[HN Gopher] Microsoft: Cloud services demand up 775 percent; pri...
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Microsoft: Cloud services demand up 775 percent; prioritization
rules in place
Author : pul
Score : 171 points
Date : 2020-03-29 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| williesleg wrote:
| Gotta get me some MSFT stock.
| gundmc wrote:
| Why would Microsoft be disproportionately affected by this? Are
| we expecting similar decrees from AWS and GCP? Or was Microsoft
| operating with less runway before this began?
| ma2rten wrote:
| My theory is that Amazon and Google are more prepared to handle
| surges because they run some of the largest web properties.
|
| This like every day is Black Friday for Amazon. It's rough, but
| not something they have never dealt with before.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| A huge portion of this has got to be MS's own services, e.g.
| tons of people who normally use Office and are at work are now
| use Office 365 online and doing a ton more videoconferencing
| with Teams.
| rightbyte wrote:
| "Rampant" work from home with Office 365 I guess. I guess most
| of the load is all these Team video calls and VPN services?
| daxfohl wrote:
| Yeah as a member of Azure networking, it's odd: HR is
| communicating we should do video calls for meetings instead
| of just audio, to keep the personal touch, and I'm wondering
| if that's really the best use of our bandwidth. I keep my
| video off anyway.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Imagine thousand and thousand video calls with multiple
| receivers for each transmitter ... over VPN.
|
| I don't use video since I feel weird doing it. Also I don't
| want to do my hair and change from pyjamas.
| jedieaston wrote:
| Office 365 runs on Azure in the same regions other workloads do
| (There's probably some replication going on behind the scenes
| too, since you don't pick your instance), so I'd bet that tons
| of new Office 365 subscriptions in the past month are what is
| causing this, not people deciding to lift-and-shift their app
| workloads because of the virus. Teams adoption has probably
| shot way up too.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Usage went up 40% last week:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/19/21186452/microsoft-
| teams-...
| [deleted]
| breakingcups wrote:
| I imagine companies are flocking to Microsoft's virtual desktop
| solutions more than AWS or Google. It is the most well-known
| provider among managers who need to make a snap decision right
| now on how to have people work from home, if I had to guess.
| [deleted]
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| >> _Why would Microsoft be disproportionately affected by
| this?_
|
| Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft..er IBM. Inertia too.
| empath75 wrote:
| A significant percent of Microsoft's 'cloud' division is office
| and sharepoint and the like. I'm sure thatusage is through the
| roof right now.
| RustyBucket wrote:
| Sharepoint Online runs on separate infrastructure from Azure
| in their own data centers.
| salex89 wrote:
| Working with all three of them, so here's my two cents: 1.
| Mostly traditional, "legacy" companies have been hit hard by
| this. Ones that don't have culture or technology of work-from-
| home. Those companies use some Microsoft products. Also,
| Microsoft has been poaching them heavily, handing out trials,
| bundling licenses and so on. A lot of them don't actually buy
| stuff from Microsoft, but through 3rd party vendors which have
| incentives of their own. Some of the end users don't actually
| want to use AWS, also.
|
| 2. I actually think Microsoft has much less runway. From what I
| understand, AWS has more modern infrastructure and backend, and
| they shuffle resources easily around, between services, and I
| think they have much more in reserve. Microsoft has
| concentrated much more on the sheer number of regions.
|
| 3. Azure has a strange way of handling quotas, if you ask me.
| Up until now, once you provision a VM, it is deducted from a
| quota and stays like that as long as it exists. It has never
| been an issue to actually power it on (unlike AWS), once you
| have it. It's not billed, but we always thought it stays like
| that. Since last week, you can see failures not only when
| provisioning VM's (even within your quota) but also when
| starting them. Nevertheless, I also think a lot of users had
| larger quotas allocated then they actually use. So they just
| started creating more VMs or other resources (because they
| could), and the thing came crashing. I think that's just poor
| planning on Microsoft's side.
|
| But the thing I'm mostly pissed of is the status page. VM's are
| failing left, right and center and everything is nice and green
| on the status page. Once you open a ticket, they send you an
| incident-in-progress report.
