At AWS we are a customer, with Azure we found a partner (original) (raw)

We are managing over ten thousand nodes in our AWS environment. Tens of millions of files in S3, and we are processing billions of rows of data every hour in Redshift. Everything works swimmingly... most of the time. But when it doesn't, and once in a while, it won't, we needed a backup plan. It was just one of these scenarios that led us to take a hard look at Azure.

We noticed an issue with a bandwidth monitoring tool we built. The application measures the quality and quantity of available bandwidth. The system worked great for a year and then one day we needed to migrate the cluster. So, we spun up new nodes, and pointed our systems to the new environment. Everything seemed was fine but within a week we knew we had a problem.

We rely on this system to show us the characteristics of bandwidth at a given location. Remote video viewing is at the crux of our business, this tool does a great job at understanding bandwidth quickly and correctly. We run about 100,000 quality and speed tests an hour and test failures began to spike or the system would go completely offline for 10 minutes shortly after the migration.Eleven months of arduous troubleshooting ensued. In our experience, AWS support was great until we had a serious escalation on our hands.

AWS support was great until we had a serious escalation on our hands.

I came across an article about Azure, I figured, what have I got to lose? The folks at Azure were more than happy to oblige. We built out the system on Azure and ran into a similar issue, but, there was a big difference, they really brought in highly skilled talent to help, and kept bringing it. We just couldn't get that at AWS. Fast forward 6 weeks, and this very difficult problem was resolved. It required collaboration between my developers and networking engineers, and their top level systems administrators and networking engineers. They were truly a partner.

At the end of the day, Azure wanted our business and they put their engineering team where their mouth was.

Now don't get me wrong, I was and still am a big AWS fan, it is just that, they are so big that we can't get their attention. Trust me, I tried pleading, threatening and everything in between. At the end of the day, Azure wanted our business and they put their engineering team where their mouth was. So now, Azure is getting some of my business, and frankly, I look for ways to move more infrastructure their way. We have a substantial Windows infrastructure and they are very aggressive and creative with regards to pricing. For us, this is critical.

Anyway, give them a shot, especially if you have Windows needs. They want your money and will do everything to earn it. Furthermore, you will save buying your Windows cloud services from them (we checked).

Regarding the photograph, I like to take pictures with my Canon T3i. It has blue and it has clouds, I thought that was appropriate. This picture was taken in Naples Florida, on the beach last year. I have over a thousand shots from those beautiful clouds. This picture just doesn't do that sky justice. I suggest you get down there and look at that sky yourself. You'll be glad you did :)