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I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on

I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places. Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.) Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.

powvans 8y ago
I agree, though I wouldn't say my experience with Azure has been "profoundly awful". Not all that great is more like it. I'm commenting because you mentioned the horizontal blade scrolling thing. For me, that has to be some of the worst UI/UX. Drives me absolutely nuts. GCP is quickly becoming my favorite. The UI/UX of the web console is light years ahead of either AWS or Azure. The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I'm stuck with AWS as my primary provider for now, but for new projects the bias is GCP. Most of the services I have used on GCP are well documented and easy to get around. Compare this to the AWS experience where documentation is often non-existent or out of date or the product itself just feels incomplete and broken.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  >The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I've found that some areas of the GCP docs are fantastic and some are appallingly bad. Two examples I dealt with last week that I particularly hated were trying to find a good resource on unit testing parts of a Cloud Dataflow and how examply to access the private key for a service account on Appengine Standard. (The switch from Java 7 to 8 really fucked this up). There seem to be two versions of a LOT of Google's APIs and it's often not clear which one is the correct one to use. Another annoying issue is that I'll be looking at the Java documentation on something and will suddenly be told to run some Python commands (which mean installing python and PIP and a bunch of other stuff) just to get some Java thing working. But, all this aside, I agree it's miles better than the last time I looked at Azure.
senorjazz 8y ago
My experience with Azure was awful. I moved a desktop app with 5000 paying customers to SAAS and wanted to not have to worry about the database management side and wanted to use azure. So not a huge business by any means, but growth potential is good. I signed up, started to look around, maybe a test table and that was it. It was end of the day. Next day, account deleted for breaking the TOS. Tried to contact support, few days later, got a reply saying I had broken the TOS. Yes I know. But how? What did I do? You broke the rules. No I didn't. I am from the EU (personal details / bank etc) but live abroad, this sometimes causes issues when I say I am from a country that doesn't match my IP so I ask if this was the issue ? No reply, I was just blanked after that.
Bartweiss 8y ago
I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package. But all of my experiences (up through "startup" size), and virtually all the stories I hear from below "major corporation", are terrible. Endless compatibility issues, awful interfaces, flatly inaccurate documentation, and support which is more time-consuming than GCP's approach of "buzz off" but equally unhelpful.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package. I work at what has been all-in Windows-.Net-Office enterprise, and despite an existing investment in Azure AD that we’re staying with for now, the experience with trying to work with Azure has been such that our comprehensive cloud transition effort is centered around AWS (which seems like it is going to have a side effect of making us less of a Windows and .NET shop, as well.)
- eropple 8y ago
  > I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. I do not. I imagine that there is a point at which the decision-makers and the Azure sales team can have many lunches and have many Serious Conversations. The further away purchase power is from implementation responsibility, the more likely one is to wind up hands-on with something as immediately-obviously deficient as Azure.

powvans 8y ago

I agree, though I wouldn't say my experience with Azure has been "profoundly awful". Not all that great is more like it. I'm commenting because you mentioned the horizontal blade scrolling thing. For me, that has to be some of the worst UI/UX. Drives me absolutely nuts. GCP is quickly becoming my favorite. The UI/UX of the web console is light years ahead of either AWS or Azure. The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I'm stuck with AWS as my primary provider for now, but for new projects the bias is GCP. Most of the services I have used on GCP are well documented and easy to get around. Compare this to the AWS experience where documentation is often non-existent or out of date or the product itself just feels incomplete and broken.

alasdair_ 8y ago
>The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I've found that some areas of the GCP docs are fantastic and some are appallingly bad. Two examples I dealt with last week that I particularly hated were trying to find a good resource on unit testing parts of a Cloud Dataflow and how examply to access the private key for a service account on Appengine Standard. (The switch from Java 7 to 8 really fucked this up). There seem to be two versions of a LOT of Google's APIs and it's often not clear which one is the correct one to use. Another annoying issue is that I'll be looking at the Java documentation on something and will suddenly be told to run some Python commands (which mean installing python and PIP and a bunch of other stuff) just to get some Java thing working. But, all this aside, I agree it's miles better than the last time I looked at Azure.

senorjazz 8y ago

My experience with Azure was awful. I moved a desktop app with 5000 paying customers to SAAS and wanted to not have to worry about the database management side and wanted to use azure. So not a huge business by any means, but growth potential is good. I signed up, started to look around, maybe a test table and that was it. It was end of the day. Next day, account deleted for breaking the TOS. Tried to contact support, few days later, got a reply saying I had broken the TOS. Yes I know. But how? What did I do? You broke the rules. No I didn't. I am from the EU (personal details / bank etc) but live abroad, this sometimes causes issues when I say I am from a country that doesn't match my IP so I ask if this was the issue ? No reply, I was just blanked after that.

Bartweiss 8y ago

I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package. But all of my experiences (up through "startup" size), and virtually all the stories I hear from below "major corporation", are terrible. Endless compatibility issues, awful interfaces, flatly inaccurate documentation, and support which is more time-consuming than GCP's approach of "buzz off" but equally unhelpful.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package. I work at what has been all-in Windows-.Net-Office enterprise, and despite an existing investment in Azure AD that we’re staying with for now, the experience with trying to work with Azure has been such that our comprehensive cloud transition effort is centered around AWS (which seems like it is going to have a side effect of making us less of a Windows and .NET shop, as well.)
eropple 8y ago
> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. I do not. I imagine that there is a point at which the decision-makers and the Azure sales team can have many lunches and have many Serious Conversations. The further away purchase power is from implementation responsibility, the more likely one is to wind up hands-on with something as immediately-obviously deficient as Azure.