21 ms·

It's tough being an Azure fan

357 points by ealexhudson 5y ago

mistrial9 5y ago
>> Conclusion -- I’ll still continue to use Azure, but the proposition is becoming weaker I do appreciate the detailed list of current failings, to add to my own systemic rejection of this system based on their management objectives you are under an illusion, you are REQUIRED to use it in service of The Company
redwood 5y ago
The tech is definitely third tier. And if you ever need to actually talk to someone over there, it's a nightmare.
- aabaker99 5y ago
  I work at a large company but I find Azure wants to talk to us too much.
  - ishjoh 5y ago
    It always depends on your scale. I was at a company that had a month spend in the 6 figures and they wanted to constantly talk. A different company I was at the spend was 3 figures a month, and we couldn't get any help at all, even knowing some internal folks in different areas of the company.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    We don't get much spam from Azure reps, but APM/metrics/logs companies like DataDog really are trying hard to schedule free-of-charge "presentations" with our teams. Unless they are faking out MTA headers and mail client details, the mail templates are actually edited and sent from a desktop by an actual sales/advocate/devrel guy. Yuck.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    They want to talk, “ connect” and “align” all the time but not really help with issues you may have.
  - redwood 5y ago
    Right but the quality of the conversation is so low it's a waste of time, hard to find the right people. It's like talking to a borg cube
- jamespwilliams 5y ago
  Yes. We found a problem with Azure’s IPv6 support a while back. It took quite literally months to get the issue escalated to someone who could do anything about it, and as far as I know it’s still broken, although it’s scheduled to be fixed this year. We had to pay for this “support” too. We worked around the problem in the end, but still.
- beh9540 5y ago
  I always dreaded talking to support - AKS would routinely break in weird and ways, and it was always super frustrating waiting for support to fix things that shouldn’t have happened. We once had an error with Azure MySQL and AKS, where it would just stop dropping packets with basic instance types. Support could never fix it, we ended up just upgrading to standard because that worked. I will say this - the manager of the team at Azure did comp our upgrade, because they couldn’t figure out why it was happening. I tried very hard to get our project off Azure, but because it was negotiated as part the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, it was “free” so the CTO wouldn’t budge. I assume this is how many people end up needing to deal with Azure.
- Avalaxy 5y ago
  > And if you ever need to actually talk to someone over there, it's a nightmare I never understand it when I see people say this about Azure. Did you ever try creating a support ticket through the Azure portal? My experience has been nothing but stellar. They respond very fast, they provide very in-depth expert knowledge, and they seem to be quite thorough, escalating any issues if needed. This is my experience with creating tickets for various organizations, both big and small.
CosmicShadow 5y ago
I was all in on Azure for years, but once my BizSpark wore off and died I was shocked at how expensive it was to run the most trivial side project or seedling of an idea or non-money making project. As a .NET full stack web dev for like 14 years, I finally decided to put all my new learnings into just doing static sites on React and trying to figure out some AWS stuff because I wasn't going to try and use .NET on AWS when I had it so fairly figured out on Azure. For a serial entrepreneur and maker, it just couldn't cut it anymore. Now I do NextJS on Vercel with minimal extra services out of what they provide and I get way faster stuff for free pretty much and I guess I'm no longer the only .NET guy struggling to hold the fort in a big tech community that also thinks .NET is too old or boring or non-sexy. I still do like Azure better than AWS. The stupid, weird UX is still nicer than AWS. The docs by MS are 1000x better than everything on AWS. I miss MSSQL and the SQL Server Management Studio, but I don't miss the cost for scaling it enough to actually use it for scraping or data processing. I tried to sell friends on Azure and even got a part time gig from MS themselves to try and help local startups use it, but no one cared or was interested. It just doesn't have that same "standard" or "sexyness" or "built into every new tech" feel to it, so I doubt it'll ever really change or pull ahead in comparison.
- metaltyphoon 5y ago
  I've never used Azure and always use .NET on AWS and have been for the past 5 years. I haven't hit any problem on it so far. .NET is not tied to a specific cloud provider.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Do you mean .NET is not tied to a specific cloud?
