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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

The European public sector is moving into the cloud and we’re picking either Amazon or Azure.

Azure is really far ahead on security compliance with EU regulation, perhaps mostly on the image side of things though. But that’s important too, because when I ask our data protection officer and our lawyers which way to go, they point to Azure.

Which is great and bad. I really, really like Microsoft and Azure is awesome for .Net. Only we’re doing less and less .Net, and more and more of the development pool I have to chose from in hiring situations live in AWS.

Our main cloud will continue to run in Azure, because that’s where our 365 platform is, it’s where our IT crew is certified and Microsoft has been a good partner for decades. But I do want the option for us to use smaller software houses that are AWS only to develop minor systems that we operate in AWS ourselves as well. I think this will help AWS in that regard.

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It's a bit of a concern that the only alternative Europeans really have are all american at a time where those are seen not so much as friendly by the public at large but the lesser of two evil when compared with what Alibaba is offering.

The data is kept in Europe, Microsoft is especially accommodating in that regard, but with both AWS and Azure there are special plans that open up when your sector spend billions.

So not only is the data kept in Europe, it’s also kept on instances that are separated from the rest of AWS and Azure and we can physically visit our specific hardware in their data enters. Hardware which only runs our stuff.

This is one of the reasons we don’t use google, because they don’t offer this. I’d love to use firebase for instance, but not if I can’t be sure citizen data is absolutely safe.

Almost everything they are doing could be lifted and shifted to generic VPS hosts, but no... everything has to be "cloud based", meaning they have to be rearchitected to accomodate the fragility and inherent flaws of that paradigm; namely that you have no control over your physical comms or who is accessing your hosts.

It could be, but it’s more expensive.

We killed the local datacenter a decade ago when we started renting iron to house our own cloud. The majority of our systems still operate on VMs in that setup, but even that is more expensive than going full Azure/aws. We don’t, because a lot of our legacy systems wouldn’t run in the full cloud and if we need a SQL cluster on our own internal network anyway, then we might as well use it. Though, we’re nearing the point where a DB cluster in Azure will be considered our own network.

Then there’s the stuff we can’t do, like spin up 5000 servers on demand. Say we train some ML to find something specific missing from millions and documents. With Azure we can call Microsoft and plan to execute this, and they’ll give us exactly the resources we need for exactly how long we need it, and you just can’t beat that.

So it’s a cost-benefit thing. By going Azure and AWS, we get to spend more money on our primary function, which isn’t IT.

What kind of patterns do you have that renting iron is more expensive than Azure/AWS? That seems counter-intuitive.

It's not the ML itself, it's the ability to quickly store large amounts of data and troll through them in a few hours and then shut everything down and never use it again.

One example is the case files I told you about. It's basic image recognition really, but it's millions of poorly scanned pages. 10 years ago, we would've gone through it by hand, and it would've taken 8-12 full time employees 3 months to do it.

Now we can have one PHD student do a 2-3 month training project that he/she uses for their research, and we have an algorithm that can go through the case files in 5 hours, provided we rent enough iron to do so. With AWS or Azure that's not a big problem, depending on size you can do it on-demand, but we had to call Microsoft and prepare 5000 server instances when we did it. That was some years ago by the way, so maybe it's on-demand now. Anyway, they went through the case files in 5 hours, and had a lower error margin than our employees would have had.

After those 5 hours, you shut everything down. There is really nothing comparable to that. You can certainly do that without moving other things to AWS or Azure, like I said, but it's often the financially solid decision.

And what's the problem with it exactly? Our own internal network has been breeched more than once, our Azure instances have never been hacked.

If all you’re doing is hosting stuff on VMs, then yes you can do it on VPS hosts. But if you take advantage of the managed services and you do it correctly, you can save money on managing infrastructure and you can develop a lot faster.

at large enough scale, VPS hosts are just as fragile. physical comms or access is really about the same on a cloud host as anywhere else. good luck getting something like IAM on a VPS provider. you can totally run off a VPS. as long as you have a server reliability team as good as a cloud service provider. and a management console as good as a cloud vm manager. and a way to grant access, and monitor, and grow on demand, and etc.

Indeed, which is why this CV padding "cloud migration" nonsense in various sectors I've seen is antithetical to the benefit of the business and entirely pushed by a need to transform for no particular reason, for the most part.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, but my opinions are my own.

I have built quite a few Azure services, most of which are written in Python or Java and running on Linux.

I also have plenty of .NET Core code running, but the non-.Net experience is just as good as the .NET one.

> I have built quite a few Azure services, most of which are written in Python or Java and running on Linux.

Is this supposed to be a differentiator?

And just the opposite, the .Net Core experience and tools are just as good on AWS as the none .Net Core languages.

Now .Net Framework on AWS is a completely different beast.

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