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Cloud Microsoft

Azure Pulls In Front of AWS In Public Cloud Adoption (theregister.com) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the took-them-long-enough dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Microsoft Azure has nosed ahead of AWS in the public cloud adoption stakes, according to a report from IT Management outfit Flexera. The 2022 State of the Cloud Report survey will have brought smiles to the teams at Redmond and Amazon, and less cheer to Oracle's cloud crew, which continued to languish in fourth place behind Google.

The key takeaway on the Azure front is its leadership with enterprise users, with 80 percent of respondents adopting Microsoft's public cloud, up from 76 percent the previous year. This was just ahead of AWS, which claimed a 77 percent adoption rate, down from 79 percent a year earlier. Some way behind was Google, with 48 percent, followed by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which tumbled to 27 percent from 32 percent a year ago. The report indicates Azure is ahead of AWS for breadth of adoption, although Google has the highest percentage for experimentation (at 23 percent). There was some cause for optimism at Oracle with the highest percentage (12 percent) planning to use its cloud, meaning there is every chance its showing in the survey could improve in the coming years. "AWS is still leading the SMB public cloud pack, although it still experienced a slight drop in adoption rate, from 72 percent to 69 percent while Azure jumped from 48 percent to 59 percent," notes The Register. "Oracle also saw strong growth, nearly doubling its adoption rate from 15 percent to 28 percent year on year."

The survey also reported an increase in wasted cloud spend. According to The Register, "respondents estimated their organizations wasted 32 percent of the cloud spend this time around, up from 30 percent the previous year."
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Azure Pulls In Front of AWS In Public Cloud Adoption More

Azure Pulls In Front of AWS In Public Cloud Adoption

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  • Cloud provider which is less prone to cancelling people they don't like pulls ahead of one which has a reputation for being quite eager to do so. Get woke, go broke. :D
    • Wow, you can tell so much from a 3% difference for just one year.

      What are you, an astrologer?

    • If companies didn't think "going woke" (whatever the hell that even means anymore) wasn't something the majority of people wanted or were neutral about, they wouldn't do it. You really think Amazon or any other global corporation actually cares about social issues outside of how it affects their revenue lines?

      When faced with a choice these companies will choose the option that will affect business the least. The actually activist companies (like Patagonia) are actualy pretty rare.

      • > You really think Amazon or any other global corporation actually cares about social issues outside of how it affects their revenue lines?

        They've hired thousands of leftist employees who cause turmoil if they don't get their way. At some point somebody has to answer the phone.

        Look at the Spotify and Coinbase civil wars for transparent examples.

        • Do you really think these companies hire "leftists" based on their political affiliations? Or is it maybe a 50%+ of the US leans democratic left?

          Spotify is based in Sweden, not exactly a right leaning populace. Coinbase until recently was based in San Francisco. Also Spotify didn't actually cave to the calls to fire Rogan and crypto is an ecosystem that leans right in and of itself.

          Again, no evidence either company actually "cares" outside of their revenue. Getting mad about "woke" companies is just as

      • Woke is a term used by some to call out people who do or support things, that their often Conservative Commentators public faces, say at the time are bad.
        It could be the Car that you drive
        Shoes that you wear
        Foods that you like
        Choice of Light bulbs they use
        Or whatever thing is a competitor to their sponsors at the time.

        So they listen to a 1/2 hour hate filled rant about those Prius Driving, Nike Wearing, Vegans going to Lowe's to get some Led Bulbs. then you get 15 minutes of ads from GM, New Balance, The Be

    • Here is a secret... Most Companies don't really care about the silly political distractions, the ones who do, are balanced by the other companies who care about the opposing idea.
      Companies don't care if they like the vendor or hate them. They could be at the same time their biggest partner and largest competitor. In the end it will come down to what will make them the most money.

      A lot of companies already have contracts with Microsoft. Adding Azure to an existing contract is easier than setting up a new con

      • > Those AWS Sites that got "Canceled" broke terms of services that they had agreed to.

        Don't fall for the narrative rhetoric.

        J6 was organized on Facebook but people were saying Mean Things about politicians on Parler, which rocketed to #1 on the App Store, so politicians told Big Tech that they would be investigated and regulated if Parler wasn't nuked from orbit.

        There's no controversy about Facebook being the platform used to organize J6. The "official line" is only there to fool low-information voters.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Well, is you mean that the small players are more likely to be leaned on, you're right. But Facebook is being leaned on a bit, too. And I'm not even sure that Parler is what he was talking about.

        • J6 was not organized at all.

