Microsoft calls out Amazon's humble hybrid cloud Microsoft's cut Azure prices again, while also making it plain that it thinks Amazon Web Services (AWS) is weak in the hybrid cloud. After explaining the price cuts, Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft's director for cloud platform product marketing writes that “Prices aside, customers are using Azure … for its hybrid capabilities …
They (MS and Amazon) will have you by the short and curlies. The'll make it hard to shift to the competition. Then prices will skyrocket.
What price cloud then eh?
These things allways come full circle. This of us who have been around It for more than 20 years should be able to recognise the signs. Sadly the PHB's will just see the £££$$$$ until it is too late.
"The'll make it hard to shift to the competition. Then prices will skyrocket."
Microsoft's hybrid cloud option makes it easy to move servers both to and from Azure so that's certainly not the case for Microsoft.
Amazon don't have an off the shelf hybrid option to compare.
"Microsoft's hybrid cloud option makes it easy to move servers both to and from Azure so that's certainly not the case for Microsoft."
If cloud revenues dip, Microsoft will just turn the tap on the on-premises licenses. Oh, what's that? They just did? Who would have ever predicted it?!?
Microsoft can't be trusted. Run far away, and do so as fast as you can.
"If cloud revenues dip, Microsoft will just turn the tap on the on-premises licenses"
So you just export your VMs to your VMware hypervisors, or any other suitable choice. Although I doubt that Hyper-V Server will ever be chargeable - the money is in the management tools.
"AWS makes way more profit than Azure"
Amazon only posted one profitable quarter ever and it was peanuts:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2015/10/22/amazon-third-quarter-earnings/#2715e4857a0b4b61841c26df
Microsoft make WAY more profit from cloud.
Well if your sinking 500 billion in Windows Servers that sit in a data center you surely want to tell the share holders your making money and you have customers waiting in like to get on those servers.
Some people say you build it they will come.... Zune, Kin, Plays4Sure, Bob, Vista, WinCE, WinMo7 and others, do you see a trend with this company?
I wonder if Apple had a cloud server if it would be cool and sexy...
AWS is cloud for developers to make Web 2.0 apps and not to run kludgy win32 apps on a full Windows OS stack. It seems that Microsoft and others still don't get CLOUD. It is a shift from developing for a stagnant OS to something that is a platform that runs your code and you don't care what the OS is, your code is important and that it can scale up and out.
How do those Windows Datacenter admins scale up? 90 day eval licenses? LOL Punching in a license or a DNS entry... for every customer that wants to spin up a node.JS instance? LOL
"If you build it they will come"
Windows, Office, SQL Server, Windows Server, Exchange, Lync / Skype, Xbox, Office 365, Surface, Azure, do you see a trend with this company? Clue - all $1 billion+ annual turnover businesses / products...
Oh - and btw - roughly 25% of Azure VMs run a flavour of Linux, so it's not just for Windows....Hyper-V Server does not require Windows to run. It's a proper standalone hypervisor, and doesn't require an underlying OS unlike say Linux based hypervisors.
"KVM and Xen are part of the Linux kernel,"
So part of a full OS install then. Hyper-V also runs in kernel mode if you choose to run it under Windows. Where by the way it significantly outperforms KVM.
"Hyper-V is just a service that runs on top of an OS."
That would be just like a Linux type bloated Hypervisor on top of the OS option then.
The difference is that with Hyper-V you can also choose to run Hyper-V SERVER which is a true standalone hypervisor version that does not require an underlying OS. It's also completely free with all features enabled.
>> No real hard numbers to back it up...
Earning statements under US law can be taken as hard numbers. Unless of course those making the statement want lots of jail time. Which seems unlikely for large corporates like Microsoft / Amazon.
It's been clear for a while now that Microsoft are rapidly overtaking Amazon in the cloud space.
The earning statements don't say anything of the kind. The earning statements say:
AWS sales Q4 2015 - 2.4 billion USD
Azure sales - Unknown. Microsoft releases figures for what it calls 'intelligent cloud products'. This includes Azure, but bizarrely also includes all Windows Server licenses and associated CALs, and the entirety of the SQL Server and associated product family.
To muddy the waters, sometimes Microsoft releases separate data showing 'cloud services' including Office 365 and other subscription license sales, along with Azure. They have even been known to add in mobile phone hardware revenues to count as 'cloud'. But Microsoft seems reluctant to ever reveal numbers for Azure alone.
The shift between one murky segmentation and another did make it possible for analysts to accurately estimate sales figures during mid-2015 - the estimate was then 400m USD per quarter, well behind AWS.
I am agnostic as to whether Azure can grow larger than AWS. I am not sure it matters much either way, currently competition is working well and prices of both are falling while capabilities of both increase.
"If Azure was better than AWS for the same price then why the need for a price cut."
It's a volume business. Staying the most competitive AND attractive is important - and a significant number of companies are migrating from S3 to Azure - they wouldn't bother if there was no TCO justification.
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