This comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence.
When we find actual astroturfing we crack down on it, but it's not ok to poison the threads by putting that label on views you happen to disagree with.
In enterprise there is two real options for cloud, azure and aws. Both are great, but a lot of us chose azure because we were already Microsoft shops.
Their support is excellent, you pay for it so that’s kind of natural, but if I submit an issue with a high importance rating they’ll be on the phone with me on the hour until it’s solved with no extra cost to me.
From a European perspective Microsoft were the first to adopt EU legislation. They were also the first to offer “private” azure hosting, where your data isn’t held on servers shared with anyone as well as letting you physically inspect your servers at the azure data farm. (Amazon does all this as well now, but they didn’t when we were chosing cloud.)
I’m extremely satisfied with how they operate for enterprise, how they adopt other technologies as first class citizens in their offered stack (we use a lot of python), and how accessible they are. It’s not just for support, if I want something added or changed I can ask them, and often it happens.
I really, really hate windows 10 though, so there is that. :p
Azure is not that great to be honest. Last time I used it (a couple of years ago), it happened to me that my VM was shut down and they sent me an email. Apparently the real hardware it was running in had a problem. That won't happen in AWS, where your VM will be automatically be moved to another server on the fly and you won't even notice.
> That won't happen in AWS, where your VM will be automatically be moved to another server on the fly and you won't even notice.
Uh, what? Literally had that happen to a tiny micro a year back. Fortunately it was quick to recover from (I was using elastic beanstalk at the time) but this happens on AWS.
I'm not defending nor using Azure, but what you described happened to me two years ago on AWS. VM shut down due to hardware failure and I got an email requiring manual intervention from my side (starting the VM).
Microsoft is a company whose three traditional strengths were Windows, Office, and Server. The first is toast and Microsoft lost in mobile, and the second is getting crushed by Google Apps. Power makes companies bad -- Microsoft was bad when they have power, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are bad now that they have power. Microsoft is weaker than they have ever been and thus they are behaving better than they ever have.