          If it had been, the shit election would have been thrown out, at least in those states where there was known to be widespread fraud, and then repeated under more lawful and verifiable conditions. Most probably resulting in a Trump win, although, now, we will probably never know.

          And those who conspired to throw the election, including a lot of our not-so-benevolent tech overlords and their supporters in the federal government, would have been arrested, to eventually face trial fo

  • Switched (Score:4, Funny)

    by rantrantrant ( 4753443 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @05:10AM (#62343023)
    Yes, Microsoft's web services are doing so much better since they switched to Linux.

    • To some extent the host OS doesn't matter as much as it used to.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Actually it still matters a lot, but you have to deal with the OS far less often. And then you just use what is best. As Windows is an insecure, inefficient legacy mess under the hood, using Linux instead when that does not cost you much or anything, is the sane choice.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ink ( 4325 )

          It's more that Linux package management is light years ahead of Windows. It's trivial to deploy very small Linux images, custom tailored to your application, than to do the same for Windows.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Actually it still matters a lot, but you have to deal with the OS far less often. And then you just use what is best. As Windows is an insecure, inefficient legacy mess under the hood, using Linux instead when that does not cost you much or anything, is the sane choice.

          I'm pretty certain Azure isn't running a host OS at all. It's running on HyperV, which is virtualization technology developed by Microsoft, and which does exist in a limited form on Windows 10 and 11 so you can run WSL2 (WSL uses a Windows ke

      • It might matter more than you think... at least for statistics. This may be a case of "damn lies and statistics" - In the survey, they identified that:

        > Azure passed AWS in the percentage of enterprises using it (80 percent Azure vs. 77 percent AWS) and surpassed AWS in the number of virtual machines (VMs) enterprises are running: 71 percent of enterprises are running more than 51 VMs on Azure, compared to 69 percent for AWS

        Whatever people are running in Azure seems to take more VMs than it does in Amazo

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )

          Whatever people are running in Azure seems to take more VMs than it does in Amazon.

          That's is a bizarre hot take. Got anything to back that up because the line you quoted does not. It only shows that more companies have workloads greater than 51 VMs in Azure. A company not using AWS would have 0 in Azure, that does not mean that it takes 0 VMs in AWS to equal their Azure workloads.

          Also, I'll bet some Azure users are only using a hosted Exchange service (hence "80% of enterprises are using Azure").

          Exchange online isn't part of Azure, it's part of Microsoft 365. You can't even see it from the Azure portal and it doesn't require setting up an Azure subscription. If they are using some 3rd party hosted e

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )

            A company not using AWS would have 0 in Azure,

            That should be "A company not using AWS would have 0 in AWS"

    • What do you mean "better since"? Azure has run on Linux and offered it as a client for almost a decade now even back when they were a minor player.

      Their recent rise to dominance has nothing to do with Linux.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Azure is tied in to Visual Studio, and they have had Windows Subsystem for Linux (run Linux stuff almost natively on Windows) for years now. They have leveraged Linux well, you can build a stack using a combination of open source and Microsoft parts.

        They also have .NET Core which allows a lot of existing software to run on Linux. Linux really has been a key part of their Azure stratergy.

        • Re:Switched (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @08:49AM (#62343377)

          I think his thoughts would be that Linux has been there all along and thus any newfound success is probably driven by other factors. "nothing to do with" seems a bad way of saying it, but I'm willing to entertain that their business success is driven more by other factors.

          You are correct in that while Linux has been part of their offering for a long time, they have done increasingly more that may be particularly useful. For example, going from a pure Windows shop to a Linux-centric cloud presence on a cloud provider is both something the wider market encourages and yet is really awkward for a pure Windows shop, and their WSL and .net have enabled a windows shop to implement those highly recommended designs without leaving the comfort of their little Windows world more than they absolutely have too (in the process, reinforcing the incorrect view that Linux is only good for programmers through command line, with WSLG being a really really crappy Linux GUI implementation, from performance to just the most terrible window manager imaginable).

          However, I suspect a bigger factor is just how hard they push all their Windows users to Azure in various ways
          -You want to have active directory? Well, you *could* set it up on premise... I guess... but that's 'lame', you want to host your active directory in Azure!!!
          -You want to open a Terminal window, sure thing, btw, we will present azure cloud shell as something about as likely for you to want to run as cmd or powershell, essentially pushing the message of seamless on-ramp to Azure services right in the Terminal application
          -Office? Well, you really want to pay us subscription and oh look, you are now a customer of cloud storage too, and even the simple act of saving your documents reminds you that the place to be is Microsoft cloud offerings

          Microsoft is making it 'natural' to just evolve into their hosted services, which carries their target market of microsoft-centric businesses nicely, for whom AWS would be either challenging to do, or at least perceived as challenging. Microsoft is able to boil the frog slowly, converting their customers to be more and more hosted clients with the customers barely noticing it. In this mode, a larger business with some gung-go Linux development contingent may be appeased by 'look, you can run your Linux stack under a Microsoft framework', which is no small value to offer, but actively pushing their more captive audience is probably a bigger factor in their business results.

