I'm curious why people pick Azure, if anyone here has direct experience with making the decision.
I work at a startup that runs on Azure, and we're only here because of Microsoft's monopolistic behavior. We switched because Microsoft gives Office 365 discounts to our customers as long as all the the SaaS services they use are hosted on Azure, and so our customers demanded we use Azure. Part of the monopoly playbook: "using a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another".
I used to work at GCP, and I thought it was almost shameful that we were in 3rd place behind Azure. Now it just makes me mad (especially since I had to migrate our startup from GCP to Azure).
Pretty similar reason, customers use Azure so the incentives are in place to run more things on Azure.
Case in point at work: we need to set up Azure infrastructure per-customer. Hitting the Azure RM endpoint from outside the Azure network is not reliable; the API endpoint's DNS record points to one of two IP addresses in westus, and when the DNS record flips (presumably for blue/green deployments) the no-longer-referenced IP address immediately aborts the connection. The official Azure Terraform provider throws an error when this happens and it usually results in Terraform state losing track of something that it already created. Azure support just says "well all we see is 200 OK from our side".
The "solution" is to run the Terraform workload from within Azure. The SLA is only really guaranteed if you're connecting to the Azure RM API from within Azure. Cue the insanity.
In my case, the company I work for isn’t a software company. The bean counters / IT group would rather just have something tacked onto their existing Microsoft subscription vs. something entirely different.
Also, I suspect part of the reason people are hesitant to use GCP because Google is perceived as a company that will gladly kill products off on a whim. Not great for something mission-critical.
From what I've seen, when people pick Azure, it's always about money.
Whereas with other providers, it can also be about money (because they offer a big discount or because the migrating partner is cheaper), but it can also be about wanting one service/feature that only X is providing; and once you're in, people tend to prefer to put everything there, instead of doing poly-cloud.
In my region, Azure salesmen are very active, providing huge discounts, so Azure is the most popular amongst big companies.
Meanwhile smaller ones will go on AWS because its easier to find information and (actual) knowledgeable people.
I used to work in a company using AWS : everything was managed through Terraform and we were as cloud agnostic as possible (mostly containers).
Then we were acquired by a bigger company with a Azure deal, so they told us to migrate from AWS to Azure.
They provided us with their own experts to help us, but six months in, we were still unable to have anything remotely viable for UAT.
The experts were starting to acknowledge that even with they years of experience, they still weren't convinced with this whole Azure stuff so they actually relied heavily on a legacy on-prem DC.
That's when I left.
Last time I heard about old coworkers, the product was still running perfectly fine on AWS, while there was still a team working on the migration.
It's been more than two years now.
And I had other bad experiences with Azure.
I know that cloud providers are not fun if you don't start with two weeks of training, so I try to stay open-minded, but no matter how many Azure experts I talked to, I never found one who was actually confident in using it.
How does this work? Do they demand you to use Azure for your servers so they get a discount? Or do you have to create instances of your product in e.g. VMs that are put in their Azure account? Did you have to completeley leave every last bit of gcp behind? How is this checked by MS?
- we use mainly GCP
- we do not want to use AWS because of random political issue (absurd, in my opinion but whatever)
- we are raped by GCP and would like an alternative to help keeping the price "acceptable"
What you call “monopolistic behavior” a senior/lead engineer with a brain will see as ecosystem compatibility. If you are working within an org that already uses Microsoft for everything, why the hell would you bother introducing a new stack everyone else will have to learn rather than use the Microsoft offering if it’s competent enough? On top of that, the Microsoft product will most likely work nicer with other MS products. Same reason people buy iPhones and Macs and stay in the apple ecosystem. Yeah it’s not as hip and exciting but enterprise development is rarely hip or exciting. At a startup not already using MS products, yeah no shit you can use whatever you want with little to no considerations for compatibility within the stack, especially when your main goal is cost savings.
I work at a startup that runs on Azure, and we're only here because of Microsoft's monopolistic behavior. We switched because Microsoft gives Office 365 discounts to our customers as long as all the the SaaS services they use are hosted on Azure, and so our customers demanded we use Azure. Part of the monopoly playbook: "using a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another".
I used to work at GCP, and I thought it was almost shameful that we were in 3rd place behind Azure. Now it just makes me mad (especially since I had to migrate our startup from GCP to Azure).