Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers' cloud products

If you use Azure in any realistic production environments, then it's on you. Even with $100k in free credits, they couldn't convince me to use it for more than a month. It is expensive, the interface is highly user unfriendly and most important of all, their products don't at all seem reliable for production workloads because of stuff like this. Sorry Microsoft, I think you can do much better.

The UI, retail pricing, and reliability reputation are not primary factors for large enterprise IT infrastructure and cloud decision makers. They look at:

1. Executive Support - can you assure me that MSFT will have my back when (not if) the shit hits the fan? Can I count on Satya or Jason Zander calling my CEO to reassure them if we’re working through a catastrophic issue? Because as an executive my career at this company is over otherwise when that happens.

2. Industry and analyst landscape - Which of my competitors / peers use your technology? I won’t be first in the pool. What does Gartner tell me about your company behind closed doors?

3. Competitive - Do any of your divisions compete directly with any of ours? Because I’ll be fired at the next board meeting if they read in the WSJ that we’re funding an adversary.

Cost is negotiable, what is a UI?, and sorry, I don’t care if all of the above is good but Azure isn’t the engineers’ favorite thing. Y’all work for me.

> 3. Competitive - Do any of your divisions compete directly with any of ours? Because I’ll be fired at the next board meeting if they read in the WSJ that we’re funding an adversary.

This is a big point that others in this thread are missing. Amazon is increasingly competing in more and more spaces, and companies are rightly hesitant to get into bed with Amazon when they are a direct competitor. Azure is the only other serious choice, GCP isn't even going to be considered.

Silicon Valley might run on AWS but the rest of non-tech company corporate America runs on Azure (or on-prem still). The IT landscape looks a lot different outside of the SF Bay Area SaaS bubble.