2025-10-20 – Weekly Cloud Computing News : Azure vs AWS workflows: who was first?

Last week in our cloud computing community, discussions centered around competitive insights between Azure and AWS regarding workflow development timelines. Members also shared detailed strategies for achieving seamless multi-region failover, a critical aspect for maintaining uninterrupted service. Career-focused threads provided valuable perspectives on transitioning into cloud computing roles, emphasizing necessary skills and career paths.


This Week’s Hot Topics

Who shipped workflows first: Azure or AWS
The community delved into a debate about which cloud giant pioneered workflows, sparking a detailed comparison of their service evolution.
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Seeking proven multi-region failover runbooks
Members exchanged practical runbooks for multi-region failover, a must-read for ensuring high availability.
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2025-10-16 – Weekly Cloud Computing Jobs: Founding Engineer role in cloud compute
This week’s job spotlight is on a Founding Engineer role, offering a unique opportunity to shape cloud infrastructure.
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Keeping p95 under 200 ms
A thread focused on techniques to maintain p95 latency below 200 ms, crucial for performance optimization.
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FAQ/Guidelines
New members and veterans alike can benefit from revisiting our guidelines to ensure smooth interactions.
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Admin Guide: Getting Started
Essential reading for admins to get up and running with forum tools and management.
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Thinking About a Career in Cloud Computing? Here’s What You Need to Know!
An insightful thread for anyone considering a switch to the cloud computing industry.
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How Did You Start Your Cloud Computing Career?
Personal stories and advice from community members on starting a cloud computing career.
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What Are the Core Skills Needed for Cloud Computing?
A discussion on the essential skills that can set you apart in the cloud computing field.
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Who Was the First Company to Offer Cloud Computing Services?
A historical look at the origins of cloud services, a topic that always piques interest.
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Looking forward to another week of engaging conversations. Keep sharing your knowledge and experiences.

On who was first, if we mean managed workflow engines, AWS had SWF in 2012; Step Functions vs Logic Apps felt like a 2016 wash. For multi-region failover, the single biggest win for us was 30s DNS TTL with health checks plus idempotent workflow steps so retries don’t smear state. Anyone else @ops-team running active-active with Route 53 or Azure Traffic Manager and keeping writes behind a queue?

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The real shift wasn’t who was first, but when code-first orchestration arrived: Durable Functions (2017) and Step Functions Express (2019) changed the latency/cost math. For the multi-region failover folks were trading tips on, the unlock is keeping workflow state out of the engine — “state belongs in a global store” — e.g., Cosmos DB multi-region writes or DynamoDB global tables with idempotent step invocations. @Guide do you also pin callbacks behind Route 53/Traffic Manager health checks so rerouted events don’t resurrect stale executions?

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