Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions.
Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put their deployments on general cloud services- which is not what the license was intended for. The license was intended for fixed, outsourced bare metal hardware.
Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact cloud services exist and you're going to need a specific license if you want to run the software on the cloud. Now, apparently this author finds this surprising, but given that the license he's complaining about is an "on premises" license it sounds more like MSFT were being generous by letting customers use the licenses on outsourced hardware, and never intended it to be carte blanche for running your "on premises" license in the cloud - which is very obviously not on your premises.
What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.
You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article.
But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host.
Microsoft sold licenses that could be used this way, customers used them this way, and now Microsoft wants to double-dip asking their customers to pay twice just to actually use their already owned licenses.
> What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.
That's not what is happening. People are buying Windows Server licenses and running them on compute that they rent from AWS. Until this change, that was completely inside the terms of Windows Server licenses (if for no other reason that they've been pushing hypervisor-based Windows Server virtualization for almost ten years).
Why is it okay for Nvidia to disable parts of a fully working chip in order to sell it as a more popular and cheaper part? Why is it okay for them to disable features in the PC vs Workstation drivers on the same hardware that you bought?
Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC?
> Voting with your wallet would be not using anything
That's RMS thinking. If you don't mind, I'll expand on it.
Voting with your wallet includes not paying into third party workarounds because their existence depends on the bad actors to exist (in some cases).
I have read literature from Stallman essentially supporting piracy of closed-source, proprietary products without saying it directly. This is more impactful in the software realm where you are not still giving hardware sales, but that is his stance.
However, I think NVIDIA is still leading the industry (AMD is catching up fast, but still lags behind) and I want to support their hardware development. However, I make it clear what kind of relationship I expect from them by virtualizing my Geforce instead of buying a Quadro. I also support open-source driver initiatives and abhor NVIDIA's practice of not releasing hardware schematics if they aren't going to open source the driver. It's a complicated issue.
As I mentioned in a sister comment, it's far more nuanced than that. NVIDIA makes the better card for the money, so they get my hardware sales. That's where it ends, however, as I do not partake in their ridiculous licensing scheme. If and when AMD finally catches up, I have no problem making the switch. That is voting with my wallet.
Well, there's "okay" in the legal/contractual sense and there's "okay" in the customer-friendly, long term interests of the company. This move may be the former, but not the later, and MS seems to be banking on gaining more revenue for these licenses & switches to Azure than they lose when some customers decide to stick with AWS but move away from Windows. Either way, some group of customers, however small, will choose to move away from Windows, so their long term market share will be smaller. Is this "okay"? Depends on which way MS has placed its bets.
My read on this is that this is really "price simplification". If you want to run Windows on the big public clouds, you used to have three options:
(1) rent a VM with a license bundled into the per-minute/per-hour rate
(2) bring-your-own-license on "dedicated hardware"
(3) pay for software assurance
Looks like Microsoft is now phasing out (2), so now basically anyone who isn't large enough to have software assurance has only one price: the all-inclusive per-vm per-hour/minute rate.
Yeah, pointing to annoying, anti-competitive, customer-unfriendly practices the happen to exist doesn't make them "okay". It only means companies aren't prohibited by law/contract from doing them. Only in that sense are they "okay"
Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything.
There used to be this belief that things are worth as much as the cost to produce them + some margin for the maker. And things were made so they will benefit their consumers.
Unfortunately more and more companies these days look for ways to get not what something is worth but to get from consumers as much as possible, to squeeze them like lemons.
It's a business decision which will make them more money.
In Universe A they sell only the most powerful version of the product for 1x price and them make some money.
In Universe B they sell the most powerful for 1x AND a slightly less powerful version for 0.9x price and they make MORE overall profit.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There are customers who will want to pay less and not need the most powerful product.
I fail to see how the company in Universe B is morally worse than those in Universe A. One could argue they are superior, in that they offer more choices.
Exactly right. It is acceptable to argue that the pricing is too high and unfair. But to say the structure itself is wrong isn't correct.
Breaking up the total price of a product by it's component features and then creating variants of the sold product with certain features enabled vs disabled and hence having different total prices is one fair way of create products that are tailored to customers needs.