          • but I'm willing to entertain that their business success is driven more by other factors.

            Exactly, thanks for putting it so eloquently. If you want to know what makes Azure popular then it's best to look at Azure AD, Exchange Online, Office 365 and all those good things MS sells to upper management.

            Heck even where I work we've given up on Citrix or running any of our own remote desktop infrastructure. Literally everything is Azure. License servers sit on Azure VMs, AD is on Azure, all of our files are located in Sharepoint (which sits in Azure) if someone needs to access the corporate environmen

        • I know what Azure can do, but it's not the reason for its popularity. It simply has nothing to do with it.

          If you want to know why Azure is the most popular cloud platform then rather looking at Visual Studio instead look at Sharepoint, OneDrive, Office365, Windows365, Exchange Online, and Azure AD.

          A single corporate customer migrating their windows stack online will have done more in one go than any Linux / Visual Studio combination. The whole point of WSL is to get existing Azure customers to use Windows a

    • Go back 15 years and the concept would have been utterly absurd. There's something strange about doing most of my Linux development on a Win10 box.
  • I don't recommend AWS to my clients anymore though, and Azure has its uses so... Why not I guess.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      I don't recommend AWS to my clients anymore though, and Azure has its uses so... Why not I guess.

      Azure is utter shit.

      Us: Let's restore from backup! Oh, the backup won't restore. Let's ask support for help.
      MS: Yeah, it's a pain that restores don't always work, isn't it? We tried to patch it in December but it's not worked. Please wait two months while we dick around and don't solve the problem. That restore wasn't urgent, was it?

      Their support staff are clueless.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Their support staff are clueless.

        Same as their "engineers". But the MS "marketing & bribery" experts are still top notch.

      • I would never depend on AWS or Azure to reliably do backups. Keep your shit in a git repo and use a managed db, friend.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by nagora ( 177841 )

          I would never depend on AWS or Azure to reliably do backups. Keep your shit in a git repo and use a managed db, friend.

          We're talking about 8.4TB of files, many of them binary, here.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          Note I have been trying to vaguely help a team that has a 60GB git repository without LFS support. It has been recoverable with every goof, but it has been *PAINFUL*. If you do LFS then git becomes manageable, but the actual big content isn't *really* that git managed and becomes more like ordinary file storage that you have to otherwise backup.

          Of course plenty of solutions for online and offline backup of arbitrary file content exist, and many of them may be a better solution than cloud provider storage.

      • Azure is utter shit.

        Compared to what? That's the problem, what you describe is literally the status quo of the entire cloud industry.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by nagora ( 177841 )

          Azure is utter shit.

          Compared to what? That's the problem, what you describe is literally the status quo of the entire cloud industry.

          Fair point. Relying on other people's computers for your core business needs is not a great idea.

          • Fair point. Relying on other people's computers for your core business needs is not a great idea.

            That depends entirely on how good you are at running your own computers. For a disappointingly high number of corporate users, that "other person's computer" is far better managed, maintained, and more reliable than you own.

            These days we see in the news when a major cloud service goes down because of the number of companies it affects. But in the past we never heard of just how reliable company's own infrastructure actually is. Basically every place I've ever worked at has had multiple high profile outages

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      If you just want simple linux cloud VMs and enough 1 month credit, I suggest you give a try to Linode or Digital Ocean, as they would be the best value if you decide to continue using them and don't need the extra Azure/AWS etc infrastructure. Here [perl.org] is my recent detailed value comparison that should give you an idea of how each provider's types perform and compare in value.

  • Azure Vs AWS (Score:3)

    by Esben ( 553245 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @05:51AM (#62343087)
    I work in a team which have been forced by the company to switch from AWS to Azure before I started. They all claim Azure is way behind AWS when it comes to managed services. Just renting virtual machines or running a Kubernetes cluster seems ok on Azure, but going cloud-native and using Azure Functions is crap compared to AWS Lambda. Things breaks often on Azure and it is very hard to get support. In general we think Azure is sold to managers and Microsoft centric IT departments. Their features are just a check list to compare with AWS. Once organisations are locked, who cares if actually works?