    - mkl 5y ago
      .NET is not tied to cloud at all. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ lists Web, Mobile, Desktop, Microservices, Cloud, Machine Learning, Game Development, Internet of Things.
NoNameProvided 5y ago
We use Azure at work and this article hit home hard. As we just have been burned recently by Azure pricing. I am in the same spot as the author: liking Azure but being put off by all the weird stuff sometimes they are doing. In our case, all we wanted was a static IP in front of an Azure Container Instance. Easy right? Let's put the container in a vNET, place a NAT Gateway in front of it and we are done. However, for some reason NAT Gateway is not supported for Container instances, instead, the official documentation suggests setting up an Azure managed firewall in front of your container that starts at a whopping 600EUR/month. That is a steep price increase from your ~30ish EUR/month for a basic container instance and it doesn't seem to be any other official alternative. I have opened an issue with the docs team [1] about it and I hope there is another way of doing this that doesn't incur a doubling of our Azure monthly spending. [1]: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/81274 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/81274
- amir734jj 5y ago
  I don't think azure-docs repo is the right place to ask for help/suggestions as maintainers are not very responsive because their sole job is to push internal docs to public docs. But I understand your frustration. However, I believe you could have set up "public IP prefix" using azure cli. I do not think you needs a azure managed firewall. Adding managed firewall just to have edge IP is like saying I want to add a outside patio to my house, sure let's add a security check point for the neighborhood first.
  - NoNameProvided 5y ago
    > I don't think azure-docs repo is the right place to ask for help/suggestions as maintainers are not very responsive because their sole job is to push internal docs to public docs. What place would you suggest? We had bad experience with Azure support we could never fight through on the first support line. > However, I believe you could have set up "public IP prefix" using azure cli. I do not think you needs a azure managed firewall. I don't have deep experience in networking stuff on Azure so my understanding can be wrong, but I think "public ip prefix" is just a group of continuous IP addresses what you can reserve. You still need to assign those to something eg a NAT Gateway. As far as I know you cannot assign them directly to an Container Instance.
JohnFen 5y ago
I have a funny story about Azure. Our company was looking for a cloud provider, and Microsoft sent a couple of salespeople to talk to us about theirs. Their salespeople were very condescending, talking like they'd be doing us a favor by allowing us to become customers and failing to take any of our questions and concerns seriously. I think it's because we aren't a large corporation in terms of headcount. In any case, that meeting ensured that no further consideration of Azure would take place, and it's very unlikely that it would be considered in the future.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Efficient that you got it sorted out in one go. Well done!
- loeg 5y ago
  We (different organization) had a similar conversation with GCP, with similar results.
  - chunkyks 5y ago
    Dodged a bullet there, I'd say. You can safely assume that google will EOL anything in GCP that you might actually start relying on for business function. "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You": https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
    - VirusNewbie 5y ago
      What service has GCP deprecated?
      - makeitdouble 5y ago
        I don't fully agree with parent, and GCP is differently managed compared to other Google products. That said, the k8s version deprecation policies, mixed with significant changes in cluster setup from times to times you have to keep up with is peculiar. I kind of think this is something we accept when going into k8s, but I'd understand people not at ease with that philosophy.
jorams 5y ago
> I’ll still continue to use Azure And this is the actual problem. Azure doesn't compete on quality. Microsoft rarely does. They have a few products and a market position that make them the default choice for countless customers. Nobody punishes them for their failings as long as the feature boxes keep being checked, and so the cycle continues.
- sjtindell 5y ago
  What’s that logic anyway? “It’s hard to be a fan” sounds to me like you’re not really a fan, you’re just in a sunk cost fallacy. Bail out.
- sli 5y ago
  A previous employer switched everything over to Azure and it was nothing but constant problems and nobody liked it except for the CEO, which meant everyone had to put up with it and nobody had a say. Teams and Azure DevOps are some of the worst software I've ever used in my life. I've used worse software before, but it was hobbyist stuff written by single developers, and therefore don't really compare fairly.
  - AlfeG 5y ago
    Azure Pipelines is just slow. I'm not sure even how to fix it. Checkout stage of our code from Azure Repos easily count for half a minute. Npm install goes for a 1.5 minute with npm cache hit. Total build times are around 20 minutes...
