Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions.
Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put their deployments on general cloud services- which is not what the license was intended for. The license was intended for fixed, outsourced bare metal hardware.
Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact cloud services exist and you're going to need a specific license if you want to run the software on the cloud. Now, apparently this author finds this surprising, but given that the license he's complaining about is an "on premises" license it sounds more like MSFT were being generous by letting customers use the licenses on outsourced hardware, and never intended it to be carte blanche for running your "on premises" license in the cloud - which is very obviously not on your premises.
What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.
You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article.
But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host.
Microsoft sold licenses that could be used this way, customers used them this way, and now Microsoft wants to double-dip asking their customers to pay twice just to actually use their already owned licenses.
> What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.
That's not what is happening. People are buying Windows Server licenses and running them on compute that they rent from AWS. Until this change, that was completely inside the terms of Windows Server licenses (if for no other reason that they've been pushing hypervisor-based Windows Server virtualization for almost ten years).
It's worse than you're describing- Microsoft is charging one licensing price if you're on their cloud but another price if you're on someone elses. This anticompetitive behavior is what we expected from Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s.
‘Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions .. some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware’
Seems perfectly clear to me:
“Microsoft has introduced a preview of Azure Dedicated Host, which provides a physical server hosted on Azure and not shared with other customers.”, ref
Microsoft has introduced it's own dedicated hardware.
“Alongside this new service, the company has made licensing changes that will make Microsoft software more expensive for some customers of AWS, Google and Alibaba.”, ref
And made it more expensive for “running Windows Server on any cloud that isn’t Azure”.
If your license differentiates between running on a physical box of my own versus someone else's physical box (cloud computing), I don't want to use your software.
I kinda agree, but then again why even make a difference between those two things? I get how you want to differentiate between home and business use, but this...
Also as they pretty much turned a blind eye on this practice for years now they just created the perception that it is fine and legal. I absolutely can't blame people for getting mad at them changing their minds now. Either have a clear stance on it right from the start or deal with the backlash. That is, we still have to wait and see if/how much there'll actually be...
Slightly related to this: it was quite remarkable how long it took Microsoft to understand and accept that one OS install doesn't equal one (physical) machine. Even back in the old days when you just wanted to have a master hdd image to clone to all your workstations there was no official way to do this. Third party tools did voodoo black magic after dumping the image to the hdd. So it's not that surprising it took them so long to react here... Dynamically spinning up as many identical Linux VMS as you want and have them execute some container? Maybe network boot them? Crazy talk in Windows land for a long time.
I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade).
The thought process being, as everyone virtualizes their compute to the cloud, any cloud, make it easy for them to stay on their existing Windows license. Well, they couldn't prevent it anyway. So in fact, they actively encouraged it. This way you don't lose that customer forever (as they transition to Linux or other, but generally Linux). The customer is happy, the move is endorsed by MS, they only have to deal with the one transition and they can decide freely on cloud provider, which feels like freedom. Part of the plan being, hope the customer moves their Windows workload to Azure, with an expectation that it would be least-effort.
Now that the bulk of the shift (to cloud) has occurred, differentiate the licensing.
IMHO this is a trumped up complaint about change. Microsoft did in part bring this uproar upon themselves by making the scheme complicated, but at least part of that was unavoidable (given that they want to make moar monies).
Please note:
> Multi-tenant hosts are not affected.
which is likely most uses. It's only dedicated hosting (and only for "listed providers") that are affected. And Azure is included. The apparent escape valve of Azure Hybrid Benefit isn't much of one ... you have to pay for the AHB and you have to have software assurance. The same as on the other providers. This is how they will (rightly) escape any claims of anti-competitive behavior.
In a nutshell, for customers that care enough to want a dedicated (vs multi-tenant) host, which BTW Azure hasn't ever had before, that's the kind of customer that cares enough to closely mind their licenses. MSFT is now going to insist on collecting the annual software assurance fee from those customers. This is probably motivated by the ease of spinning up new cloud instances, vs new on-premise hardware. With cloud, it's oh so easy to exceed your paid-for license usage. At least if they force the software assurance fees, they collect a larger fraction of fees.
TFA is a low information rant, and even declares itself as such:
> The longer version is complex, nuanced, and exceeds my attention span
Sorry, I'm not following why from a licensing perspective it matters if you are running on a bare metal server in your office, a virtual environment on a physical server you own in a co-lo, or on virtual servers you "rent" from a cloud provider.
The real question is why companies are still running Windows Servers in the cloud. It is already 50% more expensive to run Windows Server on AWS compared to a Linux based OS, so I can really only justify running Windows Server for legacy applications that are too difficult to migrate. Actually I am happy with this price increase, it will give me some leverage to migrate the remaining applications away from Windows.