    • In general we think Azure is sold to managers and Microsoft centric IT departments.

      No thinking about it. Azure is literally part of the enterprise package now. If you're a Microsoft shop someone is trying to get you to migrate to Exchange Online as well as the rest of the Office / Windows 365 ecosystem including even your user accounts.

      They very much have positioned themselves as an integrated service rather than a specialist product which makes it a very easy sell to management.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Locutus ( 9039 )
      That sounds like how Microsoft has operated for the past 30+ years. Windows shops are diehard Windows shops because nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft.
      Microsoft shovels loads of marketing crap to department managers in words they understand so it makes them comfortable to go with Microsoft. Same old way of doing business and this is why those shops plod along with very high IT budgets eating profits and sending those lost profits to Microsoft.

      LoB

  • Usually a bit more expensive than GCP/AWS (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @05:55AM (#62343091) Homepage

    I recently did a rather extensive performance & value comparison [perl.org] between different cloud providers. It is mostly perl-related workloads (as that's what my current company mainly runs on), but I threw in compiling & Geekbench in the mix, to get a clearer picture, so there's stuff for everyone. It was the first time I tried Azure, and I only tried some of their latest gen VM instances, so no idea how the rest of their infrastructure compares, but I was happy with the Azure console and linux configuration options, as well as the actual performance of their v5 instance types. Their EPYC Milan and Intel Ice Lake variants always performed as well or better than equivalent competitors, although if you factor in prices they come up lower in the value rankings to both AWS and GCP (and much lower than some smaller cloud providers of course).

  • "and less cheer to Oracle's cloud crew, which continued to languish in fourth place behind Google..

    Uh, really?

    When describing the outerworld problems of the wealthiest companies on the planet flush with billions, please try to not rub it in so much as to their "suffering".

    I'm sure the millions of humans who actually had to languish and survive a global pandemic, would appreciate it.

    • But one asshole called larry ellison made less money than expected! Doesn't it make you weep?

      • But one asshole called larry ellison made less money than expected! Doesn't it make you weep?

        Yes, but he probably doesn't appreciate my tears of joy.

        • A handful of very large companies need Oracle Database, or one or another of their other pieces of proprietary, bloated, buggy crapware.

          But the vast, VAST majority of even very large companies do not.

          They are an awful company to do business with. Worse on their best day than Microsoft ever was on its worst.

          I won't willingly use any technology that Oracle has touched. Not even things like the open-source forks of Java (OpenJDK) or MySQL (MariaDB). I do in fact use them at work, but only because I have to.

  • Use Digital Ocean instead. I have been using them for years and love it.

    • Ah, Digital Ocean. The world's #1 hideout for spammers and script kiddies. I needed to block their entire IP address range in our corporate firewall because of all the brute force password guessing attempts coming from them.

  • Microsoft quite proudly managed to bogart the earliest shipments of AMD's Milan-X CPUs. If you want an instance with an insane amount of L3, Azure has you hooked up. Milan-X is probably now shipping to some other cloud providers (and may have been for a few months now), but for awhile there, MS was the only player that that them available.

  • "There was some cause for optimism at Oracle with the highest percentage (12 percent) planning to use its cloud, meaning there is every chance its showing in the survey could improve in the coming years."

    I guess those free blow jobs behind the proshop are working. Why, oh why on this cursed planet would anyone with a future want to enter into an agreement of any kind with oracle?

  • Azure is expensive and unreliable. Not that AWS is any better. Cloud services suck. Build your own.

  • AWS has owned this space for a long time, I'm glad to see AWS, Oracle and GCP getting more of the pie. I have had customers who turned down cloud migration strategies based on AWS. Why? They compete with Amazon at some level of business so why feed something that's trying to kill you?

  • Most IT/enterprise people suck, so it's not surprising they gravitate to the provider that runs their compute infrastructure today (Windows).

    They can just forklift their windows shit up to azure and call it a day. Those migrations are easy peasy and now they can be "cloud enabled."

    It's still a good move for them because their capex is lower, and for a lot of them a managed azure infrastructure will be more reliable than what they have now. Hopefully they can jettison some of their staff during the transitio

  • ..when some assholes working for someone like Putin wreck all of it and leave you high and dry.
    Face it, kids: 'The Cloud' was always a troll-meme, you fell for it, and sooner or later you'll pay the price for that -- unless you pull out of it, now.
    Keep your own data yourselves, kids. Don't trust 'The Cloud' to keep it safe.
  • Just saying - you exchange is on Azure.

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