| pwarner wrote:
| I think Azure also has more regions than AWS, but yet a
| smaller overall capacity probably, so it's gotta be harder to
| keep space capacity. It's notable the shortages are isolated
| to specific regions. They were possibly small to start and so
| it probably didn't take as much to hit capacity there? Just a
| guess.
| salex89 wrote:
| That's my hunch also... Speaking for someone interested in
| IaaS/VDI, not all instances are available in all regions.
| For example, instances with GPUs are available only in
| North and West Europe. If you need them, and they are out
| of stock, you have no value of any UK or France region.
| sneak wrote:
| > _But the thing I 'm mostly pissed of is the status page.
| VM's are failing left, right and center and everything is
| nice and green on the status page. Once you open a ticket,
| they send you an incident-in-progress report._
|
| Status pages parroting lies in service of marketing should
| incur more liability for companies than they do. How does a
| society discourage vendors from doing things like this?
| ajcodez wrote:
| It should eventually fall under consumer protection laws.
| Failing to report incidents on a status page is like
| failing to mention trans fat on a package label.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| It's more like actively claiming "contains zero trans
| fats!" On the packaging when in fact the product is full
| of them.
| greatgib wrote:
| Good time to remind that 'the cloud is just some else computer'
| ...
| 867-5309 wrote:
| I read and executed but did not write that percentage
| crazygringo wrote:
| Wow.
|
| First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven
| primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing
| streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on
| Azure?), or what.
|
| But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization
| rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it
| "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers
| already have locked-in prices contractually so that raising
| prices has little effect. But I'd always thought that with AWS's
| spot pricing and so forth, that auction-style dynamic pricing was
| a core feature of clouds.
| pwarner wrote:
| AWS spot prices are rising last 3 weeks.
| gpm wrote:
| Is there a graph somewhere that shows by how much?
| p2t2p wrote:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-
| sp...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in
| place rather than simply raising prices
|
| Do you realise that it's potentially illegal to increase prices
| based on market demand during a crisis?
| closeparen wrote:
| Right. It's important to the public that scarce goods instead
| by allocated by willingness to stand in line. What does
| standing in line mean for a corporation that could be
| anywhere in the world? Maybe some kind of proof-of-work
| scheme for the CEO or majority owner?
|
| Azure could service VM creation requests in the order of
| their creation, but "take a number" doesn't work as well. The
| opportunity cost of what else you could be doing with the
| time spent waiting in line is the "price" that allows the
| market to clear.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > It's important to the public that scarce goods instead by
| allocated by willingness to stand in line.
|
| It's important to keep in mind that a higher price is
| unlikely to lead to much additional capacity due to the
| nature of this shock. Companies have to do business with
| their customers for many years after this is over. "Sorry,
| we're overloaded with demand due to this crisis" sounds a
| lot better than "Pay us ten times as much during the crisis
| or go f* yourself." Microsoft isn't in business to allocate
| resources according to a simplistic strategy pulled from an
| intro econ course, they're in business to make money over a
| period of many years.
| avip wrote:
| Cloud provider is not a grocery store? You can't just wake up
| and randomly raise prices of services.
|
| Also lots of .gov runs on azure.
| yurlungur wrote:
| Apparently Team usage is up significantly. You can do video
| conferencing via Team which is one aspect that is quite
| different from Slack. I imagine there are some new use cases
| arising from that.
| lewispb wrote:
| Different in what way? Slack has built-in video conferencing?
| wikibob wrote:
| Slack's video conferencing sucks.
|
| They bought ScreenHero and tried to integrate it. They
| screwed it up so bad that the ScreenHero founder quit after
| 4 years and has gone and rewrote it and called it Screen:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676040
| pwarner wrote:
| Yeah Slack themselves use Zoom. Slack is a channel based
| messaging tool, it integrates with best of class video
| tools like Zoom and file storage tools like Box or even
| SharePoint.