    - dachryn 5y ago
      there is an undocumented feature, called zip deploy, if you deploy to an app service. Give it a go, it might just work. I use it to deploy a Python Django website. You need to add a setting in your App Service environment variables. It took me an escalation from our account manager, to get a good support guy, who informed me of this functionality. Here is the summary of my support ticket: WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE” and value as 1. We performed deployment and it took around 30 secs. We also verified that the app is working fine. Now you will do some changes and deploy once more to verify end to end pipeline. Zip deployment is a feature of Azure App Service that lets you deploy your function app project to the wwwroot directory. The project is packaged as a .zip deployment file. The same APIs can be used to deploy your package to the d:\home\data\SitePackages folder. With the WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE app setting value of 1, the zip deployment APIs copy your package to the d:\home\data\SitePackages folder instead of extracting the files to d:\home\site\wwwroot. It also creates the packagename.txt file. After a restart, the package is mounted to wwwroot as a read-only filesystem. Article for reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/run-functions-from-deployment-package#integration-with-zip-deployment https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/run-f...
reducesuffering 5y ago
Azure is and will continue to creep into GitHub. Pretty sure my new projects will be on GitLab now just to get a headstart on using who the cutting edge service is a few years from now.
- oneplane 5y ago
  The biggest issue is that I've experienced some of that creep with GitHub Actions. It's a mess, doesn't do what it needs to do and besides "presenting" features/functionality it can't actually do even the basic things a nasty old Jenkins installation in an AWS ASG does. They practically just copied some Azure CI stuff over (which was obviously written from a completely different perspective/mindset) using a tech stack that is old yet immature when compared to even relatively young products like GitLab CI. If a company wants to come up with a CI product but can't even get on par with basic nominal GitLab CI features and usability, what's the point...
  - unemphysbro 5y ago
    even from a documentation perspective, GitLab CI is so much easier to digest then azure pipeline docs.
    - FridgeSeal 5y ago
      Azure pipelines is the most verbose and confusing CI tool I’ve had the misfortune of using. Why does it require so many steps? Why are they so verbose? It feels like writing glorified bash scripts (in which case why am I using a CI tool?) but worse.
  - wussboy 5y ago
    “Old, yet immature”. Perfect description.
privacyxpert 5y ago
If you run workloads in Azure, and you let their default agent run on your images, I'd highly consider you take 30 minutes to skim around this repo: `Azure/walinuxagent`. Go read through some issues, look at some closed ones, try and skim through the source code. Realize there's two enormous python scripts in the repo, one with "2.0" tacked on the end. If Azure is somehow not just rebooting/killing VMs that lack the magic handshake, I'd highly recommend dropping the agent. After all of this news, and what is on display in walinuxagent, do you really want some network-connected agent listening, who's often-most-touted feature is being a persistent backdoor? "It's tough being an Azure fan." Eh, it's a nice cyclic problem. They have no depth of caring about engineering (hence why Azure is littered with services that are impossible to fully utilize because their own engineers don't understand the how/why of what they're building half the time). Which in turn, along with crap career advancement and constant un-appreciated, unmitigated live-service burnout, is why they can't retain actual Linux talent to save their fucking lives.
Hikikomori 5y ago
As a network engineer writing code to automate aws and azure infrastructure I'm amazed at the number of pitfalls we've had with azure, they just keep popping up. Then the whole basic/standard options for every service. Feels like an order of magnitude higher in complexity for no reason, part of it is the abysmal documentation.
- yoyohello13 5y ago
  I find this to be a common theme with Microsoft products. I work heavily with SSIS and MS SQL. The Microsoft docs are so convoluted they are borderline useless for learning the products.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    Same here, and not even GCP is that bad with the 'release' vs. 'beta' APIs that intermingle constantly. Most of the time Azure feels like just another 'we have virtual machines and a crappy API' service. Kinda like a pretend-cloud where a lot of products come almost together but never finish. Almost similar to the way Windows and backwards compatibility means you end up with 100 libraries, frameworks, languages and versions all sitting side-by-side and not really working together, just differently in parallel. Not useful for automation at all, which makes it not useful at scale. (Except when scaling means: we want to run windows VMs with AD and go from 10 to 100 and change no parameters at all)
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
      My theory is that all MS products are ultimately just a layer based on SharePoint :)
      - oneplane 5y ago
        That reminds me of a relatively old twitter thread (that I can't find of course) about systems that have become operating systems and computers upon themselves. It went something like this: Code used to be running on a processor, then it ran on an OS on a processor. Then it became on a runtime on an OS on a processor. Then it an abstraction layer was sandwiched in between. Then a filesystem. Then a compatibility layer. Then a database. Then a browser. Then we went and created a runtime in the browser to run code again. We have come full circle. This probably applies to SharePoint but also the real-time OS on your GPU, the MSSQL database which has its own OS facilities you can run stuff on. Add too many features and the application becomes the very thing we wanted to get away from...
