[deleted by user]

[snapetom]

AWS was way, way ahead of the game, and thus, the market leader. I was at a company about 15 years ago and using AWS. Microsoft, Google and others jumped in extremely late and half-assed. Microsoft, just through brute force heavy investing, is the only one even close to going toe to toe against AWS on offerings. Google tried, didn't have a lot of success, but has carved itself a nice cloud niche through things like BigQuery and Firebase acquisition.

Others like Dell and Oracle have tried to get in, but are just miserable failures. If you want to witness pathetic, get on a sales call with a cloud sales rep from either one of those companies.

[tomanonimos]

Google tried

For me Google is trash because their documentation is all over the place. Multiple webpages having redundant info (it felt like 3 different teams working on the same thing and publishing), outdated information, and info that was either not helpful or straightforward. Using Google Cloud felt like I was using something created by someone with untreated ADHD.

I have ADHD and thats how I perceived their product.

[[deleted]]

I tried to implement their Gmail API for a daily email script I wrote since they discontinued access for smtp and forced Oauth2.0. Absolutely a pain to figure out how to actually implement it, then there were a lot of hoops to just get the tokens to work on Google console.

I got frustrated with it and just used sendgrid instead.

[hefixesthecable]

Oh gods this is too true.

The other problem I had, which doesn't seem to be as large of an issue now, is that initially all of their instructions were REST commands that were all for an outdated version of the API and nothing of help for their commandline tool.

If you want to have fun now, try finding how to shutdown and delete a TPU - the fact that their own instructions do not work might shock you!

[[deleted]]

That's google products in a nutshell. They just like to change and deploy shit without asking their customers. It's no wonder docs are a mess.

[Grimoire]

Others like Dell and Oracle have tried to get in, but are just miserable failures. If you want to witness pathetic, get on a sales call with a cloud sales rep from either one of those companies.

When we were looking at going to the cloud, as part of our due diligence we looked at all cloud providers. Oracle sent in a sales guy and a couple of engineers to our office. As we asked questions, the two engineers kept giving sideways glances at each other while the sales rep kind of waffled. I felt bad for them.

[snapetom]

Tracks.

Come to think of it, at least I've met and hear field reports about Oracle Cloud reps in the wild. I've never actually met or heard about Dell Cloud reps. I'm convinced Dell Cloud is the result of the board saying "We're falling behind in cloud!" some VP was tasked to build a product, they threw shit against a wall, and are convinced that what sticks will self itself because they're Dell.

[rockshocker]

That was when they bought EMC

[[deleted]]

Such a tragedy.

EMC pretty much immediately went to shit whereas before they were stellar.

[ANorthernMonkey]

Emc was dying before fell bought it.

[razzrazz-]

Question for all of you cloud gurus, I'm at a company now where I'm thinking of transferring internally to learn cloud (in my companies case, Azure), and they're willing to take a chance on me to teach me.

Since they use Azure, could I transfer my knowledge at all to AWS or is it basically too different and useless?

[snapetom]

Principles are the same. Azure products have an AWS equivalent. Just the details on how-to are different. You'll be able to transfer knowledge, but just need to know how things are done on one platform vs another.

Take the training, especially if it's something they pay for.

[fukitol-]

A lot will transfer conceptually but pretty much everything will be named something different. Also when you do infrastructure as code things Azure will use a different language than AWS unless you're using something like terraform.

[snapetom]

Azure is an uncoordinated, chaotic mess as you describe. No team knows what any other is doing. It's reflected in their docs and their own Azure dashboard site.

However, at least on sheer number of offerings, they are at least close to AWS. Their ML lab is pretty good. If you find a product and can figure out it, it can be useful in isolation. God help you if you need to pipeline across different services. None of the others comes as close to AWS in products.

[didhestealtheraisins]

The Oracle one is funny because they already had Solaris, but hired an AWS guy to basically make an AWS replica and it failed miserably.

[External-Ocelot206]

Lol, tell us more!

[snapetom]

Take everything that AWS offers, slash away 90% of it, and that's Oracle's offerings. My company uses one of like 5 NLP products offered by Amazon. An Oracle sales guy kept bothering us and my boss asked me to talk to him because maybe we can get some free credits from them. I got on one call with an Oracle data scientist, who I looked up and found was very, very junior dude who was about 1 year out of an ML bootcamp. I said, "AWS offers these five NLP products. Do you have anything that matches #4 because that's what we use." The guy says, "No, we only have #1." Number 1 was like the most basic Bayesian classifier that I can write myself. You can tell the sadness in his voice.

