[dijit]

> (hint: it's not)

Speaking as an SRE who less than 1yr ago was tasked with evaluating public clouds as burstable capacity for our traditionally bare metal server infrastructure; this comment is flippant at best and harmful at worst.

Azure is absolutely not comparable to the others, their performance characteristics are nowhere near consistent between equivalent specification instances, their API's are equally inconsistent _and_ they have a terrible usability model on most of their services (not all, admittedly).

In fact when it comes to technical competence, I would (and did) rank Google #1. The drawbacks of Google are:

* It's google and they have a habit of sun-setting products.

* They don't have as many features as AWS.

* They don't have developer mindshare like AWS, meaning FOSS tools will almost always work flawlessly with AWS but rarely have support for GCP (or, if they do it is a little b0rk)

* Google tends not to give human support. (but this is alleviated if you're buying support contracts)

-

FWIW we chose google on technical merits alone, although my company is working with all three cloud providers in some fashion. Azure is the one we constantly mock internally for their absolutely maddening warts. Almost as bad as our own internal "cloud". (providing cloud services is not my companies core competence to be fair)

----

Digression;

I would assume that a big chunk of Microsofts cloud money is coming from office365. I know my company recently started paying them in the order of 10's of millions of dollars, I assume others would too as this is "the future" of microsoft exchange/sharepoint etc;

[partiallypro]

How exactly is saying Azure isn't based on "horrible tech," "harmful?" None of the big cloud providers are based on "horrible tech." Your statement provides anecdotes but no data that proves this as "harmful."

Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like Microsoft more than an even keel observer.

[dijit]

I don't really care enough about microsoft to hate it as a company, there's some good and some bad. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's around. And Windows itself has some really good ideas underneath (like IOCP). But it's fair to say I'm not a fan of Windows itself.

My bias is purely on the technical merits of the provider. My company had a pretty large discount on Azure so it was under strong consideration.

My point about it "being harmful at worst" is that it's spreading uncertainty without any actual evidence.

I, on the other-hand have evidence from a 12,000+ person company that is using all three cloud providers.

[partiallypro]

> My point about it "being harmful at worst" is that it's spreading uncertainty without any actual evidence.

Actually, that's precisely what -you- are doing, not me.

> I, on the other-hand have evidence from a 12,000+ person company that is using all three cloud providers.

I worked at a much larger company than that with over 20K employees that used Azure/O365 and AWS (but no GCS.) Your anecdote means nothing. You're on Hacker News, there are people here that work and have worked for massive media companies, industrial companies and tech companies. Many of which use Azure, AWS and GCS.

Do I wish Azure were better? Absolutely. I have a lot of ideas and complaints where things could be so much better. But I also have just as many numerous complaints about GCS and AWS.

[dijit]

Excellent. Then this is the forum to list them.

FWIW our migration to office365 has been pretty great, but I don’t see it as being the same thing as using Azure for your product.