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My $DAYJOB is leading a team which develops applications and gateways (for the 1k+ employee B2B market) that integrate deeply with Azure, Azure AD and anything

My $DAYJOB is leading a team which develops applications and gateways (for the 1k+ employee B2B market) that integrate deeply with Azure, Azure AD and anything that comes with it. We do have Microsoft employees (who work on Azure) on our payroll, too. I can tell you, as I'm sure anyone in my team can, that Azure is one big alpha-stage amalgation of half-baked services. I would never ever recommend Azure to literally any organization no matter the size. Seeing our customers struggle with it, us struggle with it, and even MS folks struggle with even the most basic tasks gets tiring really fast. We have so many workarounds in our software for inconsistency, unavailability, questionable security and general quirks in Azure that it's not even funny anymore. There are some days where random parts of Azure completely fail, like customers not being able to view resources, role assignments or even their directory config. An automatic integration test of one of our apps, which makes heavy use of Azure Resource Management APIs, just fails dozens of times a week not because we have a bug, but because state within Azure didn't propagate (RBAC changes, resource properties) within a timeout of more than 15 minutes! Two weeks back, the same test managed to reproducibly produce a state within Azure that completely disabled the Azure Portal resource view. All "blades" in Azure just displayed "unable to access data". Only an ultra-specific sequence of UI interactions and API calls could restore Azure (while uncovering a lot of other issues). That is the norm, not the exception. In 1.5 years worth of development, there has never been a single week without an Azure issue robbing us of hours of work just debugging their systems and writing workarounds. /rant On topic though, we've had good experiences with these k8s runtimes: - GKE - Rancher + DO - IBM Cloud k8s (yeah, I know!)