When pricing individual features, the prices may not correlate relative to each other. There may be factors like which features are most used by which segment of customers and how valuable the feature is to that segment customer and hence how much they are willing to pay.
Demanding that all the features should be sold at the lowest total cost doesn't make sense. We don't do this in any other domain.
"Moral" is a loaded word to throw in here. I wouldn't use that term. Customer-unfriendly etc. I think fit better. And if we're positing hypothetical universes, let's a Universe C: They give customers the faster version that doesn't cost them any more, and as a result they build more brand loyalty and good will, leading to more sales, market share, etc.
But profits are somewhat besides the point: I'm saying simply that some policies are not customer friendly. Whether or not you consider that to be good or bad may very well depend on whether you are a customer or a shareholder.
> Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything.
Even if that were true, so what? Some customers are willing to trade less features for less money. It doesn't matter that other features are present but disabled. Those customers got exactly what they paid for. They're not getting cheaped out on.
One thing is trading features for money, the other is artificially crippling the product just so you can release a cheaper version. For what, to justify unreasonably high price for complete version?
The second part sounds kinda like “They don’t know they got screwed, so it’s completely fine”.
They didn't get screwed. They paid for X features. That's not getting screwed. The fact that +Y features are turned off is of absolutely zero consequence.
This is like the trolley problem of software licensing:
Scenario 1: Product has 3 features at x Price. New license is created with 4 features at price x+y
Scenario 2: Product has 3 features at x+y Price. Slimmed down license is created for a product 3 features at x price.
People applaud the former order, and cringe at the latter, but (at least in this artificial description, after the second option is available, the scenarios are equivalent. But something about loss aversion seems to trigger a moral sentiment.
Cost of production is a big factor. Economic theory generally holds that in a competitive environment over a decent period of time, prices will fall to just about the marginal cost of production. Think of the commodification of the PC in the late 90's/early 00's. Highly competitive environment drove prices to just a hair over costs. However, at least one company, Apple, held a very customer-friendly stance (not to mention good marketing) and was able to charge a decent amount above that as a result. (In some ways the good marketing was spreading the message of their customer-friendly stance)
If you are pricing it at cost plus, yeah, it can be worth near-ish the cost of production. Not things with assosciated costs like rnd, but think some of spare parts, for example.
Key error in your argument: "would not cost them anything."
Of course they would lose profit on the customers that would pay for X instead of .8X. "if i can buy the same hardware at 20% less cost why would I buy it at the full cost?"
It's perfectly ok. There is no harm here. We do not need morality police for a voluntary business deal where you have complete freedom and choice to purchase a product.
Regarding Nvidia, is this just a straight disable of full-function chips? Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.
In my case, NVIDIA released a "bug" in the driver years ago which disabled the ability of Geforce cards to run in virtualized environments.
They have not addressed or fixed this "bug", and instead point consumers to their ridiculously expensive Quadro cards, which are prohibitively expensive not to mention overkill for most consumers.
This "bug" can be fixed in some hypervisors, for example in KVM, by spoofing certain system information.
> ... is this just a straight disable of full-function chips?
> Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.
If one is able to get a less expensive, albeit less powerful, device for cheaper, is there any difference?
Right, take the Intel i486 chips. Intel sold 486SX, and 486DX chips, plus a 487DX. Now, as far as an end user was concerned, the 486DX was a CPU as you'd think of it today with integrated FPU (relatively novel at the time in desktop) the 486SX was missing an FPU (still fine to run workloads that were at the time predominantly integer only) and the 487DX was an upgrade to make your 486SX have an FPU
But that was never what was really going on, all these were the same CPU design, except that when yield rates for the FPU weren't so good Intel disabled it and sold those as the 486SX. When sales of the 486SX outstripped supply of dodgy FPU 486DXs Intel removed the FPU altogether from new ones. Meanwhile the 487DX wasn't "upgrading" anything, it just disabled the 486SX and replaced it with a full CPU.
A customer is buying X features for Y dollars. It doesn't matter if certain other features are there and disabled, because that's not what the customer paid for.
Software does this all the time as well. Say you get the first three levels of a game for free. You have to pay to get an unlock code for all ten levels. Is it unfair that you really got the whole game for free and that you are being kept from accessing it unless you pay?