|
| Teams does it all OKish, although the channel based
| messaging is probably the worst part.
|
| It's sort of wrong to look at Teams as a Slack
| replacement. Well, it is for who just want chat, and
| don't care about channel messaging.
| p1necone wrote:
| Integration seems like the ideal path for Slack. Make it
| easy and seamless to use any third party service from
| Slack rather than trying to build functionality directly
| into it other than the core group/direct chat stuff.
| auxym wrote:
| I work for a university, and the official word is to use
| Teams for everything, including classes transferred online,
| as the internal infra is not at all able to take the load.
|
| Teams has video conferencing, but also hooks into SharePoint
| for shared documents.
| amelius wrote:
| I suspect the situation is that most customers have already
| paid for the service, and would demand a refund if they can't
| reasonably use the service.
| rashkov wrote:
| Could extend this to large companies with multi-year cloud
| computing contracts with Azure
| [deleted]
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Don't forget Xbox Live on Azure, it has had a pair of outages
| in the last few weeks as well.
| whatever1 wrote:
| So what do you suggest here ? Prioritize a wealthy workspace
| sharing startup over a hospital?
| [deleted]
| stefan_ wrote:
| I don't think 1) locking in customers via proprietary APIs 2)
| limiting supply of resources 3) auctioning off to the highest
| bidder among your locked in customers was entirely the core
| feature of clouds. Rather, the idea was "we'll charge so much
| margin you never need to worry about anything physical, another
| machine is just an API call away". You don't need to
| overprovision for peak times and there is less physical stuff
| on your balance sheet, ez cash flow, win win!
|
| Of course now everyone realizes it's a big sham and neither
| Amazon nor Microsoft are stupid enough to spend a trillion
| capex on building the datacenters, fiber lines and so on you
| need to handle a temporary 700% pandemic situation. In a year
| from now, they don't want that stuff on their quarterly report
| just as companies going "cloud only" don't want it.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| To be fair, a situation where every single company in the
| world needed to ramp up on the cloud at the same time is
| completely unprecedented, and spending the money to do it
| would've been considered a fools' errand.
|
| If people weren't on the cloud, you'd see them scrambling for
| physical hardware, which also isn't exactly easy to come by
| on extremely short notice when the world's logistic chains
| are under stress as well.
| burkaman wrote:
| It would certainly look bad, and I think it would potentially
| be illegal in some states.
|
| https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou...
|
| For example, Georgia:
|
| > Selling items or services determined by the Governor during a
| declared state of emergency to be necessary for public safety
| at a higher cost than they were immediately prior to the
| declaration.
|
| Kansas:
|
| > For any supplier of a "necessary property or service" to
| "profiteer from a disaster" by charging 25% or more than the
| pre-disaster price for such goods/services.
|
| Louisiana:
|
| > Selling goods/services during a declared state of emergency
| (within the designated emergency area) in excess of the
| ordinary price range immediately before the declaration.
|
| Mississippi:
|
| > Selling goods and services at above the prices normally
| charged during a declared state of emergency (or what was
| charged immediately preceding the declaration).
|
| etc.
|
| Also consider that raising prices would itself be a form of
| prioritization, just prioritizing ability to pay over need.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Does this regulation applies to the entire supply chain?
| Otherwise it might become unreasonable to produce some goods
| at all if component cost raises too much.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| If you are making bread and suddenly price of flour
| increases by 600%,so you have to increase your prices.
| Unless you are based in a country run by some delusional
| autocrat, you'd be fine. If, however,the supply chain is
| fine, i.e. your toilet paper supplier, however you end up
| selling it for 500% price because people can't seen to have
| enough of it- the the laws would apply.
| x0x0 wrote:
| They aren't raising prices; they're limiting availability.
| All three quoted laws solely cover prices.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Yes; the laws are being quoted to explain _why_ they are
| limiting availability instead of raising prices.
| gmanley wrote:
| This thread is discussing the hypothetical legality if they
| did raise prices.
| dfee wrote:
| I don't know how I feel about this. In the general case, I
| feel like price gouging during emergencies is unethical.
