[partiallypro]

"Azure was eliminated since its a Linux-second cloud"

I have a feeling this person never really dove into Azure, and just wrote it off because it had Microsoft services built in; and of course various sysadmins still have a strong bias against Microsoft, especially if they are Open Source advocates. Seems like the entire article is mostly just comparing AWS to GCP instead of giving an actual overview of the cloud landscape, just brushes off every other provider (that's not AWS or GCP) without diving into an actually reason -why.-

[pbbakkum]

To be more explicit on this point - I think Azure is a good product and the growth that Microsoft is seeing speaks for itself. However, for our use case, which is at least somewhat representative of a rapidly growing Linux-based startup, we didn't see any compelling advantage in using the Azure compute product (we may use one of their ML products in the future). Hence, it made sense to narrow the focus somewhat to what we thought were the best options. We eliminated Azure from our list based on the fact that our preliminary analysis didn't uncover any big advantages to use it over the other clouds, we wanted a cloud focused more on linux, and we don't currently use any products in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Yes I know Azure runs Linux, let me unpack that point: We had run previously on a cloud that wasn't focused on Linux hosting as their flagship OS. The effect we observed was that Linux was a second-class citizen in terms of features and performance. Perhaps its unfair to project that onto Azure, but I think its true that AWS and GCP think about Linux first, and Azure doesn't. Running a company on the cloud means relying on the compute product (GCE/EC2) as the foundation for your infrastructure, so we think this makes a difference.

It would be valuable for a lot of people to see more comprehensive stats across all clouds - I would love to see this personally and I think it would help people make better decisions about cloud infrastructure.

[amaks]

Azure is also slower in block device speeds: http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/public/aws-vs-google-clo...

[brianwawok]

Honest question. If you are a 100% linux shop, what do you gain with Azure? Do they have better linux chops than GCE or AWS?

[StreamBright]

You gain the exact same things as you gain on other cloud platforms. You do not need to worry about the followings:

- data center power

- data center networking

- hardware provisioning

I don't think they are better thn GCE or AWS in terms of Linux support (maybe minor things) but they are not significantly worse either. What comes after that, pricing, machine types etc. is a different question. I see lots of companies using Azure because they got free credit for it.

[shireboy]

To me, the more interesting aspect of any of the clouds is the PaaS offerings. I like the idea of not knowing or caring what OS my stuff is running on or how many VMs back it. Throw some Node.js up into a cloud and have it run and scale automatically without me having to harden, patch, and maintain machines. Same with data - flip a switch and have a geo-redundant well managed database service as opposed to configuring and monitoring such a beast myself.

I like Azure Web Apps, Sql, and Storage PaaS offerings, as well as hosted Mongo and similar 3rd party services. In general, my experience is that they are cheaper and better managed than most stuff my customers roll themselves.

I would suggest that any "100% anything" shop look at the PaaS offerings of the various clouds and see if the benefits outweigh the risks.

[boulos]

I don't understand your conclusion (Azure is best?). App Engine is far and away the most battle-hardened PaaS, going from tons of tiny toy apps to the scale of Snapchat.

I don't disagree that having a PaaS and "marketplace" is important, but I don't see how you seem to conclude that GCP is less relevant here.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

[jacques_chester]

If you want a PaaS to run on your IaaS, Cloud Foundry can run on AWS, OpenStack, vSphere, Azure and, pretty soon, it should be on GCE.

Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering effort on Cloud Foundry.

[_delirium]

I'm not sure, but that's why I would want to read a comparison to find out! For example, if their Linux VMs had a price/performance advantage in some category (networking, CPU, whatever), that would be interesting information to know. Or if the tools were better/worse.

[boulos]

I believe GCE has a price/performance advantage in basically all categories against both AWS and Azure (one wrinkle is we don't offer small slices of local SSD, instead pushing people to either our 375 GiB per unit local SSD or our Persistent Disk SSD product). For example:

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Year-...

As jsolson mentions elsewhere, we run PerfKit and compare ourselves all the time (both on raw performance and price/performance).

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

[brianwawok]

That was on conclusion as well. I launched my baby startup on Digital Ocean and moved to GCE when I needed to do things like floating IPs (before DO had such a thing).

Overall GCE has worked well. I did have trouble fighting the beta logging agent (used 300+ MB of ram and 5% of my CPU when under no load), but logging is in beta so I guess I can't complain :)