Within the next six months or so, Microsoft is going to pull the plug on supporting SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 — two outdated, but still reasonably common, server products.
For Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's chief rival in the cloud wars, this could mean a big opportunity. Indeed, the cloud giant says, it's already helped customers like Influence Health, Fugro, and eMarketer (a subsidiary of Business Insider parent company Axel Springer) move some of their critical Windows software from Microsoft's Azure cloud to AWS.
In fact, Sandy Carter, vice president of Windows and enterprise workloads at Amazon Web Services, goes so far as to say that its cloud is the best place to run Windows and Windows software. AWS has supported running Windows software since 2008, which was actually two years before the formal launch of Microsoft Azure.
"We do have a lot of customers right now that are switching," Carter said. "The number one reason is reliability."
Carter says that customers choose AWS for their Windows-in-the-cloud needs because it's more reliable and has less downtime than its competitors, including Microsoft Azure.
"That reliability really makes a difference for our customers because many of our Windows workloads are critical to our customers," Carter told Business Insider.
To Carter's point, too, there's evidence to suggest that more Windows software is being run on AWS than on Azure. According to analyst group IDC, circa 2017, 58% of software and services that run on Windows in the cloud were deployed on AWS infrastructure, while 31% were deployed on Azure infrastructure.
IDC's data does come with at least one big caveat: It only accounts for Windows, which itself only accounts for a relatively small percentage of overall cloud use. Instead, the free and open source Linux operating system and its variants are the dominant platform in the cloud.
'The number one reason is reliability.'
As those older server products near their end-of-life, Carter says that Amazon has been helping companies make the switch.
"We've been helping customers both do the upgrade and migration and modernization and facing end of support decisions that are coming up for them," Carter said.
As customers move from Windows to AWS, Carter says it looks and feels the same.
"It look like how it does on Azure," Carter said. "That's a great thing. Customers can't retrain all their skills. That same feel and experience is very important. Our performance is much better."
Carter says that AWS has the "best customer experience," too, because it has the easiest way to migrate workloads to the cloud. In addition, she says that according to data from DB Best, AWS is as much as three times cheaper when running Microsoft SQL Server, its popular database, for the same performance as Azure.
"Because we're faster and have higher price/performance, we enable customers to enable better speed and performance," Carter said.
When Business Insider reached out to Microsoft for comment, John Chirapurath, general manager of Azure Data, Blockchain & Artificial Intelligence, said that the virtual machine speed and storage capacity configurations used in the DB Best study aren't a reasonable way to compare the two platforms.
He added that customers like AllScripts find Azure to be the best cloud for Windows software because of its pricing, and because of its integration with other Microsoft platforms and services.
"Before drawing conclusions about SQL Server on either cloud, the variables should be apples-to-apples," Chirapurath said in a statement. "The original post included the disclaimer that the tool used is not an official benchmarking tool that can be used to publicly compare benchmark results between database products or platforms."
Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at rmchan@bjinnox.com, Telegram at @rosaliechan, or Twitter DM at @rosaliechan17. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Other types of secure messaging available upon request. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.
