Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

Wow.<p>First of all, I&#x27;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.<p>But second... I&#x27;m fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it &quot;looks bad&quot; 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&#x27;d always thought that with AWS&#x27;s spot pricing and so forth, that auction-style dynamic pricing was a core feature of clouds.

The Microsoft blog post that the article is using as a source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;update-2-on-microsoft-cloud-services-continuity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;update-2-on-microsoft...</a>.

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?

How much excess capacity would a cloud provider typically have (as in %) to accommodate normal peak loads and still have a comfortable margin?<p>Or maybe that&#x27;s not something providers reveal, so let me as the sys-admins of this thread: For on-premise resources, what is your % margin of excess capacity reserved?

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.

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?

I wonder if this is because a lot of companies suddenly have to make a change they didn&#x27;t feel necessary in the past and now rush to compensate for a lack of planning.<p>While it technically doesn&#x27;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.<p>Scaling purely because you needed to scale up would be a different story, and then you&#x27;re expect overall service demands to go up that steep. This seems more like an unpreparedness peak to me.

Office365 and AzureAD has been even more unreliable than usual over the past week or so, plenty of &quot;an error has occurred&quot; pages and delayed mail - as usually Microsoft didn&#x27;t update the status dashboards (the ones you can see without being able to log in anyway), The other client I work with uses GCP and Google Mail&#x2F;Docs for business which I haven&#x27;t noticed any issues with.

So that&#x27;s why my OneDrive sync hasn&#x27;t been working at all.

There is no cloud, only other people computers. (c) FSFE

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

I read and executed but did not write that percentage

Time to buy MS stock.

Honest question; how do you define &quot;demand&quot;?

Good time to remind that &#x27;the cloud is just some else computer&#x27; ...

And 77.5% of the new demand turns out is from the Microsoft employees sent home :)

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&#x27;ll pay an extra $0.10 per hour on top of your $.08GB of outbound traffic. God forbid you load balance your service.