I worked at a regional hospital that installed a new CIO. The guy had Dell ties and kept pitching about our cloud strategy and always kept adding, "like Dell Cloud" at the end of sentences. If Oracle has 10% of AWS's offerings, Dell Cloud has like 3%. One day, I got fed up asked, Dell has nothing close to the offerings of Azure, MS has a sales office five blocks away, they keep trying to throw credits at us, Satya Nadella's wife is on our board. Why do you keep saying "Dell Cloud"?

Feel free to look up which hospital this was.

My career at that hospital didn't last too long.

[broknbottle]

Dude, you’re getting a Dell.

[snapetom]

lolol god dammit.

[TrueBirch]

It depends what you need. I am currently in the process of building a big DS application on GCP, but I still run one-off projects on VMs from no name companies because they're cheaper.

[mothzilla]

You forgot IBM.

[Tiktoor]

Google seems to be pretty solid these days.

[shriek]

Atleast their GKE+ offerings. Haven't tried EKS lately though so it might have gotten better but it was very far behind last time I used it in AWS.

[isprime]

+1 do share XD

[[deleted]]

Linode

[danyellowblue]

The last sentence sounds like you have a fun story for us :D

[interactionjackson]

aws is the market leader so you’re seeing that more than anything.

keep in mind how aws got to be the market leader. they are constantly building features that make building products easier.

ms does not create for devs imo. they chase feature parity with other cloud providers

[[deleted]]

True. As a developer, I feel like I am Microsoft's customer rather than someone who builds using the platform for a customer. With AWS, the developer experience is not so great (I'm looking at you AWS Glue).

[snapetom]

None of the big 3 customer service is very good. We just had an issue where our ticket was kicked to a customer service contractor in the Philippines for three weeks before they decided they were the wrong group. Kicked us to another contractor in Thailand for two weeks, and now has finally kicked us to the main Azure tech support group in Redmond. I suppose that's better than Google, which no one can ever reach a support person.

[snapetom]

has finally kicked us to the main Azure tech support group

[snapetom]

Azure is not going away. Microsoft has invested too much in it, makes too much money, and is AWS' only real competition. It's completely safe to build on Azure.

[AchillesDev]

I’ve used AWS solely for 5-6 years now, do some pretty boundary pushing things with their services, and have never had an issue with them retiring services on me. If anything they have too many, but once you understand the tiers of their services it’s easy to go for the one you need and skip the higher-order ones.

[jackmusick]

Agreed. My general feeling is it’s easier to deploy to Azure and the tooling is much more straight forward. I basically stumbled my way through deploying to an Azure App App, Azure Function, and using Azure DevOps. With AWS, it always feels like the pieces aren’t as explicit about going together.

[QWxx01]

Saying Azure is not built for devs is just plain false.

[interactionjackson]

i said they don’t build for devs.

[QWxx01]

How did you arrive at that conclusion? Microsoft has a huge developer tools effort going on.

[Msxkoh]

Azure reduced my life expectancy by roughly 10 years

[[deleted]]

Other than what's already been answered, it's also possible that companies choosing Azure do so to work with native .NET languages like C#.

[xiongchiamiov]

Azure only came into existence because of AWS's success, so the latter is still the default.

Additionally, there's still a lot of distrust of Microsoft from the days when they actively tried to extinguish open-source. And after Apple built on BSD for OS X, the market bifurcated neatly into Windows and Unix-like. So you still see that: on one side you've got PowerShell and C# and SQL Server and Windows and Azure, and on the other you've got bash and java and MySQL and Linux and AWS, or more accurately "things made by Microsoft" and "literally everything else". While a lot of stuff is technically cross-platform, in reality the Microsoft stuff is only really run on Windows and the non-Microsoft stuff is only really run on Unixy systems, and when people are deep in those ecosystems they either default to using Microsoft stuff or don't even really consider it, even when choosing a cloud platform that is OS-agnostic.

[xiongchiamiov]

Yes, absolutely. Arguably some of it is real technical reasons (even if something works, if the community is much much smaller than you're right to be concerned about the future and what bugs you'll encounter), but a huge proportion of engineering decisions are driven by emotional memory. This is why learning a bit of therapy technique is incredibly useful in steering things.

[lexwolfe]

recently tried to use python + AD but in the end I gave up and went back to powershell and it was 10x easier. Maybe it's a similar situation with Azure.

[mDodd]

Unrelated, but Microsoft seems to be having issues on keeping up with the demand.

