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by toomuchtodo 2254 days ago
Define "ahead". Is AWS cutting edge? Maybe, but does your business need cutting edge? Likely not. I see an enormous shift in the market towards Azure from clients of all sizes, for a variety of reasons (cost, married to AD/O365/etc, not wanting to give a competitor [Amazon] dollars). Azure definitely has the momentum, it's their race to lose against AWS.

Disclaimer: Thoughts and opinions my own, not that of any employer past, current, or future.
2 comments
thisisnico 2254 days ago
Microsoft can offer fully-integrated solutions with their already incredibly popular software. So that's a distinct advantage.
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toomuchtodo 2254 days ago
Azure is less friendly as a technology practitioner (compared to working with AWS), but I fully appreciate the value you describe. Does AWS have Active Directory as a first class citizen? Office 365? Outlook/Exchange? No.
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chucky_z 2254 days ago
AWS does offer AD as a first class citizen... More than Azure.

AzureAD is not Active Directory, and unless something has changed a lot in the last year (maybe it has?), Azure does not offer anything that looks, smells, and feels like on-prem AD in the cloud.

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jedieaston 2253 days ago
Azure Active Directory Domain Services is full-fat AD, but they market it towards only using it for services in Azure. But you can set up a VPN from Azure to join on-prem stuff (or to replicate existing AD to Azure).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-doma...

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chucky_z 2253 days ago
That's good to hear! I really wanted "hosted AD" from a cloud a few years ago, and Azure definitely did not offer this... or they marketed it so poorly I could not find it anywhere. :(

AWS has straight up guides for do's/dont's, and various ways to integrate their AD service with yours, including multiple scenarios such as running them as the masters of the forest, with read-only's on-site, and vice-versa.

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gaukes 2254 days ago
This was immediately after they mentioned 95% of Fortune 500, etc. so I assumed market size.

But, maybe that was the intention without giving any details.

We’ll never know until office is separated out in MSFT reporting I guess.

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miscPerson 2254 days ago
It’s also very carefully worded.

> More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies run Microsoft Azure.

For example, I worked at a large media company and we had a couple Azure services spun up related to our email service.

But the bulk was on AWS, which handled our business workloads — eg, serving video.

Is Microsoft counting my former employer among that 95%?

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