I admit my experience is mostly with JS deployed on Linux, but ASP.NET seems like a good framework with awesome tooling. Also using the same language on the frontend and backend is very useful and I consider C# the best option for Windows frontend work.
Not that I'm saying NodeJS backend with Website/Electron frontend is bad, but ASP.NET backend with WPF frontend seems great as well, just with more enterprise-oriented trade-offs, support cycles longer than one year but no cross-platform support (yes, ASP.NET core is a thing now, but that's a very recent development).
And compared to the cost of engineers I don't think many companies are that worried about spending 50% more on infrastructure.
It’s not about “difficulty”, it’s that those apps are mostly Windows-only. Until very recently, incentives to build enterprise/professional shrinkwrap applications on platforms that weren’t Windows, were basically non-existent. That’s billions of dollars in software that will never be ported.
Plenty of us still have CALS-mares. The Man will use license terms to control what you deploy and where and how - it's more than just a purchase of a Thing that you can use because it comes with FUTURE terms that can change, forever. See also weekend thread on Cisco locking users out of their own hardware.
This is why there is Free software -- free as in choice, not free as in beer -- so users don't get locked in or forced into something other than a simple purchase.
You'd be surprised. When I interview developers in their early 20s, they say Microsoft is great because they created Typescript and VS Code, and now they'll make web devs' lives easier by embracing Chromium.
I once interviewed at a young fintech company that proudly said they're Microsoft-first company (ie they use .net stack, azure, outlook and ms teams etc)
The "old" MS vs the "new" MS really could stand to fade away at this point. Companies, pick anyone you want, have sticks and carrots. MS used to be almost all stick and little carrot, these days they are a lot more generous with the carrots... but that stick is still in the other hand behind their back when the opportunity arises.
I was an exclusive Microsoft developer for almost 20 years until I started doing cloud deployments to AWS 2 years ago. Before then, server costs were someone else's problem. Now I’m doing a combination of .Net Core, Python, and JS/Node.
I realized that everything gets worse when you add Windows to any cloud solution - licensing costs, resource requirements, (I can do at lot with a very small Linux instance, Windows not so much), performance, startup times, easy scripting and automation, etc.
It gives me more of a reason to tell companies to move as far away from Windows on the server as possible.
I still develop on Windows,C#/.Net Core is my favorite language, don’t know much about Linux, and all of my “Linux deployments” are serverless with Docker/Fargate or Lambda.
I don’t have to worry about “server administration”, the one thing that kept me on Windows. We use managed services.
All Windows servers on Azure already have to have "Software assurance". The license T&C for the last few years have been fairly clear you need to pay for software assurance to cloud host.
Are they not simply closing the loophole where direct customers are paying more?
The "loophole" was that you could license a specific host in AWS or GCP and use the "outsourcing" provision to use existing perpetual licenses on that host. My understanding is that now you cannot do that with specific providers. But, if "Spooky23 Outsourcing Services, LLC" rents you a server, you can, but you cannot do it on AWS.
I don't think that AWS/GCP guarantee that you are on a specific host for any period of time, and I think that in many scenarios, you cannot move Windows Server workloads more than once in any 30-day period. I think Microsoft's position is that customers on these platforms are likely breaking that rule.
That said, those same rules apply to ESX and HyperV, and Microsoft doesn't blacklist vMotion because it can violate an agreement. Many people see these sorts of actions as a part of a pattern where Microsoft is leveraging the existing license rights to drive Azure. That's how they are providing Windows Server 2008 extended security updates as well.
I don't understand why anyone would even want to use Windows. You're taking on a huge risk for very little to no benefit. It's not like there's a shortage of engineers familiar with Linux in the world.
In a situation like this, if you're not willing to take the price hit on the chin in the long term, there's about two options: Change your cloud provider (to Azure) or change your platform (away from windows). It seems MS is betting there will be, on net, more people who take it on the chin &/or switch to Azure. But even if they're right, there will still be some loss of marketshare for those staying with AWS & ditching Windows. This seems like a Bad Thing in the long term, no matter the specifics of other short term gains.
I wonder, if Microsoft did decided to increase the costs of it's product and services what's the best way to that?
To me, that's all that's happening here. And the licenses purchase buy customer in the past weren't intended for Cloud Workloads. Sure, it didn't outline that you CANT use on AWS, GCP, etc. but that wasn't the intent.
Surprised? This is the same company that not long ago was waging a mafia-style Linux patent war against open source verndors. Microsoft only got into the open source game because they had no choice. How long, I wonder, before ASP.Net Core is "optimised" for deployment on Azure even if it can be run on Linux?