fzingle 5y ago
We use Microsoft Azure AD B2C to manage users. AD itself is a nice (for enterprise software), is used all over the place and is pretty stable. B2C on the other hand is a different story. Every few months we have to roll out a new tenant in our system. Tenants are identified by B2C "applications". Every single time, the new application doesn't work. Every single time the fix involves editing the JSON spec, changing something random (like a "true" to a "false"), saving, and changing it right back again. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence... we're planning a migration to AWS. Also, try Googling for documentation related to "Microsoft Azure AD B2C". Almost every shred of internet wisdom is related to AD and not B2C. Even with Microsoft's own documentation you sometimes follow a link from a B2C API reference and find yourself in AD-only land and it isn't obvious. This makes the task of researching features and debugging infuriating.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Maybe Bing search would be better for MS docs? (ducks)
  - liamwire 5y ago
    I got a full-blown belly laugh out of this, thank you.
- davidspiess 5y ago
  B2C is the worst product we have ever worked with. Outages on constant basis, an extremely complex XML configuration, translation bugs, unsupported features which are only available in AD but not AD B2C (e.g. M2M), and really bad documentation. We basically had to dive in their github examples and issue tracker to make it work. Do yourself a favor and stay away from it.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
I'm surprised Azure still doesn't have any ARM processors to compete with AWS' Graviton instances. It's been nearly a full year since rumors of Azure working on ARM chips (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-designing-its-own-arm-chips-for-datacenter-servers-report/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-designing-its-own...), and going back further it's close to 5 years since they talked up Windows Server on ARM (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/2-years-later-theres-still-no-windows-server-arm-in-microsoft-azure/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/2-years-later-theres-st...) on Azure. Where is any of it though? I can go to AWS right now and spin up multiple different types of ARM processor instances, most of which are cheaper and more efficient for web-like workloads. It's really surprising that Azure hasn't been able to get anything out in all these years.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  It's very possible that there just isn't much demand. This is likely for a number of reasons: - x86 just has better support for the stuff Azure's "enterprise" customers want - ARM servers are often more expensive to spin up than an equivalently specced x86 option - PRISM compliance is easier on x86 (half-joking, half not) I like ARM, and I owned a Rev1 Raspberry Pi when those were cool. But even now, ARM still has yet to make a strong case for existing on the server. And that's before we even discuss architectures like RISC-V that are out on the horizon, much better suited for servers than ARM. I'm not planning on an "ARM revolution" taking place in the next decade unless x86 is critically compromised in some way.
  - donavanm 5y ago
    Can you clarify point two? I was under the impression that the wide consensus was for Graviton instances to have significantly better price performance for most workloads. And the current state of arm support is surprisingly good for opensource or linux based server software.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > But even now, ARM still has yet to make a strong case for existing on the server This is several years out of date: AWS Graviton instances are usually a fairly substantial savings over similar Intel, with AMD in between, and Cloudflare has been reporting rather good numbers as well: https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-cpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-... The main reason I suspect Azure doesn't have it is both Windows' legacy x86 hyper-focus (the days where NT ran on half a dozen platforms never really panned out) and a smaller number of managed services. AWS has very popular services like RDS, ElastiCache, ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, etc. where you can simply check a box and wait a couple minutes to see savings, not to mention things like Lambda being only slightly more work for many users, and that's a great way to get volume usage even if the average enterprise IT department is scared to go near it for VMs.