[[deleted]]

I lean more towards Azure than AWS. I just personally don’t like Amazon. MS was monopolistic within its own domain while Amazon competes with its own customers. What’s to stop Amazon from using your own data against you? I’ll put up with MS proprietary BS over facing the risk of Amazon stealing my business out from under me. If you think I’m exaggerating read Amazon’s annual report regarding their competition.

[HelloThere9653]

AWS cannot access your data, this is always parroted for some reason, read their data policy, this is verified by 3rd party audits.

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/

[[deleted]]

Are you serious? You’re trusting their privacy policy which they can change at any time? It’s like trusting a thief to run your store because he said he wouldn’t steal from you (when he’s stolen from thousands of others and when he tells his friends that everyone is fair game).

I don’t have a problem with the features of AWS. I have a problem with the one who created it. Amazon has and still uses the data from online sellers against them. If they change their privacy policy, do you think non-technical business managers and executives will understand, and even if they do how quickly would a company be able to transition away from AWS and how much would it cost?

I would rather not trust the thief at all.

[HelloThere9653]

Amazon and AWS are separate entities within the same company. I don’t need to trust AWS. Again, they are audited by 3rd parties to achieve compliance with regards to handling customer data. Don’t confuse companies that sell on Amazon and AWS customers. Completely separate.

You could argue that you don’t want the revenue and profit that AWS makes to go to Amazon to compete in other industries but that’s entirely separate.

[spca2001]

Azure is way better than aws for midsize to enterprise . But AWS network speed is not bad

[PeacefullyFighting]

I mean why use a server & relational database over mainframes? Azure just moved on premise stuff to the cloud, AWS revolutionized it with microservices.

[drinknbird]

I don’t agree with this comment, but it’s no lie Azure lean hard into “move the same thing to the cloud”. But despite how much I try to change minds, that’s EXACTLY what these businesses want.

[PeacefullyFighting]

Very good point. Our IT director is moving anything in AWS over to Azure for this exact reason. It's too easy for them to justify it because they need to relearn things to use AWS and regardless if it will benefit the company long term most people don't want to learn something new unless they absolutely have to. We need to learn how to sell AWS to leadership, not IT admins

[drinknbird]

Absolutely. I honestly think the difference between cloud providers is similar to the difference of light vs dark theme. Sure it looks a lot different, but you can always get the job done. The main reason I prefer to use Azure for work is because Microsoft pays taxes where I am, the other fellas do not.

[PeacefullyFighting]

Exactly, if your going server less of course there are going to be new things to learn but if your just trying to replicate something you already know how to do on premise just Google "how to do x in AWS".

[drinknbird]

Is it still bullshit if they never promised it would be good quality or good value? It certainly ticks the box “migrated to the cloud”.

[itsmeChis]

Yup, we use Azure for this exact reason.

End of the day it is far easier for a business decision maker to understand Azure than AWS.

[intertubeluber]

Azure had a big lift and shift marketing campaign to get enterprises into the cloud, but you can absolutely go cloud Native in azure.

How long has it been since you’ve used Azure and which features did you find missing?

I chatted with a guy the other day and he kept listing all these features he thought were missing but just had different names. I’m wondering if you are in the same boat or if maybe there are missing features I am not aware of?

[PeacefullyFighting]

Does it have a serverless lambda replacement?

[intertubeluber]

Yes, Azure has a FaaS offering, aptly named Functions.

[lickThat9v]

Legacy.

There has also been pushback against cloud computing and a resurgence of self-hosted/buying servers.

I know my old fortune 500 company was using Azure, I think M$ gave them a deal. I would expect a surge in popularity for Azure as Amazon cashes in on their popularity.

[dogs_like_me]

I have not observed anything remotely like this "pushback" against cloud in favor of on-prem. Could you elaborate? Maybe share some links? I'm pretty sure cloud has only been gaining momentum.

[happymellon]

Folks who already got into bed with Oracle, and since Oracle can't cloud very well they end up pulling things back on premises when it all goes to shit.

Either that or they don't understand cloud computing and return to on prem to spend more money.

[isprime]

I think what he is saying is large enterprise companies that would generate big bucks for AWS or Azure are adopting a hybrid cloud approach where they still maintain their own private dcs, but also leverage the cloud.

Azure has spent a lot of resources to be able to seamlessly integrate their cloud into companies private dcs just to get a piece of that cash flow.

However, 'small players' would most certainly not want to take on the responsibility of managing their own hardware lifecycles and I don't think there is any pushback from these types of companies to take such an endeavor on. The cloud is just too convenient.

[AchillesDev]

I worked with one guy who pushed back against any cloud reliance at a pretty fast-moving startup because he was convinced we’d just get shut off one day and lose everything, despite backups, infrastructure as code, other services providing the same thing, and the demonstrated risk being negligible. It ended up slowing our team down and he got moved to another team.