The whole "won't somebody think of the poor advocates" angle seems pretty thin to me, tossed in to gin up a little unearned outrage. Did all these advocates all take big pay cuts to leave Amazon, Oracle, Salesforce, etc... to go and preach the gospel of Azure? I doubt it.
Now I am curious, who runs production customer facing apps on Azure? I'm assuming many people do given that Azure is second after AWS in market share or is that really just mostly corporate IT servers?
We do. We're a non-profit, and a few years ago we went cloud-provider hunting. Microsoft was willing to be generous with us in a way that Amazon was not. Not only in terms of non-profit friendly pricing, but also in terms of incidentals -- trainings, related services/pricing, and so on. Amazon offered no concessions at all, so it was kind of a no-brainer for our CTO and board.
So everything we host is Azure. We are a relatively small outfit, but a fair chunk of our 'stuff' is customer-facing. We haven't had any negative experiences yet at all and it's been a few years now.
//Now I am curious, who runs production customer facing apps on Azure? I'm assuming many people do given that Azure is second after AWS in market share or is that really just mostly corporate IT servers?
The government does. Though AWS and IBM are also used. In other words, entries outside the bubble.
we recently adopted a 'far in the upper right hand quadrant' SaaS platform, and learned _after_ we signed that they were 99%+ Azure. And many of the other platforms we auditioned were on Azure as well. I think it's pretty common in the enterprise.
When folks say Azure is just behind AWS what does that mean? I don't see nearly that many Azure large scale workloads or is something else counting as Azure I'm not aware of?
[+] [-] Traster|6 years ago|reply
Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put their deployments on general cloud services- which is not what the license was intended for. The license was intended for fixed, outsourced bare metal hardware.
Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact cloud services exist and you're going to need a specific license if you want to run the software on the cloud. Now, apparently this author finds this surprising, but given that the license he's complaining about is an "on premises" license it sounds more like MSFT were being generous by letting customers use the licenses on outsourced hardware, and never intended it to be carte blanche for running your "on premises" license in the cloud - which is very obviously not on your premises.
What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.
[+] [-] Someone1234|6 years ago|reply
But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host.
Microsoft sold licenses that could be used this way, customers used them this way, and now Microsoft wants to double-dip asking their customers to pay twice just to actually use their already owned licenses.
> What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.
That's not what is happening. People are buying Windows Server licenses and running them on compute that they rent from AWS. Until this change, that was completely inside the terms of Windows Server licenses (if for no other reason that they've been pushing hypervisor-based Windows Server virtualization for almost ten years).
[+] [-] tedivm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmileyRedBall|6 years ago|reply
Seems perfectly clear to me:
“Microsoft has introduced a preview of Azure Dedicated Host, which provides a physical server hosted on Azure and not shared with other customers.”, ref
Microsoft has introduced it's own dedicated hardware.
“Alongside this new service, the company has made licensing changes that will make Microsoft software more expensive for some customers of AWS, Google and Alibaba.”, ref
And made it more expensive for “running Windows Server on any cloud that isn’t Azure”.
ref: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/05/microsoft_licensing...
[+] [-] ryanisnan|6 years ago|reply
I think most developers would tend to agree.
[+] [-] iforgotpassword|6 years ago|reply
Also as they pretty much turned a blind eye on this practice for years now they just created the perception that it is fine and legal. I absolutely can't blame people for getting mad at them changing their minds now. Either have a clear stance on it right from the start or deal with the backlash. That is, we still have to wait and see if/how much there'll actually be...
Slightly related to this: it was quite remarkable how long it took Microsoft to understand and accept that one OS install doesn't equal one (physical) machine. Even back in the old days when you just wanted to have a master hdd image to clone to all your workstations there was no official way to do this. Third party tools did voodoo black magic after dumping the image to the hdd. So it's not that surprising it took them so long to react here... Dynamically spinning up as many identical Linux VMS as you want and have them execute some container? Maybe network boot them? Crazy talk in Windows land for a long time.
[+] [-] jiveturkey|6 years ago|reply
I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade).
The thought process being, as everyone virtualizes their compute to the cloud, any cloud, make it easy for them to stay on their existing Windows license. Well, they couldn't prevent it anyway. So in fact, they actively encouraged it. This way you don't lose that customer forever (as they transition to Linux or other, but generally Linux). The customer is happy, the move is endorsed by MS, they only have to deal with the one transition and they can decide freely on cloud provider, which feels like freedom. Part of the plan being, hope the customer moves their Windows workload to Azure, with an expectation that it would be least-effort.
Now that the bulk of the shift (to cloud) has occurred, differentiate the licensing.
IMHO this is a trumped up complaint about change. Microsoft did in part bring this uproar upon themselves by making the scheme complicated, but at least part of that was unavoidable (given that they want to make moar monies).
