Microsoft Makes It Harder To Avoid Azure 164
itwbennett writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a handful of hybrid cloud services that make it easy for businesses to start using Azure in a small way. What struck blogger Nancy Gohring about the announcement was 'how deeply Microsoft is integrating Azure into other products,' with the intention of moving long-time customers onto Azure in ways that are hardly perceptible to them."
What is old is new (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone leasing time to run their applications and access their data. Like it or not, welcome back to the mainframe age folks, just with more shine and color.
WTF is Azure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, I don't use any Microsoft products so I have no idea what Azure is supposed to be. A small description or at the very least a link to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] should have been at the beginning of your text, itwbennett.
Two simple steps to avoid being locked into Azure (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Do not use Microsoft products
2) Rinse and repeat
Don't tell me it's unavoidable because that's bullshit. There is always a choice, you are just too comfortable and/or inflexible to use an alternative.
Trainwreck waiting to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
Who in their right mind would throw down that kind of recurring cash for Azure?
Modern hardware is insanely capable, reliable and cheap.
More to the point, who would bet that kind of cash, and their corporate health and/or reputation, on Microsoft? Case in point, the 7 hour outage [wikipedia.org] on the London Stock Exchange, blamed on Microsoft's Tradelect electronic trading platform. Microsoft was trying to ramp the system up to 10,000 messages/second at that point, a pitifully small number compared to contemporary platforms based on Linux. Not only was Microsoft unable to achieve even remotely respectable performance, they were unable to design and implement a system that could resist catastrophic failure, or when it did fail, bring it back up in less than a day. One can reasonably ask, did Microsoft ever test the failure modes of this system, even once? And what does this say about the efficacy of the .NET + MSQL database platform this was built on?
As a direct result of this incident, LSE decided to replace the Microsoft system with a Linux-based platform developed in Sri-Lanka, presumably by competent engineers not harrassed by the likes of Steve Ballmer.
What are the chances of the Tradelect fiasco playing out again on Microsoft's cloud platform? I would say, virtually 100%. Everybody who wants the equivalent of having their business model towed back to shore after suffering the Microsoft effect [wikipedia.org], please raise your hand and repeat: please, can I have some more of that!
Re:Options are good but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Control of your own data, and lock-in to a single solution is a different matter.
Actually, I think this is what TFA is about. Buy part of your infrastructure from Microsoft and you'll find yourself sliding towards Azure. The people who have a good handle on their IT operations might be able to avoid this. But it appears that the target is those who just trust the Microsoft brand without a plan in place. Microsoft products are a lot like roach motels. Once the data goes in, it never comes out again. 'Out' being to a non Microsoft platform.
On the cost front your comment misses the mark completely.
Maybe, maybe not. This is how drug dealers work. The stuff they sell to the school kids is cheap. Once they are hooked, the price goes up.
Same tactics for lots of businesses (Score:4, Interesting)
As they say, if you're not leading you're following. By doing these kinds of tie-ins, MSFT is trying to position themselves as innovative but Azure, while good isn't on par with other Cloud services that cost less and deliver more. What'll be really sad is when customers realize that MSFT will start locking them out of using other Cloud solutions because they "cause problems with Windows Server" or "We don't support the use of product x on an untested Cloud solution." That is the way this usually pans out and eventually if you want to use MSFT Server products with "Cloud" that will mean Azure. Usually after that the anti-trust hawks start suing, so I have 2015 in the pool when Amazon, Rackspace and a couple of other Cloud providers sue MSFT for anti-competitive practices.
Re:Cloud OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Put down the tinfoil hat and join the real world. You haven't got a citation because it's only something you want to believe and has no basis in reality. What's next, claiming that Linux has a backdoor for the NSA and that Linus Torvalds is on their payroll?
If something like what you claim existed Snowden would have dumped it along with the rest. It would have been revealed and Microsoft stock would have taken a massive multi-billion dollar hit from the news. All that kind of talk does it make you sound like a crazy conspiracy theory nut.
icloud runs on Azure.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Last i checked Apple actually uses azure for some of its cloud offering. It's been that way since 2011.. or maybe longer..