The coup at AWS was programmable infrastructure. It's building blocks that fit together in the way that software engineers know and love: APIs. Sure there's a sales bro for the pointy haired boss and a console for the IT technician, but the thing is the API. It's going to be used primarily at engineering-driven companies, where "holy shit this is cool" is actually a factor in the decision. Most of those will be startups that flare out, but some will grow up to be tech companies that run very large, very locked-in, very expensive workloads. But an IT manager's only real interest in AWS is trend-following.
Microsoft thrives in a different world. IT managers are dealing with lots of different vendors (MS, VMWare, Dell, local HVAC and security contractors) to run their Windows Server workloads. It's pretty attractive to instead just pay Microsoft. But the nature of the workloads will not change, at least in the short term. It's still about technicians clicking in GUI consoles. I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero. Every business with a traditional IT department will end up with an Azure account, and the Fortune 500 is no exception. But the size of those workloads will scale with the number of enterprise apps they're running (each one its own VM). That won't necessarily grow with those businesses. It may even decline, as shrink-wrapped software for Windows Server is displaced by SaaS companies running on AWS.
> I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero.
I can't speak for anyone else, but we make sure extensive use of the Azure API, both via the 'az' command line tool and through terraform. From what I've heard, read, and had conference calls about, Microsoft treats the API as a first-class citizen.
Same here. Not to derail OP's point on how the use cases are different, but us developers are all trained on using APIs with our cloud backends by now. Obviously Azure produced something of similar quality to the awscli.
It provides roughly thee same APIs, but the cultural context it sits in is different. The APIs are there for parity with AWS, not as the key value proposition.
It is true, many of the companies I have worked for the last few years is using Azure and only the UI. No one uses the API/SDK. They hire devops cloud consultants to click on the UI, not to use the API to tie everything together.
The equivalent of “AWS Consultants” who are just a bunch of old school netops people who passed one multiple choice certification. All they can do is duplicate an on prem infrastructure on AWS doing a lift and shift and costing their client more for the privilege.
That doesn’t mean the APIs aren’t first class citizens.
If you go watch Channel 9 (Official MS) training videos, outside of the let’s get setup videos, the devs and presenters are almost always using the APIs to interact with Azure either through Powershell or Visual Studio.
The coup at AWS was programmable infrastructure. It's building blocks that fit together in the way that software engineers know and love: APIs. Sure there's a sales bro for the pointy haired boss and a console for the IT technician, but the thing is the API. It's going to be used primarily at engineering-driven companies, where "holy shit this is cool" is actually a factor in the decision. Most of those will be startups that flare out, but some will grow up to be tech companies that run very large, very locked-in, very expensive workloads. But an IT manager's only real interest in AWS is trend-following.
Microsoft thrives in a different world. IT managers are dealing with lots of different vendors (MS, VMWare, Dell, local HVAC and security contractors) to run their Windows Server workloads. It's pretty attractive to instead just pay Microsoft. But the nature of the workloads will not change, at least in the short term. It's still about technicians clicking in GUI consoles. I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero. Every business with a traditional IT department will end up with an Azure account, and the Fortune 500 is no exception. But the size of those workloads will scale with the number of enterprise apps they're running (each one its own VM). That won't necessarily grow with those businesses. It may even decline, as shrink-wrapped software for Windows Server is displaced by SaaS companies running on AWS.