gamblor956 8y ago
My company uses Azure quite heavily, but not Kubernetes. No crashes, ever. Way more reliable than AWS ever was. (GCP is our failover.) So it seems that your experience is, from my POV, the exception. Maybe there's something wrong with the way you guys have Azure set up?
- politician 8y ago
  Which provisioning model are you using -- ASM or ARM? The last time I used Azure we used the (deprecated) ASM model which was pretty stable instead of the newer and often broken ARM model. We ended up staying on the deprecated model until we moved to AWS (for unrelated reasons).
  - electricEmu 8y ago
    Wow, our experiences were different. I found ARM to be a great tool compared to ASM. The moment I removed the last ASM bits, my entire infrastructure became reliably versioned and deployable.
    - politician 8y ago
      That's really great to hear!
- partiallypro 8y ago
  In most cases the cause is on the DevOps team and not on Azure, GCS or AWS. I can attest to that in screwing up some configs early on. That being said this is a very new offering from Microsoft and is possible it has some kinks to work out.
- jgalentine007 8y ago
  This has been my experience as well, I was surprised to read about some of the issues that were posted. Been using azure app service for about 50 .net/core services for over a year with 100% uptime. Guess I'm just lucky!
RoadieRoller 8y ago
My Team uses CosmosDB heavily (so far, and not too far anymore) and it is another half-baked service. The support people are Indians (Microsoft outsourced Azure support to an Indian company - MindTree) and are not very knowledgeable on the CosmosDB service. They always point us to the URI of a web article (of course from Microsoft) and says everything will work if you follow the article, and close the ticket. Over the time, we understood that we know more than them on CosmosDB, and used to ignore their replies, but nevertheless raise tickets to make sure that they are aware.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- megaman22 8y ago
  I generally like Microsoft, but their official support channels are pretty terrible. Just go looking for something in the MSDN forums - a large percentage of the posts from "Microsoft" people are telling the customers/developers that they posted in the wrong forum (often incorrectly), or suggesting some inane thing that the original post already specified and then closing the thread. GitHub issues are slightly better, although if you get off the beaten path of the new hotness, responses get very thin. You're much better off trying to find some backchannels via MVPs on Twitter or through blogs, or figure out the developers or evangelists that give talks on this kind of stuff and contact them directly.
Spoom 8y ago
The biggest red flag I saw when I was working with Azure is that I noticed that a lot of their CLI commands ("az do-a-thing") actually have the pattern of "retry until it works"... and the first few tries often actually fail!
lovich 8y ago
I've had wildly different results. My shop wasn't large by any means but azure worked pretty much perfectly for us. The only issue we ever had was when changing the size on an azure swl db went from a 20 minute operation to taking up to an hour sometimes. Other than that it let us scale as we wanted and have the engineers duplicate environments with their local changes arbitrarily. Gave us a 400 dollar/month bill for something that would have taken a full devops to handle with 10 engineers
ripberge 8y ago
Can't speak to the Azure Resource Management API's but I've had a very different experience with Web Apps, Azure SQL, Storage, Traffic Manager. Other than a few short-lived bouts of missed writes into Service Bus and Cosmos (their worst product, IMO) the platform has achieved 100% uptime for us for several years. Pretty amazing. From what you're describing I'm guessing you're REALLY not their average user and they de-prioritize quality on your use cases. Probably better off on another platform if you can help it.
- blablabla123 8y ago
  Some stuff works really good, I had very good experience with the Table and Blob Storage, Traffic Manager as well. But seriously, these are pretty basic services. ;-) What did you host on Web Apps if I can ask?
  - ripberge 8y ago
    It's basically a SASS eCommerce app. Kind of an enterprise class OLTP solution, but with pretty unusual traffic bursts and due to what we're selling very high DB contention. We test with 100,000 concurrent users, have achieved about 10,000 orders per minute--much more than our credit card gateway (Stripe) will allow us to process. There are some rough edges here and there, but I've experienced just as bad and sometimes worse with AWS.
Bombthecat 8y ago
With DO you mean digital Ocean?
- alexpi 8y ago
  I think DO stands for DC/OS in this context
  - minxomat 8y ago
    No, I actually meant DigitalOcean. We tested both Rancher (k8s) and Portainer (Swarm) backed by DO Infrastructure. Both worked well. Of course it's not a managed solution, but both are operationally very easy. DO also announced native k8s support, so I'm excited for that.
    - sitepodmatt 8y ago
      It's in beta and closed access at the moment though https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ Would be interested as test/QA environment but I guess combined with 'CPU Optimized Droplets' could work for production loads too
- lloeki 8y ago
  I guess so since RancherOS is available as a fully supported option (as well as Fedora Atomic and CoreOS). FWIW we're running a simple, custom cluster made of Debian droplets set up using kubeadm.
blablabla123 8y ago
Haha... I have experience with Azure as well, seen both good and bad things. As I read the title, I was already quite sure to read such a post. When Kubernetes became popular, I tried it with Azure and both scripts and documentation were broken. When I found out, I stopped trying. Regarding Azure in general: Azure Websites is c*. Having used Heroku and App Engine for some time before, this feels like a joke. Deployments sometimes work, sometimes they don't. Have to deal with node gyps? Don't, just don't. If you ever are forced to use Azure Websites (free startup package? ;)), learn Ansible as soon as possible and convince your team to switch to VMs. The VMs are okay, you can't do much wrong with. I don't really know where the complexity of Azure Websites comes from, maybe from the fact that it runs on Windows, but this cannot be the full explanation. I have seen people work with node on Windows (even without Ubuntu on Windows) and they were fine. For anyone interested, this is the Azure Websites backend: https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu Disclaimer: my long adventure with it was years ago, maybe the service has changed 100% but I doubt it
brianafrank 8y ago
Thanks for the shout out to IKS (ibm cloud). you have no idea how obsessed we are with this service so it's always great to see someone noticed. :)
JediPig 8y ago
i rarely comment. I was going to give a thumbs up on testing azure for k8s. I am removing azure from the list perm. After reading these horror stories, azure just killed itself as a cloud provider. GC & AWS. AWS support engineers bend over backwards for us.
merqurio 8y ago
We were very surprised with the quality of IBM's Kubernetes service too ! We had a cluster there for almost a year and everything runned very smoothly. We missed having more instance types to choose from, but it was a nice experience.
- danberg 8y ago
  We are constantly working to add more machine-types based on customer requests. Recently we have added several new flavors including bare metal systems. You may want to check them out. https://console.bluemix.net/docs/containers/cs_clusters.html#planning_worker_nodes https://console.bluemix.net/docs/containers/cs_clusters.html...
mijoharas 8y ago
So, just to understand, are you writing the software because the large business clients are already tied to azure and gonna keep using it? Trying to understand why there is a market, and why people would want to use it.
eip 8y ago
> That is the norm, not the exception. Have you never used any other Microsoft software? I mean it is the same software company that made Windows ME, Vista, 7, and 10, along with countless other chocolate covered turds.

