[mbesto]

Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.

Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage startups.

That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode and Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills to free services is a no-brainer.

EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.

EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their platform: http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/

[fsniper]

I'm not very keen on office365.

Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :)

And the shameless plug: Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If any one is in need of system administration, integration, performance analysis, optimization, configuration management and devops like services I'm here to help.

[mattmanser]

As someone who just helped migrate a client to exchange online, do not get it. It's shockingly awful.

They have two separate admin interfaces, neither of which you can do everything in so you have to break out powershell to finish off the job. The client had to lean heavily on me to help, something other clients have never had to do with gmail.

I like a lot of MS products, but from my brief exposure, exchange is a complete mess of WTFs. And annoyingly, googling doesn't often bring up pertinent answers and their help is pathetic.

[odonnellryan]

Having used both from an admin and a user perspective, Gmail is definitely better all-around.

Gmail is not flaky the way O365 is. Random outages with no explanation/contact from support until days after remedy...are no fun.

[FLUX-YOU]

Are you using the web app or the installed app? I haven't had a bit of a problem with the installed version (The UI can be slow though).

[fsniper]

I'm a linux guy I do not need to touch windows or windows clients daily so what I'm talking about is web ui.

[raincom]

O365 is good for existing corporate customers who use inhouse exchange servers. Thats what microsoft shops are doing these days: migrate from inhouse exchange to O365.

Otherwise, I don't see why small shops wanna move away from gmail to O365.

[aioprisan]

"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.

[mbesto]

Sorry, should have clarified. Most early stage startups don't do DevOps or sysadmin well. Imagine the typical YC startup where its just 2-3 developers who are comfortable with the command line, but not comfortable with Chef, Puppet, etc. Having to plan a migration is not fun or productive for a set of developers because it means (1) less time for them to focus on mobile/web development (2) learning to do sysadmin when it's out of their comfort zone.

AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.

note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.

[sankethkatta]

Azure also has a Heroku-like offering: Azure Websites http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/websites/

[olifante]

Actually Microsoft has not one but two Platform-as-a-Service offerings:

- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)

- Azure Websites (PaaS light)

Unfortunately, when I last looked at it two months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.

First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).

Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.

If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings.

[mbesto]

Whoa! Didn't know about that! Very cool. No ruby support though :/

[ghuntley]

Ruby works/supported -> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingRunningRubyOnRailsOn...

[tracker1]

Wild... didn't know that. I've been doing mostly node with some C# for the past 3 years... just double checked MS WebMatrix and nope, doesn't look like Ruby is in the box...

Been playing with CoreOS though...

[vosper]

Sure, but in practice if you have any complexity in your stack then it's going to be a PITA to from Azure to AWS (or vice-versa).

If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc...

I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming so wedded to that Azure systems that the opportunity cost of switching to AWS is too high.

Edit: Typo

[mikermcneil]

Looks like Azure has a PaaS now though-- I mean it's no heroku, but as far as I can tell it's working.

[nbevans]

Azure was always PaaS... they added IaaS much later.

[maratd]

> I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.

You can spin up your own load balancer pretty easily. DO offers backup too.

In terms of bang for the buck, you can't really beat DO, unless you're giving your services away for free ...

[spellboots]

I've found this to be very untrue - digital ocean offers very poor performance per $ compared to linode in my experience. Linode don't have a $5/month option but if you pay $10/month or more you will get a lot better performance at Linode

[StavrosK]

Sure, but Linode had a number of breaches. I don't think I could trust my business with them.

[spellboots]

Every provider will have security issues occasionally. Including digital ocean:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/02/digitalocean-fixes-securit...

[ryanlol]

Not every provider lies to their customers about the hacks though. Linode only came forward about the hacks after I announced them on their IRC.

[StavrosK]

Having data scrubbing disabled by default is different than two breaches that exposed customer data in a short while, though.

[proveanegative]

>In terms of bang for the buck, you can't really beat DO

If you treat DO as just another VPS provider and pay on a monthly basis does it offer advantages over the competition?

[jtreminio]

This is probably a good time to promote my FOSS, PuPHPet [0], an online GUI for creating your own customized VM that you can deploy locally, to AWS/DO/Linode, and soon Azure.

[0] https://puphpet.com

[wheels]

> this would be a good time to start the cold calls

The post mentions that this is only for new YC startups, i.e. folks that won't have anything (or very little) to migrate.

[mrmondo]

Honestly, O365 is very poorly designed and operated product - I've seen countless organisations either implement it from scratch or migrate to it and they've had more problems than they can afford - the amount of undocumented downtime over the last year has be absolutely unbelievable - If i told you how many clients have said they have not weekly - but daily problems you wouldn't believe me.

Bundle that with cleaverly designed vendor lockin and General poor UX and you've got yourself a real headache.

[pkallberg]

That's a great idea! I work at Cloud 66 (http://www.cloud66.com) and we let you build your own Heroku on Azure and benefit from this $500k and Heroku-like simplicity. You can also migrate between cloud providers (including Azure and the ones mentioned) if needed.

We think this is a great way for startups to use the tons of cloud credits they get, instead of letting them go to waste or spending precious time on setting up infrastructure.

[deapu]

YC companies get $100K for 2 years.