https://medium.com/@wtfmitchel/azure-vs-moores-law-2020-65a6fe67e31b
As a result of undershooting their projected capacity by such a large margin, Microsoft was way off on their capacity projections with Azure and only built roughly 1/3 of the data center capacity that was actually necessary. Consequently, they had to over-provision their existing data centers to the point of tripping the breakers and rapidly fill the gaps with an excessive amount of leased space to meet the demand that they projected. All of which effectively doubled the amount of leased space in their portfolio from 25% to 50%, extended their break-even to nearly a decade, and killed their hopes of profitability any time soon.
While an honest mistake and not being able to foresee the future is forgivable, knowingly omitting a mistake of this magnitude is criminal when considering how much Microsoft is hedging its future on Azure. On top of supplying misleading revenue metrics in their quarterly 10K filings to fortify a position of strength and being second only to AWS, Microsoft seems to be wary about reporting Azure's individual performance metrics or news of these failings that would enable investors to conclude this for themselves. Instead, Microsoft appears to be averaging out Azure's losses with their legacy mainstays that are profitable by reporting its revenue within their Intelligent Cloud container instead of itemizing it.
Previously:
- Azure 'Running out of Internets' in UK South, Starts Rationing VMs
- Azure Stack Will Need Special Sysadmins, Says Microsoft
Related Stories
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Microsoft reckons its forthcoming Azure Stack on-premises cloud needs a special breed of sysadmin to keep it humming.
The company describes that worthy as a " Azure Stack Operator" and says they will be "Responsible for operating Azure Stack infrastructure end-to-end – planning, deployment and integration, packaging and offering cloud resources and requested services on the infrastructure."
[...] True to form, Microsoft will try to monetize these roles: it's flagged a new five-day course titled "Configuring and Operating a Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft Azure Stack" that will debut on September 18th. When, presumably, we'll also learn what it costs to become an Azure Stack Operator and how quickly the certification will expire. ®
There are rumblings that Azure is having capacity issues once again, with customers in the UK South region reporting problems getting new VMs provisioned.
[...] In case there was any doubt as to what the problem was, the message went on: "To ensure that all customers can access the services they need, we are working through approving quota requests as we bring additional capacity online."
According to the update, the capacity constraints apply to the A, BS, Dv2, DSv2, Dv3 and DSv3 series machines in the UK South region. A-series VMs are typically used for development and testing, B-series are similiar[sic], but are geared to short bursts of high CPU utilisation. The D-series are heftier beasts, aimed at running enterprise applications. The 'S' moniker indicates support for SSDs.
Microsoft introduced the Dv3 VM sizes last July, with the cloudy machines featuring up to 64vCPUs and 256GiB RAM. Assuming you can actually provision the things.
Customers are feeling blue about Azure.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Friday October 11 2019, @08:53PM
How cool is that! You can have your Windows desktop (and the life of your business!) on a Microsoft server in a Microsoft data center!
No need to worry about US Tirade Wars cutting off service to you depending on where you live.
And best of all, you can be assured that this will have the same kind of reliability, safety, security, robustness and quality that you have come to expect from the Microsoft and the Windows brand name!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @08:57PM (1 child)
Why am I not surprised? Only this time it is them eating the bill.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jasassin on Friday October 11 2019, @09:30PM
Microsoft definitely made a mistake here. They got even more greedy. I don't blame them, but I sure don't feel sorry for them.
This reminds me of this Facebook libre blockchain deal. They have so much money and they are getting greedy and I think it's going to come back and bite them.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @09:29PM (4 children)
The rust belt dinosaur managed to make more money than the "tech giant" MS. So high tech.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday October 11 2019, @09:51PM (3 children)
I'm not sure GM is a very good comparison to make. They needed $50 billion from taxpayers to stay afloat not too long ago, and couldn't pay back more than $11 billion of that.
They also laid off 14,000 workers last year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @12:32AM
But bah gawd dem quarterlies!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:21AM (1 child)
Will they ever pay it back?
Does this mean the US government now owns GM?
Why not?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @11:01PM
The U.S. invested 51 Billion dollars into the GM bailout. They sold all their stock on Dec. 9, 2013, for 39 Billion dollars, leaving a shortfall of 12 Billion dollars. And no, that money will never be repaid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @09:42PM (1 child)
You couldn't make this shit up.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 11 2019, @10:58PM
Did the author email the findings to the SEC? Nice.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ken_g6 on Friday October 11 2019, @09:50PM
...underestimated the required number of servers in the first place?
https://www.xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by edIII on Friday October 11 2019, @11:49PM (1 child)
They only planned for 640,000 servers?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday October 12 2019, @01:26AM
No one needs more than 640000 servers.
--Bill Gates
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 12 2019, @12:03AM (3 children)
Microsoft has always waited for other people to create stuff, then take it away from them. Microsoft doesn't have a history of creating stuff, or of innovating. Microsoft didn't even create Windows. They bought it off of some guy, then hammered and bludgeoned Windows into the shape they wanted. Or, they just steal what they need. How is Microsoft Java working out?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @12:09AM
Your signature, "We need to eat the babies! - some liberal at an AOC townhall meeting," seems like a modest proposal to me.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:01AM (1 child)
They didn't buy Windows off some guy. Story is much more interesting than that. IBM was the Microsoft at this time and apparently was struggling with an OS for its hardware. Bill Gates had a meeting with them in which he got IBM to *lease* his OS. He left that meeting with a promise to deliver and went to the guy who actually owned DOS and purchased it for less than $100k IIRC. It was literally like purchasing a priceless multi-million dollar antique painting for 50c, all the while taking advantage of their ignorance.
Those are balls that clank :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:16AM
Now doing the same with Linux..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @01:05AM
This takes the out completely. It is time for microsoft to go away and never come back.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:24AM
TCO is a PITA for any 'cloud adviser' trying to get a company to go to the cloud.
It would cost us at least 30% more, resolve a lot of headaches, and just shove them into the budget.
May as well stay as we are and develop our own 'private cloud'. Same thing, less cost, inhouse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @07:48PM
what kind of piece of shit uses azure? people need to boycott any company that hosts with MS cloud or OS.
(Score: 1) by brkpt on Saturday October 12 2019, @08:51PM (1 child)
They are number 2 in the cloud business and as a consultant I've seen a lot of companies building products that weren't feasible before Azure abstracted away so many complexities not just like classic scaling, but resource intense computations such as language processing. Any shortfall in predicting the necessary investment in data centers will be irrelevant considering the future revenue from companies using Azure to speed up development of their products and accepting their resulting vendor lock-in.
Also, putting their cash cow Office into the cloud with new features was a smart move. So many companies depend on Office and there is no competition in that space.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday October 15 2019, @02:05PM
Microsoft Azure is #2 in the cloud business for a simple reason. They offer Windows hosting. One of the few vendors who do. And, Microsoft has begun changing the licensing (sorry I don't remember a link) so that other "windows hosting" cloud providers are at a significant price disadvantage.
If you had a Windows workload to host in the cloud, honestly, what vendor would you go to?
Microsoft is #2 here because they offer something that few others provide.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.