gamblor956 8y ago

My company uses Azure quite heavily, but not Kubernetes. No crashes, ever. Way more reliable than AWS ever was. (GCP is our failover.) So it seems that your experience is, from my POV, the exception. Maybe there's something wrong with the way you guys have Azure set up?

politician 8y ago
Which provisioning model are you using -- ASM or ARM? The last time I used Azure we used the (deprecated) ASM model which was pretty stable instead of the newer and often broken ARM model. We ended up staying on the deprecated model until we moved to AWS (for unrelated reasons).
- electricEmu 8y ago
  Wow, our experiences were different. I found ARM to be a great tool compared to ASM. The moment I removed the last ASM bits, my entire infrastructure became reliably versioned and deployable.
  - politician 8y ago
    That's really great to hear!
partiallypro 8y ago
In most cases the cause is on the DevOps team and not on Azure, GCS or AWS. I can attest to that in screwing up some configs early on. That being said this is a very new offering from Microsoft and is possible it has some kinks to work out.
jgalentine007 8y ago
This has been my experience as well, I was surprised to read about some of the issues that were posted. Been using azure app service for about 50 .net/core services for over a year with 100% uptime. Guess I'm just lucky!

RoadieRoller 8y ago

My Team uses CosmosDB heavily (so far, and not too far anymore) and it is another half-baked service. The support people are Indians (Microsoft outsourced Azure support to an Indian company - MindTree) and are not very knowledgeable on the CosmosDB service. They always point us to the URI of a web article (of course from Microsoft) and says everything will work if you follow the article, and close the ticket. Over the time, we understood that we know more than them on CosmosDB, and used to ignore their replies, but nevertheless raise tickets to make sure that they are aware.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
megaman22 8y ago
I generally like Microsoft, but their official support channels are pretty terrible. Just go looking for something in the MSDN forums - a large percentage of the posts from "Microsoft" people are telling the customers/developers that they posted in the wrong forum (often incorrectly), or suggesting some inane thing that the original post already specified and then closing the thread. GitHub issues are slightly better, although if you get off the beaten path of the new hotness, responses get very thin. You're much better off trying to find some backchannels via MVPs on Twitter or through blogs, or figure out the developers or evangelists that give talks on this kind of stuff and contact them directly.

Spoom 8y ago

The biggest red flag I saw when I was working with Azure is that I noticed that a lot of their CLI commands ("az do-a-thing") actually have the pattern of "retry until it works"... and the first few tries often actually fail!

lovich 8y ago

I've had wildly different results. My shop wasn't large by any means but azure worked pretty much perfectly for us. The only issue we ever had was when changing the size on an azure swl db went from a 20 minute operation to taking up to an hour sometimes. Other than that it let us scale as we wanted and have the engineers duplicate environments with their local changes arbitrarily. Gave us a 400 dollar/month bill for something that would have taken a full devops to handle with 10 engineers

ripberge 8y ago

Can't speak to the Azure Resource Management API's but I've had a very different experience with Web Apps, Azure SQL, Storage, Traffic Manager. Other than a few short-lived bouts of missed writes into Service Bus and Cosmos (their worst product, IMO) the platform has achieved 100% uptime for us for several years. Pretty amazing. From what you're describing I'm guessing you're REALLY not their average user and they de-prioritize quality on your use cases. Probably better off on another platform if you can help it.