bluedino 5y ago
It's a mess from an admin standpoint, but I like to think most of our issues are from running hybrid with on-prem Also, lots of stuff doesn't worth with GCC High
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  another team in my org is trying to configure the same but it's been challenge. I don't know specifics but it's taken considerable time to set-up the environment.
wkirby 5y ago
My company once took a project on Azure, and ended up giving a 35% cut on our invoices to move to AWS. The bugs I filed while working on that project are still not closed. That was 4 years ago.
m0zg 5y ago
It's tough being an AWS fan for that matter too. Aside from the simplest things, every time you need to do something there are huge reams of "documentation" in various stages of decay, and each doc is comprised of dozens of (unnecessarily) manual steps. Error messages are shit, too, and the whole thing has this stench of massive engineering debt and duct tape to it. I was told this stuff was supposed to be built by people who know what they're doing, but apparently not. It's duct tape all the way down it seems like.
- CosmicShadow 5y ago
  Yeah, when I finally switched over to using it from Azure I was shocked at how horrid the docs are. I would have assumed by now they would have been cleaned up, but no, time does not heal these wounds.
- danjac 5y ago
  The individual services maybe are built by people who know what they're doing, sure. But the aggregate is a mess because Amazon ships its org chart.
FridgeSeal 5y ago
I’ve had what can only be described as the unfortunate displeasure of using Azure. Unnecessarily complex, arcane and frustrating is how I’d describe basically everything we had to do. The fact that they ship a whole Python runtime is basically the least shocking thing I’ve learnt about Azure.
TheBill 5y ago
I spent ~6 months getting them to properly delete a unprovisioned, un attached, properly shut down disk.
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  Deleting any resource has a 70% success rate simply mindboggling
  - handrous 5y ago
    Judging from the stories posted here, can you even imagine what the stories from the poor souls working on this would be like, if only they could tell us without violating an NDA? Must be the stuff of nightmares.
zz865 5y ago
I miss my on prem data center. Life was so easy then. I dont even need scalability but my dumb bosses think the cloud is cool.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Yeah...and if I have to sit through one more week of managers and devs freaking out about lambda cold starts Im probably going to quit tech altogether. It is the most dumb ass broken record. Torture. Read the manual before you write two hundred functions and bet the whole project on fantasies next time.
selimnairb 5y ago
Don’t know if this is still the case, but I always felt more nickled and dimed on Azure (than AWS). For example, the base SKU for their managed PostgreSQL compatible service did not allow use in a VPC/behind a DMZ. You had to pay substantially more for the mid level SKU. This was not the case with AWS’s equivalent service.
- selimnairb 5y ago
  Also, I may have missed something, but cloning VMs in Azure used to be (still is?) a destructive process. WTF?
  - MBCook 5y ago
    How could it possibly be a destructive process? Do you mean like cloning VM A destroys it and creates identical VMs B and C?
    - selimnairb 5y ago
      I think what was happening was, if you wanted to make a VM image (which you could then later clone to new instances), it would result in the original VM (i.e., the source of the image) being no longer usable.
- nsatya_msft 5y ago
  Did you try Azure Flexible server offering for PostgreSQL? It is in preview and addresses this exact issue.
  - selimnairb 5y ago
    No, I haven’t used Azure since changing jobs two years ago. Thanks for the heads up.
atlgator 5y ago
I’ve been using Azure since the old portal and it always feels like Microsoft is just checking the box. AWS launches some innovative new service and Azure copies them with a half-as-capable alternative.
rhacker 5y ago
We moved EVERYTHING to Teams and ADO (for git, backlog, pipelines) except our actual product is still on AWS. If we didn't have a couple things like encryption, S3 and some fargate usage, we'd probably start fresh on Azure.
cure 5y ago
Azure is a typical Microsoft product: it doesn't work all that well, but you can get the job done if you just buy more of it (to work around the deficiencies). From a business perspective, this is brilliant. From a technical perspective it's not awesome, obviously.
- uuddlrlr 5y ago
  Bill gates.
acdha 5y ago
The mention of AWS ECS made me curious — does Azure have the equivalent of Fargate, where they manage the host and you only pay for the container's actual usage? The O&M wins on that have been really substantial and I recommend it for anyone who doesn't have sufficiently large scale that the savings will fund an ops team capable of running something like ECS or Kubernetes. One of the reasons why is the challenge of avoiding over-allocated instances — every time I've seen people running AWS ECS/EKS, Google GKE, etc. they've been substantially over-provisioned because someone's always meaning to get around to looking at that but the time never seems to materialize.