If you get the features you pay for, then the transaction was legitimate. Fin.
If one wishes to price like that, they do it from the start. We have more than enough history to show that you don't offer customers something for one price scheme and then change it in the middle to get even more money out of them. It doesn't work and only causes problems.
What irks me about this is I like to ride as close as I can to the fantasy of SDE == 8 hours of problem solving.
Meetings, sprint ceremonies, interruptions I've come to deal with as baggage that comes with the territory. But when I have to blow the dust off my olde Microsoft Licensing Nits and Pitfalls Tome and play license-lawyer again, that really sucks the life out of me.
Windows Server is a great product and I want to pay great money and use it without worrying about where in the cloud it's floating. Why even cut a distinction about what kind of machine is hosting your product, virtual or metal? Nevermind even talking about who owns that machine being an issue.
> Windows Server is a great product and I want to pay great money and use it without worrying about where in the cloud it's floating
If that's the case, just use the windows license that's provided to you when you spin up an instance with your cloud provider. This is only for people using dedicated instances.
Are you arguing against a business being able to update their licenses, as they see fit, to adjust to major changes in the market? That doesn't seem reasonable.
As a consumer, if you don't like it, you can always migrate away from Windows.
> But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host.
Because they wrote and own the software you are interested in licensing. If you don't like the license, don't run the software.
Microsoft has the leverage that open source projects like Redis and Elastic wish they had on AWS (and why those open source projects are updating their licenses to combat AWS' profiting off of their work).
As someone else has mentioned, Apple restricts how and where you can run OSX/MacOS. I don't think thats going to stop people from using OSX/MacOS out of principle (typo corrected).
According to most peoples definitions if you can't do what you please with it or make a derivative product and do what you please with THAT I cannot imagine why you believe its free as in speech anymore.
It's worse than you're describing- Microsoft is charging one licensing price if you're on their cloud but another price if you're on someone elses. This anticompetitive behavior is what we expected from Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s.
You say it like that and it sounds bad, but you say it like "Microsoft offers a discount if you bundle cloud and license spending" and it sounds pretty fair to me.
Goodness knows there are a lot of other cloud options than Microsoft. If you're tightly coupled with one vendor you're gonna be at their mercy.
When you have a monopoly on Y, it is not fair to offer a discount on a bundle of X and Y. The problem is not the general idea of a discount bundle, it's leveraging a monopoly to get more business in a different market.
Can you name a business that doesn't offer you a discount commensurate to the amount you spend with them? Why wouldn't Microsoft give you a discount on your windows license if you're also using their cloud?
This practice is a form of "bundling" in the antitrust sense, and while it is not inherently illegal different rules apply to such behaviors if you've been found to have monopoly powers.
They do have a monopoly on Windows licenses, and they are trying to leverage that to sell cloud hosting of Windows servers, which they do not have a monopoly on. In this case Microsoft's defense would probably be "Windows is not the only OS available", which may or may not be accepted by a government (it's gone both ways for them in the past).
Azure Hybrid Benefit is for licenses with Software Assurance. The change that the blog post keeps railing on about is for licenses without Software Assurance.
‘Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions .. some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware’
Seems perfectly clear to me:
“Microsoft has introduced a preview of Azure Dedicated Host, which provides a physical server hosted on Azure and not shared with other customers.”, ref
Microsoft has introduced it's own dedicated hardware.
“Alongside this new service, the company has made licensing changes that will make Microsoft software more expensive for some customers of AWS, Google and Alibaba.”, ref
And made it more expensive for “running Windows Server on any cloud that isn’t Azure”.
If your license differentiates between running on a physical box of my own versus someone else's physical box (cloud computing), I don't want to use your software.
I think you're going to run out of options pretty quickly outside of what Amazon writes in-house then. The alternative isn't a sustainable business model.
I kinda agree, but then again why even make a difference between those two things? I get how you want to differentiate between home and business use, but this...
Also as they pretty much turned a blind eye on this practice for years now they just created the perception that it is fine and legal. I absolutely can't blame people for getting mad at them changing their minds now. Either have a clear stance on it right from the start or deal with the backlash. That is, we still have to wait and see if/how much there'll actually be...
