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Comment by hannibalhorn | Hacker News Reader

$1B/year is quite a bit, would have been 4% of AWS's business. I suspect it will positively impact Azure more but havn't paid much attention to their numbers.

Not that it's relevant, but I actually signed up with Azure a couple months ago just to build an open source project on a cloud copy of Windows 10 with Visual Studio. I still ran into a bunch of problems with licensing type stuff, and wound up getting calls & e-mails from a sales rep. I'm glad there's some decent competition, but definitely prefer Amazon.

Edit: Corrected percentage, thanks to statguy.

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The monetary benefit is one big thing but in the B2B scheme of things , a big success story like this would be very easy to convince other government organisations and government in other countries to adopt Azure if they haven’t moved to the cloud already. It’s the new “No one ever got fired for suggesting IBM”.

Really? Why would a foreign country trust a firm deeply engrained with the US military?

Then again, there are only a few military in the world that need this kind of service, and those countries are highly unlikely to go with foreign entities as provider.

Yes. Other countries, particularly the "five eyes" are already deeply engrained with the US military, and they are rich countries with lots of money.

Five Eyes: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand

Then you have all the other wealthy countries with close ties to the US: Germany, Japan, etc.

Agree that not all countries would do this. But Allies? Also don’t other countries use AWS Gov ( or whatever it is called ) even though it AWS is “deeply embedded” in the US gov scheme of things?

It would not be politically expedient. US allies are mostly democracies consisting of people that don't want to spend on the military if they don't have to, and if they have to, better to spend it domestically instead of giving it to a foreign firm.

Europe have its own fighter, armor, command systems despite being US allies militarily.

Suspect the parent poster was thinking primarily about the other five-eyes. The rest of Europe though... has no great cloud options I can think of for genuine national security stuff.

AWS revenue in Q3 2019 was $9B, so it would be about 4% of AWS's business in terms of revenue.

Ah, I remembered the $8.x B last quarter, but for some reason was thinking that was annual. Thanks for actually looking. :-)

Set up a Datascience Virtual Machine next time. Everything prepackaged (Visual Studio, SQL, Python, Julia, lots of other packages for Datascience) and low cost and no licensing problems to deal with.

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