Google Scores Six-Year Meta Cloud Deal Worth Over $10b

Data centers don’t pop up overnight, until then they are going to use a vendor :-)

You are crazy if you imply AWS Athena or Azure Synapse are better than BigQuery.

Based on my professional experience, when we ignore cost [0] my ranking of the big three for "plain old computing" (that is, just compute, networking, and storage workloads) is AWS, GCP, Azure.

Azure is very, very flaky. Things often break for no clear reason, or things are changed in unexpected ways without warning, and then quietly reverted back. [1] I used to say that the only consistently good thing about Azure was that you could throw an entire Subscription in the trash and have everything in there be destroyed... but even that has become intermittently unreliable!

Given how godawful Azure is, I expect that companies use it either because they think they need it for its AD integration, or because they get very deep discounts on Windows licenses for VMs running on Azure.

[0] Both because I never had to pay the bills and (I assume) our cost estimators were always full of lies because the tooling (and I) had no idea what discounts we had negotiated.

[1] (Don't) ask me about the time Azure added in some sort of multi-minute "cooldown" time for reuse of a statically-assigned IP address that was assigned to a VM that Azure reported was completely destroyed, and we were attempting to assign to a brand new VM. Creation of the new VM kept failing with some wacky error. Azure support was clueless, and the problem vanished and came back several times over the course of a year.