Slightly related to this: it was quite remarkable how long it took Microsoft to understand and accept that one OS install doesn't equal one (physical) machine. Even back in the old days when you just wanted to have a master hdd image to clone to all your workstations there was no official way to do this. Third party tools did voodoo black magic after dumping the image to the hdd. So it's not that surprising it took them so long to react here... Dynamically spinning up as many identical Linux VMS as you want and have them execute some container? Maybe network boot them? Crazy talk in Windows land for a long time.
I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade).
The thought process being, as everyone virtualizes their compute to the cloud, any cloud, make it easy for them to stay on their existing Windows license. Well, they couldn't prevent it anyway. So in fact, they actively encouraged it. This way you don't lose that customer forever (as they transition to Linux or other, but generally Linux). The customer is happy, the move is endorsed by MS, they only have to deal with the one transition and they can decide freely on cloud provider, which feels like freedom. Part of the plan being, hope the customer moves their Windows workload to Azure, with an expectation that it would be least-effort.
Now that the bulk of the shift (to cloud) has occurred, differentiate the licensing.
IMHO this is a trumped up complaint about change. Microsoft did in part bring this uproar upon themselves by making the scheme complicated, but at least part of that was unavoidable (given that they want to make moar monies).
Please note:
> Multi-tenant hosts are not affected.
which is likely most uses. It's only dedicated hosting (and only for "listed providers") that are affected. And Azure is included. The apparent escape valve of Azure Hybrid Benefit isn't much of one ... you have to pay for the AHB and you have to have software assurance. The same as on the other providers. This is how they will (rightly) escape any claims of anti-competitive behavior.
In a nutshell, for customers that care enough to want a dedicated (vs multi-tenant) host, which BTW Azure hasn't ever had before, that's the kind of customer that cares enough to closely mind their licenses. MSFT is now going to insist on collecting the annual software assurance fee from those customers. This is probably motivated by the ease of spinning up new cloud instances, vs new on-premise hardware. With cloud, it's oh so easy to exceed your paid-for license usage. At least if they force the software assurance fees, they collect a larger fraction of fees.
TFA is a low information rant, and even declares itself as such:
> The longer version is complex, nuanced, and exceeds my attention span
That makes it even more anti-competitive, since it makes it readily apparent that they're leveraging one area (Server Licensing) to artificially stimulate another (Enterprise Cloud vis-a-vis Azure Vs. Azure).
Hopefully the US Government doesn't deem Windows Server a monopoly or they're in deep trouble.
I wouldn't think Windows Server is anywhere close to a monopoly, unless you define it narrowly, like Windows Server is a monopoly for Exchange installs or something like that.
Sorry, I'm not following why from a licensing perspective it matters if you are running on a bare metal server in your office, a virtual environment on a physical server you own in a co-lo, or on virtual servers you "rent" from a cloud provider.
The real question is why companies are still running Windows Servers in the cloud. It is already 50% more expensive to run Windows Server on AWS compared to a Linux based OS, so I can really only justify running Windows Server for legacy applications that are too difficult to migrate. Actually I am happy with this price increase, it will give me some leverage to migrate the remaining applications away from Windows.
I admit my experience is mostly with JS deployed on Linux, but ASP.NET seems like a good framework with awesome tooling. Also using the same language on the frontend and backend is very useful and I consider C# the best option for Windows frontend work.
Not that I'm saying NodeJS backend with Website/Electron frontend is bad, but ASP.NET backend with WPF frontend seems great as well, just with more enterprise-oriented trade-offs, support cycles longer than one year but no cross-platform support (yes, ASP.NET core is a thing now, but that's a very recent development).
And compared to the cost of engineers I don't think many companies are that worried about spending 50% more on infrastructure.
Legacy ASP.NET web pages might be harder to migrate, however, newer web sites can also be implemented using ASP.NET Core MVC. It seems other departments in Microsoft do understand that their code base needs to be able to run on a Linux OS, otherwise they are at risk of losing market share. Even SQL Server can run on Linux now.
It’s not about “difficulty”, it’s that those apps are mostly Windows-only. Until very recently, incentives to build enterprise/professional shrinkwrap applications on platforms that weren’t Windows, were basically non-existent. That’s billions of dollars in software that will never be ported.