- pjgalbraith 5y ago
  Their closest Fargate equivalent is probably Azure Container Instances. I haven't tried it recently but last time I did the startup time was very slow for new containers (5mins+). However that may have improved now.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Thanks — I'll have to take a look at that sometime.
- pram 5y ago
  You can do Fargate with EKS now too, but it has sizing limitations that aren’t present in ECS last time I tried.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Yes - and they had limits with EBS, too. It’s not perfect but it’s really handy for cutting out maintenance for a substantial fraction of my tasks which don’t hit the edges.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
I find Azure to be expensive. Microsoft is not accountable for service issues and bugs. Support is just a wall of consultants that mostly cannot help and then reach back to actual Microsoft for help (which makes everything really really slow). Garbage.
thayne 5y ago
The AWS cli has much the same problem as the az cli. Especially v2, which bundles the python runtime as well. Not that that is an excuse for azure of course (or conversely the fact azure does it isn't an excuse for aws).
zeronine 5y ago
I don't think being a "fan" of tech products/services is healthy. Having a preference is fine, but loyalty won't work in your favour.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  It's a good article, check it out. It's really just about being a heavy Azure user and considering whether to recommend it to others, with the bulk of the article being a critique of various issues. "fan" is just in the title.
dudus 5y ago
> Every cloud provider has their expensive “thing”. Ingress is always cheap, egress always expensive. AWS has their “Managed NAT Gateway”, after all, the sit-in-the-corner money printer that never fails. This is my pet peeve with cloud providers. Each one of them seem to have a gotcha somewhere hidden. It's very hard to compare what your final costs will be early in the project. You try to compare GCloud, AWS and Azure on VM, ingress, egress. After that comparisons become harder as services don't necessarily map 1:1. You end up choosing one and always find something else that adds to the cost you forgot to include, or maybe you just underestimated some metric. Egress feels abusive pretty much across the board. Without really a good reason. Feels like they all sat at a table and decided to fix the price there. While you are developing your business you find you want to use some feature (like managed VMs on Azure's case) that is priced way out of a reasonable amount. You feel robbed, maybe you can still pay for it with your budget, but even then it leaves a bad taste, like you are getting a bad deal.
- pram 5y ago
  I wouldn’t call that particular thing hidden. You can roll your own NAT setup in a VPC, but that still costs money.
- rkrzr 5y ago
  > Egress feels abusive pretty much across the board. Without really a good reason. Feels like they all sat at a table and decided to fix the price there Indeed. You can significantly lower your price for hosting static files by using an external CDN in front of S3 or GCS. Little known fact: egress from GCS to Cloudflare is half the price than their usual egress fees. So combining the Cloudflare CDN for caching static files with this egress discount can lead to a 3-4x saving over just serving files out of GCS directly.
smackeyacky 5y ago
I once ran up a $15,000 bill on Azure completely by accident when trying to get one of their video processing services to work. Once I figured out the service wasn't going to do what I wanted at a price I could afford, I tried to detach it and shut it down and thought I had succeeded. I didn't. The offending process costing me money didn't appear on the Azure console and I had no idea it was running, how to access it to stop it or even to know what was going on. When it turned up on my bill I nearly had a heart attack. Thankfully they let me out of it once I pointed out I was getting billed for something I couldn't see. I appreciated that greatly but I've never gone back to Azure and the experience scarred me so much I don't think I ever will. This was about 4 years ago so more than likely they have sorted it out. They keep reminding me I have $50 of test/dev credit on Azure through my Visual Studio subscription but it flat out frightens me to even try to use it. AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.
- mrits 5y ago
  It took me 2 years to get AWS to stop billing me a few cents a month. I didn't try that hard but every month or so I'd get another bill for like 23 cents. I'd login and try to figure out what was still turned on.
