4 ms·
>At Microsoft, those resources are so disconnected from engineering that they seem to rely on whitepapers and customers to learn about their own products. This
by hacknat 10y ago
>At Microsoft, those resources are so disconnected from engineering that they seem to rely on whitepapers and customers to learn about their own products.
This is so true. My company was being courted by Azure folks so we got some premium access and it was always laughable and frustrating how much more I knew about their cloud architecture than they did. I remember finally being able to talk to the head of network engineering, who was able to talk me through the finer points of how their load balancers worked (we were bumping up against some limitations). That 5 minute conversation was worth more than all their white papers (which were incorrect and contradictory at times) combined. I think I asked her why they didn't publish this information. She didn't say anything.
- liquidchicken 10y agoWe had an escalation to "the expert" on an Azure product one time and the guy's response to one of my questions was literally "I don't know, that isn't in the PowerPoint I brought."
- zimbatm 10y agoAzure is the worst. I think their strategy is to throw money at addon providers (and other customers) until something sticks. The issue is that their API is so horrible that unless you use .NET and use their official client libraries it's way too much work. I remember one time we published our addon on production and it had a different behavior than staging...
- youdontknowtho 10y agoThat hasn't been my experience, but I have heard that from other people. I personally like most of the API's that I've used.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoI've had some pretty intense problems there myself. I've found that a particularly good conference to attend to get access to people involved in Azure is put on by a company from England called Oxford Computing. It's identity focused, but touches on other aspects of security. It's also hosted on the MS campus in Redmond. Last time I was there I actually had a sit down with one of the guys working on their provisioning engine. The tech and engineering people really seem to want to engage with people using their stuff. The sales support people usually just describe features to people. Very, "Ill have to get back to you", kind of stuff. In their defense, though, in our area they do actually get back to you with real info. It's weird, though.
- gentleteblor 10y agoThis isn't all true, is it? I replied to one of those "Welcome to Azure" emails and mentioned I had some questions about integrating the Key Vault with a bunch of their other offerings. Someone from MS reached out to me and setup a meeting with a developer from one of the (many) Azure team. And this guy knew his shite, and was very helpful (still have notes from that meeting on my desk, many months later). I was a solo developer, with a startup idea, no revenue, no company. And I got help ASAP. I thought it was awesome. I'm sure my experience doesn't reflect the whole picture, but i think that's true all around.
- hacknat 10y agoI'm sure that for basic functionality it's true, but we were stretching their load balancers so I needed some deets on what was going on.