Microsoft Expands Azure Data Centers To France, Launches Trust Offensive vs AWS, Google (thestack.com) 33
Microsoft announced on Monday that it plans to build its first Azure data center in France this year as part of its $3 billion investment for building cloud services in Europe. The company today also launched a new publication dubbed, Cloud for Global Good with no fewer than 78 public policy recommendations in 15 categories such as data protection and accessibility issues. TechCrunch adds:The new expansion, investment and "trust" initiative were revealed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was speaking at an event in Dublin, Ireland. He said that the expansion would mean that Microsoft covers "more regions than any other cloud provider... In the last year the capacity has more than doubled." As a measure of how Microsoft and Amazon are intent on levelling each other on service availability right now, the news of the French data center comes one month after Amazon announced that it would also be building a data center in France. Nadella, of course, did not mention AWS by name but that is the big elephant in the room for Microsoft. Nadella said today that Microsoft has data centers covering 30 regions across the globe, "more regions than any other cloud provider," with the European footprint including Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella, currently on a whirlwind tour of Europe, says that Microsoft has now invested over $3 billion in cloud infrastructure in Europe, and will extend that to governance-friendly French data centers in 2017. The company has also released a new publication calling for 78 policy reviews in 15 sectors of Cloud, including an overhaul of the verbose and opaque way that end-users are required to click legal agreements over data, some of which are specious and others of which are critical: "Because data is now collected and used in so many different ways, people can be overwhelmed if constantly presented with privacy choices and requests to consent to data collection. Requiring express consent in every situation could also make it difficult to understand which situations raise serious privacy implications and which are trivial."
Trust offensive (Score:3)
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This is, like almost all of Microsoft's public announcements, a marketing move. They're trying to convince the millions of straggling PHBs to move to Azure instead of AWS. This effort spans many fronts, including back room short-term discounts on Azure pricing, EA/SA licensing, Office 360 migration discounts, etc...
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Because 'The Cloud' has become as much a marketing buzzword as the real thing that it is, you will find companies embracing Azure to run their traditional Windows desktop apps 'in the cloud' using some combination of Azure and Citrix.
Those companies bought in to the Windows desktop paradigm and built database-centric client/server applications that in hindsight should have never been built that way - but that's what they have to sell, and if it will sell better if it's hosted 'in the cloud', then that's wha
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Last time I checked the price difference between Linux and Windows is about the same for AWS vs Azure. Microsoft doesn't discount Windows on Azure, it would open up a lot of antitrust lawsuits if it did.
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In any case, this is a Microsoft-only market, since Amazon or Google can't do this cost-effectively if they have to pay for Windows on all their servers.
This is not a Microsoft-only market. AWS was there first with Amazon Workspaces, and Google will likely announce something soon. VMware has vCloud Air, and IBM Softlayer also runs VMware's stuff in its cloud.
Basically, because of Microsoft's cloud-unfriendly licensing practices, many customers are forced to bring their own, existing Windows licenses to the cloud to run their desktops in the way you describe, so that portion of the playing field is pretty much level.
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Trying to translate your AWS applications to what Microsoft has in Azure is hard, as hard as a Windows to Linux transition was 10 years ago.
Maybe if you designed all your applications around AWS PaaS services -- in which case you'd be no better than the Windows developers of yore. But there ARE other ways to do it. You CAN get mobile backend services from other vendors and run them on the cloud of your choice. There are ways to run VMware workloads on the cloud of your choice. There are things you can do with containers. In fact, a lot of customers are suspicious of putting their eggs in one cloud and they have already built out the same thing
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Too much catch up (Score:3)
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That is what they said about Windows, Internet Explorer, MS Word and MS Excel.
It is not only about how good your product is. Leveraging your other advantages is just a important.
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Except that MS is a juggernaut of a company, is hugely profitable and is working in their primary skill set.
Does Amazon even make money yet?
Azure has already surpassed all other cloud services companies including Google.
So I would not count them out. Their offerings may be behind AWS, but I would expect that lead to narrow dramatically in the coming years.
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Does Amazon even make money yet?
Err... yes. Largely driven by their hopelessly profitable AWS division.
Azure has already surpassed all other cloud services companies including Google.
Apart from Amazon, of course. Amazon's marketshare is greater than the next 3 (Google, Microsoft, IBM) combined.
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Which services are behind?
The only one that I've had come up is RDS. Azure SQL is great if your application supports SQL 2016, but if it's mysql/etc you have to spin up your own linux server and run mysql on it (Azure DOES have a template for that at least) whereas on AWS it's a pure PaaS offering.
The cost calculator on AWS is years ahead of the Azure one, but that's not a day by day use thing.
Azure's CDN capabilities are more flexible than AWS, and I'd argue HDInsight is better than EMR.
AWS kinesis beats
France, Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France? (Score:3)
I mean, they have laws giving their secret service similar access to data centers .. and they also have "NSL" equivalent gag orders.
So, this was only the second worst decision.
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Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France
You must have been sent by Elon and you are now living on Mars. Have you been to France recently? Have you even left your village, or home, recently? Been in France in summer. People are gathering as usual. Maybe a bit less. But besides that, life in normal in France! Stop watching apocalyptic dramas...
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You missed the point the SoE gives also extended rights for covert operations, normally not found in a gathering crowd but in a data center.
Start reading the backgroundstory we are talking about datacenters and not about public gatherings.
Sounds like MS wants to 3 EU (Score:3)
After all the legal actions from the EU v Microsoft, by announcing a $3B investment in cloud infrastructure, Microsoft is aiming to reduce oversight and legal controversies.
Microsoft protects your email, UNLIKE GOOGLE! (Score:3)
Regions (Score:2)