  - foolfoolz 5y ago
    i have this happening on gcp and aws. i get a text from my credit card each month for like 10-25 cents. i’ve gone in multiple times all the consoles show $0 it’s impossible to track down. it’s so cheap i haven’t cared enough to dig more
    - bspammer 5y ago
      https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=2021&month=9 https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=202... This page should show you a full breakdown of exactly what’s costing you money across all regions.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
ctvo 5y ago
The security issues are very worrisome. They're the type of mistakes where it looks like there's no process or culture in place. Not a good thing for a cloud provider.
vyrotek 5y ago
Pretty happy Azure & DevOps fan here. Been using it since day-1. I've helped build large platforms at several companies completely on Azure with great success. They were all small teams that shared all responsibilities across FrontEnd/BackEnd/DB/DevOps. Our current project uses what I feel like are pretty standard features for a SaaS app. They include C#/.NET Core, Linux App Services, SQL Server, FrontDoor, SignalR, Functions, etc. Functions is the only feature that has been bumpy for us deployment-wise. The journey of the various portals has been fun. The current one isn't perfect but it's far better than my experience using AWS. It's got to be a challenge to organize such a massive portal developed by so many teams. The effort MS has put into documentation has been really great as well. That said, there's a lot that could be better. A lot of the PMs are on Twitter I tend to be a squeaky wheel there about various problems so hopefully they're listening.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  I have had the same experience - the entire package works really well for a small team. We had a really easy time configuring our builds, but we don't do anything fancy - install things, run unit tests, create a build artifact. Haven't had issues with Azure functions, though DI is wonky in them if you try to build anything complex (imo you shouldn't). Other than that, I guess I just don't use them often to really understand what all the boilerplate does. Finally, when we switched to Python from .NET, it didn't feel like any of the function knowledge carried over somehow. Felt like developing on a different platfom. I also HATED the Azure certification exam compared to GCP. GCP tried to actually teach you something practical, Azure tested a bunch of memorization that you can google.
- nickkell 5y ago
  There’s a nice bug with azure functions where it reports the environment it’s running in as “development” when it should be “production”, which means the app uses the wrong settings. Nothing in the documentation to mention this, you just need to deploy and learn from your mistakes!
  - stillblue 5y ago
    I remember this one!!!! I spent about a week and a half trying to figure this one out. Holy shit. Has your trauma waned off?
datavirtue 5y ago
Are the security issues (that are fresh of mind!) just Microsoft being open and proactive about... security? Is AWS this open? Everything else could have been written about AWS as well. They all feel duct taped when you know what's going on behind the curtain. Enterprise developers spend a crapload of time messing with infra on AWS. I think it all sucks. Unfortunately its better than nagging the BOFH for a few VMs (which you are only going to get this month if he knows you AND likes you, AND you can keep info-sec off everyone's back).
dandotway 5y ago
2010: Move to cloud hosting to save yourself from scalability hassles. 2020: Move from cloud hosting to save yourself from surprise billing hassles.
- betaby 5y ago
  Is it even a trend? I still see org are moving everything to cloud despite the much higher expenses. Beside Dropbox II didn't hear any other story https://www.techrepublic.com/article/dropbox-saved-75m-by-dumping-the-cloud-but-your-company-wont/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/dropbox-saved-75m-by-du...
  - dandotway 5y ago
    It's slowly starting to trend because of three realizations backend developers are having: (1.) Although scalability is hard, distributed apps are really hard, particularly distributed debugging and logging. (2.) Monolithic servers are now powerful enough to host an entire billion dollar internet business with millions of simultaneous users.[*] (3.) Cloud providers make their huge profits in part by carefully engineering their billing to maximize how much they dark-pattern surprise-bill their clients the moment they have unexpected growth. [*] In early 2010s, WhatsApp could handle 2M connections on a single 1U with Erlang; MigratoryData could handle 10-12M connections with Java on Linux. Epyc servers are even more powerful now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem
bbkane 5y ago
Just today I got this notification after submitting this broken link issue through the "Feedback" button at the bottom of the docs page a month and a half ago: https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/issues/20249#event-5351038485 https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/issues/20249#e... I wish the people in charge of these docs cared a bit more about their quality...
