[JOnAgain]

This is why AWS is better. They dogfood when it is hard.

I remember when S3 and EC2 were coming out. They tried to make us working on the retail website move year after year. Our excuses became their roadmap. We (developers working on not AWS) really didn’t want to move to AWS. It was 100% worse than what we had before.

“Network is slow”, “it’s not PCI compliant”, “the drive is unreliable”, “the load balancer is missing a feature”.

It took years and years. But they did it. Google and Microsoft don’t have the willpower to force this, and its why they will always be behind AWS.

When Google tries to sell you Google Cloud, remember they don’t use it for anything internally. They don’t think it’s good enough. So why should I?

[seper8]

... You think Microsoft doesn't dogfood?

Where do you think Teams, Bing, OpenAI, the billion internal systems they use and Xbox are hosted

[k12sosse]

A lot of Microsoft products have had years-long complaints finally resolved in the post-Azure world.

It seems while some of the features implemented pre-Azure were supported, but not fully working as intended because they were sets of features that weren't necessarily in use by Microsoft themselves. But they became an issue as Microsoft was now interested in it working properly after they started using that capability, or parts of the Azure infrastructure depended on it, or some big money customers "'how about'ed" these features. I'm talking minor but important aspects of larger products, or Interoperability.

Windows Server had a lot of life breathed into it post Azure. I'm too lazy to find specific incidents, or recall the past annoyances as a sysadmin of years past (PTSD?), but they absolutely dogfood and we are all better off about it. What they can never dogfood however is the pricing.

I'm k-12 education sector (almost 200,000 staff and students to our district) and we get what I would imagine one of the sweetest of discounts, and if we were to move all of our operations to Azure, our TCO actually increases to maintain the same level of service and availability.

That being said, the performance hits aren't that terrible, but it's the little things that add up quickly at scale.

Of course, as public funded k-12, it's sometimes a decision that gets made when having to decide on buying new things for the data centre (capital cost) vs. subscribing it to Azure (operational cost). The money for both piles comes from the same vault but there destination pile is loaded with implicit reasoning excuses. For example if we spend $200,000 a year on a service as a subscription, it's easier to get money for that versus requesting $400,000 on something that would last us 3 or 4 years.

It takes great leadership at the IT level to liaison this impact to the business movers and shakers, and sometimes that's not there.

[alternatex]

Yeah reading that comment felt like the twilight zone. Microsoft is foremost a software company and they host everything on Azure. Amazon's software services offering is a speck of dust in comparison. Amazon cannot dogfood AWS more than Microsoft dogfoods Azure.

[carlivar]

Well, to take it full circle, they don't dogfood LinkedIn on Azure. How about GitHub for that matter? Wouldn't that indicate Amazon can dogfood more?

[prepend]

I think those are different because they are acquisitions.

It doesn’t mean they will never use Azure, just that they’re being rational about what to use.

It would be very different if they designed GitHub today and didn’t use Azure.

[k12sosse]

Add to that, future product offerings determined by real world use cases based on the reasons why they don't or can't do it today.

[prepend]

I can’t imagine they use Teams internally.

[inglor]

Microsoft mostly gives different groups autonomy in what tools to use, where to host etc.

Most groups in Microsoft use the Microsoft stack as it's best supported and already compliant and works pretty well - so most groups use teams, office, Azure etc.

Groups are free to use other tech and may for example use zoom+slack (some groups do) or GSuite. This is also true for technology (e.g. a team can use yarn and flow instead of npm and TypeScript). It's just very rare they do.

[pixel16]

This is not true. Microsoft uses teams heavily internally. Zoom slack and others banned unless it's a customer requirement

Source: msft employee

[k12sosse]

I engage frequently with the Canada Education team and office 365 national reps and they are wonderful and the way Microsoft uses their own stuff to interact with their customers is a true blessing. Teach by showing instead of telling.

[hyperliner]

I think the point is that the scale of requirement intake that came into AWS from the website is orders of magnitude more than whatever level of dogfooding that Azure might undergo from internal solutions. Not that they don’t dogfood at all, only that the massive amount of engineers moving one of the most complex websites in world’s history into AWS, and AWS taking them in as real input into the product, made AWS a lot better than the old AWS.

[23km2oij]

AWS is extremely overengineered for startups. In order to create a simple SaaS on AWS you have to invest much more time comparing to Azure. So, I only use their S3/Route53/Email services and do the rest on Azure.

[bob1029]

We started on AWS in ~2014 but it got too complicated for us to tolerate. My latest AWS complexity trigger was trying to set up a public S3 bucket. It's almost like they want you to screw it up on purpose. We were mostly working with .NET/Windows Server so we looked at alternatives sometime around 2020.

Our stack today has us using AWS for domain registration & S3. We use Azure for everything else. We actually log into AWS by going to the Microsoft MyApps portal and authenticating via our AAD/Entra credentials. Microsoft's docs regarding how to set up SCIM/SAML auth to AWS are excellent [0].

In Azure, we use ~5 products: AAD/Entra ID, DNS, Azure Functions, SQL Server, Azure Blob Storage. That's it. There isn't really any VM/container presence in our go-forward infra. Everything is managed/'serverless' now. There are some VMs but they are supporting legacy systems that will eventually be turned off. We have ZERO custom networking. I couldn't explain how to manage an azure vnet to save my life. We don't need VPN tech anymore either.

Github Actions->Azure Functions is pretty much the end game CI/CD experience for me. I am not rocking this boat. I never want to try anything else. I've spend a decade of my life keeping some flavor of Jenkins alive.

Could we do all this "cheaper"? Sure. But at what cost? My mental state is something that is a non-zero factor in all of this. Keeping track of hundreds of moving pieces in production is simply overwhelming. It's unnecessary suffering. I need something I can explain in 20 minutes to a new hire if we want to remain competitive.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/referen...

[Hamuko]

Technically you could start off with just Lightsail if you want to start off as simple as possible.

[paulryanrogers]

But then you cannot update without tearing down and rebuilding. (Since it's based on Bitnami.) Unless there is something I'm missing.

[Thorrez]

>remember they don’t use it for anything internally

Google does use Google Cloud internally for some things. Source: I work for Google.

[ametrau]

For anything critical?

[luma]

You see a story how a company manages to build out their internal infrastructure such that there is no appreciable benefit to migrating the whole thing to the cloud, and your takeaway is that "AWS is better"?

I feel like you might not have read the article.

[datavirtue]

Microsoft is long game. Azure will be here long after AWS. Microsoft is like the Borg. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Resistance? Futile.