When you realize their objective is the commoditization of software and software development to further increase your dependence on their ecosystem (it's not just Windows anymore, it's Azure and the IDE and their other tools), it seems a lot less benevolent. No company worth their salt does anything for free, there's always a reason.
That is a given. Of course every company has the goal of making money.
They really don't stand to gain much by open-sourcing their tools, though, besides developer goodwill, which is something that they sorely needed to remain competitive in today's market.
Plenty of us still have CALS-mares. The Man will use license terms to control what you deploy and where and how - it's more than just a purchase of a Thing that you can use because it comes with FUTURE terms that can change, forever. See also weekend thread on Cisco locking users out of their own hardware.
This is why there is Free software -- free as in choice, not free as in beer -- so users don't get locked in or forced into something other than a simple purchase.
You'd be surprised. When I interview developers in their early 20s, they say Microsoft is great because they created Typescript and VS Code, and now they'll make web devs' lives easier by embracing Chromium.
I once interviewed at a young fintech company that proudly said they're Microsoft-first company (ie they use .net stack, azure, outlook and ms teams etc)
The "old" MS vs the "new" MS really could stand to fade away at this point. Companies, pick anyone you want, have sticks and carrots. MS used to be almost all stick and little carrot, these days they are a lot more generous with the carrots... but that stick is still in the other hand behind their back when the opportunity arises.
I was an exclusive Microsoft developer for almost 20 years until I started doing cloud deployments to AWS 2 years ago. Before then, server costs were someone else's problem. Now I’m doing a combination of .Net Core, Python, and JS/Node.
I realized that everything gets worse when you add Windows to any cloud solution - licensing costs, resource requirements, (I can do at lot with a very small Linux instance, Windows not so much), performance, startup times, easy scripting and automation, etc.
It gives me more of a reason to tell companies to move as far away from Windows on the server as possible.
I still develop on Windows,C#/.Net Core is my favorite language, don’t know much about Linux, and all of my “Linux deployments” are serverless with Docker/Fargate or Lambda.
I don’t have to worry about “server administration”, the one thing that kept me on Windows. We use managed services.
All Windows servers on Azure already have to have "Software assurance". The license T&C for the last few years have been fairly clear you need to pay for software assurance to cloud host.
Are they not simply closing the loophole where direct customers are paying more?
The "loophole" was that you could license a specific host in AWS or GCP and use the "outsourcing" provision to use existing perpetual licenses on that host. My understanding is that now you cannot do that with specific providers. But, if "Spooky23 Outsourcing Services, LLC" rents you a server, you can, but you cannot do it on AWS.
I don't think that AWS/GCP guarantee that you are on a specific host for any period of time, and I think that in many scenarios, you cannot move Windows Server workloads more than once in any 30-day period. I think Microsoft's position is that customers on these platforms are likely breaking that rule.
That said, those same rules apply to ESX and HyperV, and Microsoft doesn't blacklist vMotion because it can violate an agreement. Many people see these sorts of actions as a part of a pattern where Microsoft is leveraging the existing license rights to drive Azure. That's how they are providing Windows Server 2008 extended security updates as well.
I don't understand why anyone would even want to use Windows. You're taking on a huge risk for very little to no benefit. It's not like there's a shortage of engineers familiar with Linux in the world.
Just because you run windows doesn't mean you like it. SQL Server, vendor app requirements etc. A windowless world is about as likely as a paperless bathroom and for the same reasons.
Also, not sure what huge risk you are talking about here besides licensing pricing?
Not the original poster but from experience of running windows on everything for over 20 years the risks are: being treated like a criminal until you prove yourself innocent, unreliable and difficult to automate tooling, half-baked clones of ideologies as a me to proposition rather than a product direction, absolutely no support worth mentioning even when you pay for it in organs, schizophrenic roadmaps which never materialise or turn up half baked, pretending to care about the community while shitting on it with telemetry and products being yanked that you rely on. Then QA so bad that it makes me wonder if there was any. I feel like most of my time and cash investment has been thrown into putting a marketing facade over this steaming pile of feces.
Now there's a pile of legacy on top of Windows which is unavoidable but at this point I couldn't possibly consider building a product from scratch on top of something which has been basically a 20 year long bad trip. I will also push for everything to be moved off their platforms at every available opportunity.