blablabla123 8y ago
Some stuff works really good, I had very good experience with the Table and Blob Storage, Traffic Manager as well. But seriously, these are pretty basic services. ;-) What did you host on Web Apps if I can ask?
- ripberge 8y ago
  It's basically a SASS eCommerce app. Kind of an enterprise class OLTP solution, but with pretty unusual traffic bursts and due to what we're selling very high DB contention. We test with 100,000 concurrent users, have achieved about 10,000 orders per minute--much more than our credit card gateway (Stripe) will allow us to process. There are some rough edges here and there, but I've experienced just as bad and sometimes worse with AWS.

Bombthecat 8y ago

With DO you mean digital Ocean?

alexpi 8y ago
I think DO stands for DC/OS in this context
- minxomat 8y ago
  No, I actually meant DigitalOcean. We tested both Rancher (k8s) and Portainer (Swarm) backed by DO Infrastructure. Both worked well. Of course it's not a managed solution, but both are operationally very easy. DO also announced native k8s support, so I'm excited for that.
  - sitepodmatt 8y ago
    It's in beta and closed access at the moment though https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ Would be interested as test/QA environment but I guess combined with 'CPU Optimized Droplets' could work for production loads too
lloeki 8y ago
I guess so since RancherOS is available as a fully supported option (as well as Fedora Atomic and CoreOS). FWIW we're running a simple, custom cluster made of Debian droplets set up using kubeadm.

blablabla123 8y ago

Haha... I have experience with Azure as well, seen both good and bad things. As I read the title, I was already quite sure to read such a post. When Kubernetes became popular, I tried it with Azure and both scripts and documentation were broken. When I found out, I stopped trying. Regarding Azure in general: Azure Websites is c*. Having used Heroku and App Engine for some time before, this feels like a joke. Deployments sometimes work, sometimes they don't. Have to deal with node gyps? Don't, just don't. If you ever are forced to use Azure Websites (free startup package? ;)), learn Ansible as soon as possible and convince your team to switch to VMs. The VMs are okay, you can't do much wrong with. I don't really know where the complexity of Azure Websites comes from, maybe from the fact that it runs on Windows, but this cannot be the full explanation. I have seen people work with node on Windows (even without Ubuntu on Windows) and they were fine. For anyone interested, this is the Azure Websites backend: https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu Disclaimer: my long adventure with it was years ago, maybe the service has changed 100% but I doubt it

brianafrank 8y ago

Thanks for the shout out to IKS (ibm cloud). you have no idea how obsessed we are with this service so it's always great to see someone noticed. :)

JediPig 8y ago

i rarely comment. I was going to give a thumbs up on testing azure for k8s. I am removing azure from the list perm. After reading these horror stories, azure just killed itself as a cloud provider. GC & AWS. AWS support engineers bend over backwards for us.

merqurio 8y ago

We were very surprised with the quality of IBM's Kubernetes service too ! We had a cluster there for almost a year and everything runned very smoothly. We missed having more instance types to choose from, but it was a nice experience.

danberg 8y ago
We are constantly working to add more machine-types based on customer requests. Recently we have added several new flavors including bare metal systems. You may want to check them out. https://console.bluemix.net/docs/containers/cs_clusters.html#planning_worker_nodes https://console.bluemix.net/docs/containers/cs_clusters.html...

mijoharas 8y ago

So, just to understand, are you writing the software because the large business clients are already tied to azure and gonna keep using it? Trying to understand why there is a market, and why people would want to use it.

eip 8y ago

> That is the norm, not the exception. Have you never used any other Microsoft software? I mean it is the same software company that made Windows ME, Vista, 7, and 10, along with countless other chocolate covered turds.