Please note:
> Multi-tenant hosts are not affected.
which is likely most uses. It's only dedicated hosting (and only for "listed providers") that are affected. And Azure is included. The apparent escape valve of Azure Hybrid Benefit isn't much of one ... you have to pay for the AHB and you have to have software assurance. The same as on the other providers. This is how they will (rightly) escape any claims of anti-competitive behavior.
In a nutshell, for customers that care enough to want a dedicated (vs multi-tenant) host, which BTW Azure hasn't ever had before, that's the kind of customer that cares enough to closely mind their licenses. MSFT is now going to insist on collecting the annual software assurance fee from those customers. This is probably motivated by the ease of spinning up new cloud instances, vs new on-premise hardware. With cloud, it's oh so easy to exceed your paid-for license usage. At least if they force the software assurance fees, they collect a larger fraction of fees.
TFA is a low information rant, and even declares itself as such:
> The longer version is complex, nuanced, and exceeds my attention span
[+] [-] belltaco|6 years ago|reply
Any other cloud hosting provider, say Rackspace, can be used with on-premise licenses.
[+] [-] apercu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxfordmale|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|6 years ago|reply
Not that I'm saying NodeJS backend with Website/Electron frontend is bad, but ASP.NET backend with WPF frontend seems great as well, just with more enterprise-oriented trade-offs, support cycles longer than one year but no cross-platform support (yes, ASP.NET core is a thing now, but that's a very recent development).
And compared to the cost of engineers I don't think many companies are that worried about spending 50% more on infrastructure.
[+] [-] toyg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belltaco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drummyfish|6 years ago|reply
Wait, there are people who genuinely believe this?
[+] [-] holtalanm|6 years ago|reply
Also, them open-sourcing a lot of their tools seems to back that effort up:
VSCode
TypeScript
.NET Core
Powershell Core
Just to name a few.
[+] [-] imglorp|6 years ago|reply
This is why there is Free software -- free as in choice, not free as in beer -- so users don't get locked in or forced into something other than a simple purchase.
[+] [-] arnvald|6 years ago|reply
I once interviewed at a young fintech company that proudly said they're Microsoft-first company (ie they use .net stack, azure, outlook and ms teams etc)
[+] [-] jbigelow76|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magashna|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
I was an exclusive Microsoft developer for almost 20 years until I started doing cloud deployments to AWS 2 years ago. Before then, server costs were someone else's problem. Now I’m doing a combination of .Net Core, Python, and JS/Node.
I realized that everything gets worse when you add Windows to any cloud solution - licensing costs, resource requirements, (I can do at lot with a very small Linux instance, Windows not so much), performance, startup times, easy scripting and automation, etc.
It gives me more of a reason to tell companies to move as far away from Windows on the server as possible.
I still develop on Windows,C#/.Net Core is my favorite language, don’t know much about Linux, and all of my “Linux deployments” are serverless with Docker/Fargate or Lambda.
I don’t have to worry about “server administration”, the one thing that kept me on Windows. We use managed services.
[+] [-] Dayshine|6 years ago|reply
Are they not simply closing the loophole where direct customers are paying more?
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
I don't think that AWS/GCP guarantee that you are on a specific host for any period of time, and I think that in many scenarios, you cannot move Windows Server workloads more than once in any 30-day period. I think Microsoft's position is that customers on these platforms are likely breaking that rule.
That said, those same rules apply to ESX and HyperV, and Microsoft doesn't blacklist vMotion because it can violate an agreement. Many people see these sorts of actions as a part of a pattern where Microsoft is leveraging the existing license rights to drive Azure. That's how they are providing Windows Server 2008 extended security updates as well.
[+] [-] ohthehugemanate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogwog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|6 years ago|reply
It's not like AWS and Windows are for the cost conscious.
[+] [-] philliphaydon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ruxbin1986|6 years ago|reply
To me, that's all that's happening here. And the licenses purchase buy customer in the past weren't intended for Cloud Workloads. Sure, it didn't outline that you CANT use on AWS, GCP, etc. but that wasn't the intent.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cutler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbigelow76|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CyanLite2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killStea1|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shyneeup|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gene_Parmesan|6 years ago|reply
So everything we host is Azure. We are a relatively small outfit, but a fair chunk of our 'stuff' is customer-facing. We haven't had any negative experiences yet at all and it's been a few years now.
[+] [-] belltaco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crag|6 years ago|reply
The government does. Though AWS and IBM are also used. In other words, entries outside the bubble.
[+] [-] neurobashing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattferderer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] privateSFacct|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okmokmz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NedIsakoff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxcole|6 years ago|reply