On numerous occasions the pure frustration caused by MSFT has nearly made me quit the industry entirely.
To confirm, everything is greener on the other side. I do that too.
> Also, not sure what huge risk you are talking about here besides licensing pricing?
The many business risks of being 100% tied down to a single provider (Microsoft). Licensing is one, but also what would happen if Microsoft decided to kill off a service that your product depends on? You'd have to invest in finding an alternative and rewriting your software. Or what if Microsoft sells that service to another company which is actually directly competing with you, and then decides to stop providing third party access, or looks at your usage metrics/data to gain a competitive advantage over you. Or maybe Microsoft gets an incompetent CEO which drives the company to bankruptcy, and Windows and all their services you depend on are sold to hundreds of different companies which you now need to deal with.
Building your software on Linux or BSD means you don't have to worry about any of that since you own everything. It's like you're getting vertical integration for free. It's a no-brainer.
You are vastly more likely to have a long, dependable platform when you use Microsoft than almost anything else. They worship backwards compatibility. Being stranded and all-alone on an open source dependency is very possible. You're vastly more likely to be stranded after using a Google open source product. I say all this having used the linux stack for my entire professional career. I prefer linux by a long shot, but Microsoft backwards compatibility is exemplary compared to almost anyone else, including open source.
Both replies to me earlier comment mentioned vendor lock in. Is there any greater vendor lock-in then integrating AWS thousand and one services? Is it really riskier to trust MS to not kill a product then Google? Is the answer really to write everything yourself from the OS up?
I don't disagree that MS could do any of what you mentioned but I'm not sure AWS/GCP etc wouldn't be as likely to as well.
I think you misread my comment. I was talking about Windows, not Azure. As far as I know, Azure lets you run Linux on their machines, so there's no point in using Windows and locking yourself in.
Depends on the app. Legacy LoB / Enterprise stuff is very Windows-centric. For example, think of the huge sub-industry of “component vendors” that service the legacy Visual Basic ecosystem. If your CTO says they want that LoB system _in the cloud_ without rewriting it then you’re in the market for a Windows cloud provider.
I get the legacy part of it, but for new development I don't see the benefit. Even if Microsoft offers to subsidize hosting if you use Windows or one of their services, that obviously would not last forever.
In a situation like this, if you're not willing to take the price hit on the chin in the long term, there's about two options: Change your cloud provider (to Azure) or change your platform (away from windows). It seems MS is betting there will be, on net, more people who take it on the chin &/or switch to Azure. But even if they're right, there will still be some loss of marketshare for those staying with AWS & ditching Windows. This seems like a Bad Thing in the long term, no matter the specifics of other short term gains.
That's why I put in the beginning "if you're not willing to take the price hit on the chin" caveat. Some will be willing to do so, and for good reason if they have workloads that really need windows and specific features of AWS. My point is simply that some people will abandon Windows, and I could be wrong but even if they have some revenue gain in the near term, losing a bit of market share is bad in the long term.
I wonder, if Microsoft did decided to increase the costs of it's product and services what's the best way to that?
To me, that's all that's happening here. And the licenses purchase buy customer in the past weren't intended for Cloud Workloads. Sure, it didn't outline that you CANT use on AWS, GCP, etc. but that wasn't the intent.
Surprised? This is the same company that not long ago was waging a mafia-style Linux patent war against open source verndors. Microsoft only got into the open source game because they had no choice. How long, I wonder, before ASP.Net Core is "optimised" for deployment on Azure even if it can be run on Linux?
The whole "won't somebody think of the poor advocates" angle seems pretty thin to me, tossed in to gin up a little unearned outrage. Did all these advocates all take big pay cuts to leave Amazon, Oracle, Salesforce, etc... to go and preach the gospel of Azure? I doubt it.
Now I am curious, who runs production customer facing apps on Azure? I'm assuming many people do given that Azure is second after AWS in market share or is that really just mostly corporate IT servers?
We do. We're a non-profit, and a few years ago we went cloud-provider hunting. Microsoft was willing to be generous with us in a way that Amazon was not. Not only in terms of non-profit friendly pricing, but also in terms of incidentals -- trainings, related services/pricing, and so on. Amazon offered no concessions at all, so it was kind of a no-brainer for our CTO and board.
