouldn't go up. If margins are thin and or there is no competition it will go up.
But these thing are not thin margin goods. They make a fair amount on it and there is competition. So if they paid more tax, like they should be, then the prices shouldn't go up, just their profit after tax go down, unless there was collusion between them, which in the current climate, there wouldn't be.
If there was collusion, then price fixing fines will come in and they will be forced to lower prices.
Reading this it does seem we need an independent body to run the TPC-C benchmark on the cloud services that people can buy, so all optimisations are ones that you can select through the control panel etc. then we can build a database of readings just as we have with CPU's, broadband, mobile data etc.
My first thought was why benchmark SQL on EC2? SQL will (I think) always be cheaper on RDS and should perform the same. Of course, that assumes SQL means a SQL RDBMS and not specifically SQL Server (which may have to be run on EC2 if it is not an RDS option (can't remember off-hand and can't be bother to bring up AWS to check))...
Seriously, beside running "Office-related" workload, I can't imagine how any other workload could be more efficient with the overhead of running VM's on top of window machines crippled by a 30 years old filesystem + antivirus.
Nobody ever seriously explained how this miracle could happen... or stated that Azure's bare-metal O.S. is NOT window.
Oh dear.
Do you remember a couple of years back when the Reg's cluster of fanboys had apoplexy about MS making their own linux distro? It was never distributed because it was for Azure. SQL Server runs on linux - don't believe me? sudo apt-get install mssqlserver - and Azure SQL is a weird free-floaty kind of cloud powered distributed version that runs on all kinds of metal. Not to mention that, much like any major RDBMS, SQL Server is pretty much 90% of an OS all on its own.
Yes, if you installed it on a VM running Windows 2000 with antivirus and the Ask Jeeves toolbar, it would be slow. But that's not where it is.
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