|
| But, when there is a non-artificial supply and demand issue,
| I struggle with the derivative effects of these policies.
|
| My concern is that rather than simply evaluating on the
| consumers ability to pay (and backwards-looking at prior
| statements instead of increased go-forward costs), these
| policies add only one additional criteria: ability to
| threaten legal issues. Thus, it's only effect is to
| prioritize government agencies alongside wealthy clients. And
| that's just governments using force to get better treatment.
| Which also feels unethical.
|
| But maybe there's a happier and healthier read of the
| situation.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Governments will also exert this force on behalf of their
| citizens, is the happier read. In a disaster, everything
| becomes finite, but profiteering is still deeply disruptive
| to the shared societal fabric.
| p1necone wrote:
| Yep - if there's N capacity to provide a necessary
| necessary good/service, but M > N need, raising the price
| doesn't seem like a great solution to manage it in a
| crisis situation. To some extent non necessary uses would
| decrease, but you also end up with more wealthy people
| who _want_ it more getting it, and more generally there
| won 't be any distinction between _want_ and _need_.
| burkaman wrote:
| Why do you think governments would only sue on behalf of
| themselves? The point of these laws is to allow attorneys
| general to sue on behalf of their constituents. Random
| example: https://www.standardspeaker.com/coronavirus/state-
| attorney-g...
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Ability to pay is only one aspect of demand. There's also
| how much you actually want it, and the amount of
| opportunity cost you're willing to pay. Keeping prices
| artificially low keeps demand artificially high, while
| supply doesn't increase, or cannot increase if it's
| inelastic.
| hkmurakami wrote:
| >does Disney+ run on Azure?
|
| Some cursory web searching suggests that at least as of 2017,
| BAMTECH / Disney were using AWS as their public cloud provider.
| There's enough inertia here that you'd imagine that this is
| still the case.
| voltagex_ wrote:
| From here in Australia, developer tools tells me the video is
| coming from vod-akc-oc-east-1.media.dssott.com which appears
| to be an Akamai thing.
| felipelemos wrote:
| Akamai is just a CDN so it's cloud agnostic.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| video conferencing is way up online food ordering is way up
| buying stuff online in general is up i imagine all video
| streaming and gaming is up
| hestefisk wrote:
| Time to buy MS stock.
| gruez wrote:
| priced in
| jbverschoor wrote:
| No it's not.. The market is not sane atm. It's 100% emotion.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| What makes you think that? Have you seen a discrepancy
| between your projections of future cash flows and therefore
| your valuation, as compared to the value the market is at
| right now?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| They're mainly a software / services company. There's no
| reason their revenue will drop, the contrary..
|
| Yet the stock price has the exact same changes as the
| rest of the entire market.
|
| Their cloud demand is up x7.. it's not priced in. Amazon
| same thing, although less so imho
|
| Their current p/e is 26. Remove cash and it's nearing 20.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| I think it's safe to say the market isn't rational when
| Zoom Technologies is up nearly 900% when it's completely
| unrelated to Zoom Video and not actually operating.
|
| There's a different HN post about it:
| https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-sec-really-wants-
| investo...
| cm2187 wrote:
| I don't know about that. Long MSFT short AAPL perhaps. But if
| we believe that the lockdowns will last 2 months+, and if we
| believe the economic forecasts, we are facing a crisis worse
| than 2008. Even good stocks sink in those markets. The 30% drop
| we have seen so far barely reversed Trump's rally. I don't know
| that a severe recession is priced in yet.
| ShinTakuya wrote:
| 2 months? Try 2 years. It's a year minimum before we get a
| handle on this (no, not the vaccine, just the virus itself).
| mardifoufs wrote:
| That's ludicrous. If you were right we wouldn't have a
| stock market by then. We wouldn't even have an economy
| after 1 year of lock downs, even if they were on and off.
| There's a point where we just won't be able to isolate and
| if the virus stays dangerous we will be forced to just take
| the risk.
| RangerScience wrote:
| "I do not think that this argument is sufficiently
| substantial to require refutation. Consolation would be
| more appropriate."
