Versatile software engineer with a background in .NET consulting and CMS development. Working on regaining my embedded development skills to get more involved with IoT opportunities.
Say what you will about Microsoft, they are brilliant at marketing Azure. It's the most expensive service, yet they still pull in an impressive number of customers. I think that the incentives they give to MSDN subscribers and startups manage to get people hooked really quickly. Either your company leverages the benefits effectively as an investment, or a couple programmers decide to start messing around with them and come back to the office after a fun weekend with a ton of new ideas.
Microsoft also did a wonderful job taking advantage of their existing partner channels. If you can convince someone to buy Dynamics, you can convince people to buy Azure credits in their sleep.
Microsoft also does a great job with evangelism and leading companies towards cloud confidence. Maybe it's just because I worked for Microsoft shops most of my life, but I don't see the other companies spending as much time figuring out why people aren't taking advantage of Azure incentives and letting Microsoft developers or partners gently lead teams ready to take the leap.
Amazon has the most stuff hands down, but the documentation is pretty worthless. It's hard (for me at least) to keep track of what all of the products are.
IAM keys are amazing at security, in principle. But I imagine 95% of Ops staff aren't taking the time they need to revoke rights from IAM roles...it's so much easier to just click All in one or two places and be done with it. Although really they should be spending their time figuring out how to automate IAM role generation
GCP still attracts more of a fringe crowd. If you like Python, Rust, and Go, you're going to feel right at home.
My instinct has always been to use Azure because that's what I am most familiar with, but more and more often, I am finding cloud totally inappropriate for the use cases I encounter. I've never worked at a company bigger than 100ish people. We don't need the ability to massively scale resources on a global level. Cloud is brilliant...the licensing model getting absorbed into the cost of the compute resources makes it way less apparent that you are paying a lot more in licensing fees. Case in point: Look at what it would cost you to license pfSense for a year or two on top of buying some badass hardware to virtualize it versus what it would cost in Azure or AWS with the recommended compute resource size.
A lot of cloud infrastructure is falling behind. You need to know what your vendor is running underneath the hood and when they are planning to upgrade it again. I think we've seen some improvement over the past 12-18 months, but there was a point where the vCPUs you were rentingt were less powerful than professors from several generations back. If you didn't need the scaling and redundancy, you vould have had a server farm at the fraction of the cost.
My opinions on teh cloudz:
Microsoft also does a great job with evangelism and leading companies towards cloud confidence. Maybe it's just because I worked for Microsoft shops most of my life, but I don't see the other companies spending as much time figuring out why people aren't taking advantage of Azure incentives and letting Microsoft developers or partners gently lead teams ready to take the leap.
Amazon has the most stuff hands down, but the documentation is pretty worthless. It's hard (for me at least) to keep track of what all of the products are.
IAM keys are amazing at security, in principle. But I imagine 95% of Ops staff aren't taking the time they need to revoke rights from IAM roles...it's so much easier to just click All in one or two places and be done with it. Although really they should be spending their time figuring out how to automate IAM role generation
GCP still attracts more of a fringe crowd. If you like Python, Rust, and Go, you're going to feel right at home.
My instinct has always been to use Azure because that's what I am most familiar with, but more and more often, I am finding cloud totally inappropriate for the use cases I encounter. I've never worked at a company bigger than 100ish people. We don't need the ability to massively scale resources on a global level. Cloud is brilliant...the licensing model getting absorbed into the cost of the compute resources makes it way less apparent that you are paying a lot more in licensing fees. Case in point: Look at what it would cost you to license pfSense for a year or two on top of buying some badass hardware to virtualize it versus what it would cost in Azure or AWS with the recommended compute resource size.
A lot of cloud infrastructure is falling behind. You need to know what your vendor is running underneath the hood and when they are planning to upgrade it again. I think we've seen some improvement over the past 12-18 months, but there was a point where the vCPUs you were rentingt were less powerful than professors from several generations back. If you didn't need the scaling and redundancy, you vould have had a server farm at the fraction of the cost.
thanks for sharing, Scott!