If you talk to customers, all they're using is AWS, and some breadcrumbs of Azure here and there.
I don't know how they're even allowed to present financials this way.
"Azure revenue grew 140% in constant currency with revenue from Azure premium services growing nearly 3x year-over-year" (actual azure it would seem)
Says the guy who worked at AWS.
Our cloud projects are spitted 50/50 across both cloud systems.
Office 365 makes it easy to setup the organisational IT (login based on your own domain, email, storage, document collaboration, chat). Add Power BI if you need fancy (realtime) analytics and charts.
Then you create a private git repository (using the same login) for your startup product and configure continuous deployment using Visual Studio Online and Azure. Most of the Visual Studio Services are node-based now, so it's cross-platform and you can deploy to Linux too.
It's also easy to add other services if you want (Slack, Zoho, Google).
All this is managed with a single login, paid with only two bills (Office 365 and Azure are separate). The Azure bill can be lowered if you get into BizSpark.
This all saves a lot of work, a single person can create and manage a very advanced infrastructure without too much effort.
> bad stability problems
The cloud is inherently unstable. If you have this problem it means that your architecture isn't ready for the cloud. This is why software developers are interested in consensus/fault-tolerance in the first place. Azure might be more unstable but at the end of the day the degree of stability is completely moot. If your software isn't designed for the cloud bad things will eventually happen. It doesn't matter if it takes hours, minutes, or days.
That is the reason we chose Azure: Reliable Actors/Services are a huge boon when it comes to writing software that correctly deals with cloud conditions because they are architectural patterns that are built for it.
This is why Netflix uses chaos monkey[1]. Even the Azure SDK ships with a chaos monkey script. If fault tolerance is not a concern of yours then cloud should be your very last concern. We tried slapping on-premise architecture on the cloud (evaluating AWS, RackSpace and Azure) and we had some degree of stability problems across all of them.
I'm a bit torn. I like Azure, the interface is much nicer than other cloud providers in my opinion, the hosted SQL works well for my needs, being able to run for free is very nice... I'm loving the grouped SQL billing. Basicly, instead of paying seperately for each SQL database you host, you can pool all of your databases together and they'll share a billing pool. So, if one of your customers needs less performance and the other happens to use more, there's no change in what you pay.
But I have encountered stability and speed issues, especially in the beginning. Not on the VM's themselves, mind you, just in the management side of things. Most of these issues seem to stem from the backends, the frontend is pretty slick but it can only do so much when the response time of backends is so slow. Also, it's a bit ridiculous to get an unknown error when you try to add an endpoint to a firewall, because the previous endpoint operation (Adding a different endpoint) was still in progress.
Nowadays it seems to have stabilized and improved a lot and I'm hopeful it will continue to get better.
Anyhow, Microsoft's revenue is exploding in this space mostly because it lumps in Office 365; not really because of Azure itself, which I think is a great product. Azure has a few short falls that are annoying...still preferable to AWS though.
AWS is still very popular with extremely popular apps which drive its revenue lines. Netflix, Tinder, etc all use AWS. However from my experience with Azure they could lower their cost if they had Azure installs, AWS likes to keep instances up and spinning which eats into your costs (and they are enormous) Azure has better auto-scaling and it shows. I can't bare to imagine how much Amazon makes off of Netflix's AWS usage, you'd think they'd want to get off of their competitor's platform...but I guess it costs a lot to migrate.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/cloud-surface-are-th...
It's very clearly not inflated. Azure is the #2 competitor to AWS at this point. Their quarterly results have been telling the tale of this build-up for the past two years.
AWS just grew by nearly 70%, and is quite a lot larger than Azure. It's not surprising that Azure would continue to grow so fast.
There seems to be a lot of confusion here about the Microsoft report. Nowhere in that report did they split out Azure sales, only "commercial cloud" ($9.4b annual run-rate) and "intelligent cloud" ($6.3b sales). The sole thing they were specific about regarding Azure, is 140% sales growth.
That said, in the past I have also used AWS and Google cloud services a lot, and I don't really have strong opinions about which features of these three services that I like best.
One thing that I do have a strong opinion on is the extremely high value of Office 365 for $99/year for the family plan. Everything works fine. We use just a bit of OneDrive storage but having all of the apps run on all of our devices is useful. On Linux, I just use the web versions.