|
| https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf
|
| Or, we change the kind of economy that we have. We're
| seeing right now how what parts are actually "essential";
| arguably, the rest is only necessary for growth. If
| growth stops being the goal, the the economy as it was
| doesn't have to continue.
|
| We're already seeing some rumblings of a stark dichotomy,
| what with some people advocating for a return to work and
| acceptance of the risk, contrasting with the backlash
| that their dollar is not more important than someone's
| life.
|
| In a Japanese subway, someone wrote: "We can't return to
| normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the
| problem."
|
| It doesn't entirely matter if they're right or wrong
| objectively; if enough people subscribe to this view, it
| becomes what we live through.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The difficult question is how quickly can capacity be increased
| and given uncertainty about how long this demand increase will
| last, does it make financial sense to do so?
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| It would be interesting to know how many standard deviations is
| 775% extra demand from the norm. More than six standard
| deviations is rarer than a 1 in 506797346 event.
| techntoke wrote:
| Leave it up to Microsoft to find out ways to profit more during a
| pandemic, rather than open sourcing their software and platform
| to be used anywhere and everywhere. People forgot what hosting is
| like without these massively overpriced cloud services that
| nickel and dime for every feature. Want encryption which
| basically costs nothing? Oh, you'll pay an extra $0.10 per hour
| on top of your $.08GB of outbound traffic. God forbid you load
| balance your service.
| jedieaston wrote:
| Office (/Microsoft) 365 is a pretty good value for what it is.
| It isn't free, but $20 per user per month for Windows + Office
| + Exchange + OneDrive + Azure AD and support is pretty good.
|
| Microsoft saying "Ahh! Crisis! Here's the Windows Server
| codebase!" wouldn't help, since you'd have to still find a host
| and time to make sure your code works on this upstream variant
| without all of the licensed DLLs that makes Windows work.
| techntoke wrote:
| Google offers the same for less than $12 a month with
| unlimited storage for large companies and $12 a month for
| everyone else. Plus you get an operating system that is based
| off Linux and open source. Windows is a giant PITA when it
| comes to deploying and setting up mobile device management.
|
| Matrix offers free decentralized video/voice communication
| and there are lots of self-hosted alternatives that often
| provide better features than things like Teams. With
| NextCloud you basically get a free office solution that just
| needs to be deployed. With Kubernetes you can quickly deploy
| a Nextcloud cluster. These services should be free and open
| source because the goal should be helping build a better
| world, not building better profits through backroom deals
| with tax dollars.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| You've just named and listed the services. Odd why people
| would choose Office365 instead of hosting their own
| nextcloud distribution cluster in their own colocation
| space.
| Kye wrote:
| Plus, you don't have to use Windows on Azure. Linux instances
| are cheaper.
| spencerwgreene wrote:
| The Microsoft blog post that the article is using as a source:
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-microsoft....
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Honest question; how do you define "demand"?
| KennethSRoberts wrote:
| Maybe start by clicking the link?
|
| > In a March 28 blog post, officials said that demand for its
| new Windows Virtual Desktop usage has grown by more than three
| times. They also said government use of public Power BI for
| sharing COVID-19 dashboads is up 42 percent in a week. (As is
| the case with Microsoft's overall cloud services figure, we
| don't have a base number for WVD and Power BI from which to
| calculate these percentages.)
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| It still doesnt define demand. Is that new sales or what?
| 9nGQluzmnq3M wrote:
| Utilization.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Their utilization has gone up 700%? Bullshit.
| oneplane wrote:
| I wonder if this is because a lot of companies suddenly have to
| make a change they didn't feel necessary in the past and are now
| choosing the shortest path provided by their vendor instead of a
| path that would be chosen when taking technical competence and
| business competence in to account.
|
| While it technically doesn't matter where you run, there are a
| lot of choices that have a different answer depending on if you
| ask your vendor or if you do your own checks and research.
| _sword wrote:
| So that's why my OneDrive sync hasn't been working at all.
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