Microsoft's Azure cloud offering "not as strong as Amazon Web Services", says Just Eat CTO

Carlos Morgado tells Computing why he opted for AWS instead of Microsoft Azure

Just Eat's cloud infrastructure is hosted by Amazon Web Services rather than Microsoft's Windows Azure because the online takeaway service believed AWS to be a stronger offering.

The firm, which sees business peak in the evening, shifted its operations fully into the cloud last year to increase scalability and reduce costs, and felt Amazon Web Services offered the best service.

"A lot of our technology is based on Microsoft so there was a certain attractiveness about dumping it all in Azure and letting Microsoft deal with the complexities we've had to face ourselves in deploying Microsoft technology onto AWS," Just Eat CTO Carlos Morgado told Computing.

However, when it came to long-term offerings about plans for cloud services, Morgado felt more confident about Just Eat being in the hands of Amazon.

"Ultimately we didn't feel that the [Azure] roadmap was anywhere near as strong as AWS and just the sheer size of the offering and how many businesses they were supporting, we just didn't feel as confident about Azure as we did about AWS."

Morgado also pointed to a desire not to be ‘married to' Microsoft, to ensure flexibility that ultimately benefits both the firm and its customers.

"We're not a Microsoft through-and-through team and we use a whole load of tools that are not Microsoft. So to give ourselves the best flexibility we could, we felt that not marrying ourselves to Microsoft was the right thing to do," he said.

Morgado also told Computing that while Amazon has received negative coverage in the media for occasional server outages, he believes that pinning blame on the firm is wrong, because just like everybody else, they're having to learn as they go along with cloud.

"This is a new approach to hosting servers and therefore people are learning on the way. There's clearly value in criticising a player that's actually disrupting this market in such a major way as AWS," he said.