So everything we host is Azure. We are a relatively small outfit, but a fair chunk of our 'stuff' is customer-facing. We haven't had any negative experiences yet at all and it's been a few years now.
//Now I am curious, who runs production customer facing apps on Azure? I'm assuming many people do given that Azure is second after AWS in market share or is that really just mostly corporate IT servers?
The government does. Though AWS and IBM are also used. In other words, entries outside the bubble.
we recently adopted a 'far in the upper right hand quadrant' SaaS platform, and learned _after_ we signed that they were 99%+ Azure. And many of the other platforms we auditioned were on Azure as well. I think it's pretty common in the enterprise.
When folks say Azure is just behind AWS what does that mean? I don't see nearly that many Azure large scale workloads or is something else counting as Azure I'm not aware of?
Yes and no. I work on some ASP .NET applications and on a big .net core project.
The .net core project indeed runs fine on Linux in AWS. It's a great success story for us.
The ASP .NET projects I maintain have a budget that doesn't easily allow us to just migrate them to .net core. There are some hairy legacy libs and code in there that would also prove challenging to resolve too.
Yeah, this right here. I work on a MVC 5 app that uses some pretty large legacy libraries that's going to be hard to move from. Some of it is legacy stuff that may or may not have a .NET Core or .NET Standard equivalent. Others like Entity Framework have a Core equivalent that changes some paradigms to be a bit more modern, but ultimately creates a situation where it's not a drop in replacement.
There's also the question of SQL server. It's not so much of an issue when you're dealing with Azure, but SQL server on Linux isn't ready for prime time yet IMO.
Over time what you're implying here is true, but in the short term there are a lot of people stuck on .net Framework and it's difficult to get off of it.
It should absolutely be done, any company with old .net framework solutions that are not actively looking at moving them to .net core is being foolish.
“It should absolutely be done, any company with old .net framework solutions that are not actively looking at moving them to .net core is being foolish.”
If it only were that easy to move to Core. I thought I could sneak that transition into a few projects but there are a ton of little obstacles that make such an effort lots of work.
yep, which is why they should be working on it now.
The fact that you can target .net standard with framework means TODAY you can sequester your framework specific things behind DLL's and put everything else on .net core officially.
I honestly think there's going to be a huge consulting/freelance market for it soon.
I wasn't trying to imply that it's easy, just that everyone should be planning out how to do it so they can do it slowly over the next few years rather than all at once in panic mode.
Props to MS for ensuring the two can live side by side the way they have. It makes the transition a LOT easier if you're smart enough to start it early and let it have a long tail.
MS has not changed strategies since starting .net core. It's on v3, going on v4. If you're still unsure what the future is going to be, you've missed the boat.
I guess that’s true. The .NET framework strategy is pretty consistent. I guess I am still traumatized by the mess they have created with their desktop UI toolkits.
I work in GCP support. I think you would be surprised. Of course Linux is more common, but we still support a lot of customers who use Windows Server, SQL Server, and .NET for production.
Not even close to true. The last project I worked on had a Windows Domain entirely hosted in AWS with Windows server instances including DCs, CAs, SQL servers, etc.
>Three years ago, Mark Russinovich, CTO ofAzure, Microsoft's cloud program, said, "One in four [Azure] instances are Linux." Then, in 2017, it was 40 percent Azure virtual machines (VM) were Linux. Today, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, said in an interview, "it's about half now, but it varies on the day because a lot of these workloads are elastic, but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." Microsoft later clarified, "about half Azure VMs are Linux."
Plenty of companies use Azure and MS all the way, media/marketing people think Linux is nerdy and too hard and those nice folks from MS came by and bought them lunch last week, would be rude not to go with them...
Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put their deployments on general cloud services- which is not what the license was intended for. The license was intended for fixed, outsourced bare metal hardware.
Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact cloud services exist and you're going to need a specific license if you want to run the software on the cloud. Now, apparently this author finds this surprising, but given that the license he's complaining about is an "on premises" license it sounds more like MSFT were being generous by letting customers use the licenses on outsourced hardware, and never intended it to be carte blanche for running your "on premises" license in the cloud - which is very obviously not on your premises.
What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.