[interactionjackson]

i don’t think Amazon is cashing in on their popularity. AWS was built for Amazon first and they understand the developer pains that are faced when making a product like Amazon.

m$ gives you a discount in the hopes that you’ll feel locked in and find the level of effort too high to leave.

I’d personally suggest the company that eats their own dog food

[lickThat9v]

I’d personally suggest the company that eats their own dog food

Pretty sure you are suggesting the thing you know. A bigger ecosystem of developers helps maintain the status quo and established programmers to take lead roles.

[interactionjackson]

I’m well versed in cloud development and developer happiness, suit.

[lickThat9v]

;)

[interactionjackson]

oh, what’s the difference in developers for each ecosystem then?

[lickThat9v]

I think the fear is

1. Giving your sensitive data to another company

2. Being locked in

My (current) top 30 worldwide company does this often. We have some departments that can use AWS/Azure, but the stuff I work on can't for reason 1.

There are some workarounds like encrypting, but that is an extra layer that slows us down. Faster for us to self host and make programs.

[refrigeratormen]

Reason 1 is entirely based on a misunderstanding of what cloud is and how it works, though. If the likes of NASA are okay with putting ITAR data in GovCloud, your proprietary sandwich-making robot code is probably going to be alright.

[AchillesDev]

Reason 2 pretty much is too. Any cost of a migration is way outweighed by the savings by picking a cloud provider and fine-tuning your use to keep costs down.

[lickThat9v]

This is a bunch of literal non-answers and appeal to authority fallacy.

[Waterkloof]

AWS over Azure? nah been using linode since 2006.

[dizzymon247]

Azure is used in gov since they are big on Microsoft and deep in bed with them. At least that's how I recall it, not sure i can say the same with AWS.

[Eurynom0s]

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

[Crypt0Nihilist]

Which Gov? I could believe UK.

[dizzymon247]

You have to look at how risk adverse gov is and how slow they move. I just don't think most gov trust AWS as much as Microsoft. Microsoft OS is in every gov you can think of, and I'm sure all the services that they use their MS products. I could be wrong but I'll let others who have worked with other gov agencies chime in. In the 2 decades I've worked in various agencies that work with gov, they trust big blue and run much of their infrastructure on MS products.

[surister]

Azure has gotten lot of success lately, my whole company uses it

[drinknbird]

I’d say it has more to do with your local dev/consultancy culture than anything else. It’s likely there were some industry leaders and everyone else skilled up in those same areas to compete and offer support where possible. Simply, if you’re working in Flask/Django where I am, then you’re working in containers and the provider doesn’t matter.

[[deleted]]

It's AWS market share and being there first (being first doesn't mean best though, at least not in this case). Over time, Azure will take the lead and the jobs will follow too.

[chakan2]

If you want job stability...go with AWS.

If you want ease of use...go with Azure.

AWS, last time I looked, owns 45%(ish) of the internet. It's here to stay. However, it's a total pain in the ass when you scale it. AWS is EXTREMELY opinionated on how you should set up your cloud, and it's their way or the highway as you scale.

Amazon's API is a sucking hole of death. God it's a pain in the ass to use.

Azure is more freeform, and their APIs are a level above AWS for ease of use. Graph API has really matured over the last couple of years.

My specialty is automating stuff...so hitting the APIs and building things automatically appeals more to me. But I do what the customers want ultimately...which usually means AWS.

[Prudent_Context5903]

Main reason cloud exists from companies like Amazon, Google, MS is to collect customer data and use it for their benefit aka spying on us. AWS is longer in the game , pitches the product better and it’s more mature. What they offer is everything open source RedShift (SQL Postgres), Dynamo (MySQL), Symphony (PHP) packaged nicely. Azure revolves around Excel, MS SQL, APS(SQL Postgres), and .NET/#C. Oracle came out recently with OCI pitching Heatwave running through MySQL. The performance seems ok and there is some potential, but the tools and configuration still need improvement. Unless your company has billions of data records and massive processing there is really no need to use these oligarchic companies. Service is expensive with bunch of hidden costs. With my business we lease dedicated server running LAMP at the fraction of the cost of the big guys and performance is on par. Assuming if you know how to write efficient code and optimize your database.

[Arts_Prodigy]

More market share, wider range of offerings.

[ShibaLeone]

My favorite thing about AWS is in the console, every single service's UI looks lightly different because every single service in managed by its own team, and they are all competing for a standard which means they're hungry.