CyanLite2 5y ago
Am I the only one who thinks it's incredibly suspicious that the folks that "discovered" the Azure security issues were the same guys who were responsible for Cloud Security at Azure? https://www.wiz.io/press-releases/wiz-emerges-from-stealth-with-100-million-series-a-financing-and-a-mission-to-reinvent-cloud-security https://www.wiz.io/press-releases/wiz-emerges-from-stealth-w...
- munchbunny 5y ago
  Suspicious as in they might have left Microsoft knowing about these issues, or that they're a plant by Microsoft? It's quite likely they had insider knowledge and therefore had a better idea of where to look. But I'm not sure that makes it "suspicious", as opposed to... well, what else would you expect in those circumstances? Or are you saying that the unfair advantage of insider knowledge is what makes it suspicious?
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  At a previous job I was tasked with writing our bug bounty policy. I was also in charge of running and reviewing all of the SAST and DAST scans. It was tempting to monetize that potential conflict of interest, especially after I left the company.
jiggawatts 5y ago
A moral hazard with all cloud providers is that their PaaS services are typically billed on consumption. So what incentive do you image they have to make those services efficient? My favourite example is Log Analytics. It can easily cost up to 20% of the virtual machines it is monitoring! If you have a very heavily loaded website and you're logging every HTTP request, it can exceed the cost of the service it is monitoring. They charge you a ludicrous $2,380 per terabyte of ingested data. This is 20x the cost of the underlying storage, even if it's Premium SSD! For comparison, AWS charges just $500, which is still overpriced. Now consider: If you're an Azure software developer and you find a way to reduce the bloat in the log data stream format, what do you think the chances are of getting that approved with management? They have a firehose spewing money in their cloud. I can't imagine them ever saying: "I think it's a good idea to turn that down to a mere trickle!" As others have pointed out, all of their other services have similar moral hazards: Bastion, NAT Gateways, Private Endpoints, Backup, Snapshots, etc...
- afiori 5y ago
  internally it will probably be approved, for example I am sure that Google drive applies basic compression and deduplication to uploaded files, but if I upload 10 files of 10GB of zeros they are gonna count 100GB, not the few MB they are actually writing to disk (there are good reasons for this, but still declared consumption is different from internal consumption)
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Log Analytics uses a columnar compression format on-disk, so ingested data is likely compressed by anywhere between 10:1 and 100:1, maybe even higher. However, the wire format is super verbose JSON. They bill per GB of the latter, not the former. To put things in perspective: How many $ of CPU time do you imagine it takes to column-compress 1 TB of data? I would estimate that a single modern CPU core could do this in a minute or so. Factor in various inefficiencies and make it a super generous 1 hour. At spot pricing, that's about $0.01! One cent!!! The larger cost would be bandwidth. Azure charges a huge markup for traffic (just like AWS), so for example zone-to-zone data costs $10 per terabyte at retail pricing (not internal costing). They store that data for 30 days "for free" (lol). Assume a worst-case compression ratio of 10:1 and then that means that they have to retain 100 GB for 30 days. That's $9.43 for a Premium SSD at retail pricing. So their hosting costs for Log Analytics is something like $20 per TB ingested, but they charge well over $2000 for it. That 100:1 markup is pretty sweet if your KPIs are based on recurring revenue. There is no way in hell they will ever "optimise" this. Any accidental improvement will be rolled back or "adjusted" to ensure the revenue stream doesn't fall off a cliff. Have you not wondered why it's taken them so long -- over ten years -- to enable any feature to filter logs at the source?
ericd 5y ago
I always wonder if going all-in on cloud services actually saves most people time, after hearing about all the weird corner cases that need debugging. Because leased dedicated hardware really doesn’t take much time to manage, it’s entirely fungible and easy to switch off of if you’re not happy with support, it can support an enormous amount of traffic, and it does it for relatively low cost (especially if you need eg high bandwidth).
- randomdude402 5y ago
  It doesn't seem to. My current place is all in on AWS and we have about 6 "DevOps" people dedicated to dealing with it all. Last place we did pretty similar stuff with 3 data centers, all self hosted, self managed, mostly OSS stuff with about 6 sysadmins and way less hassle.
- hiram112 5y ago
  > I always wonder if going all-in on cloud services actually saves most people time... Agreed. The apps and services I manage aren't very big compared to a lot of posters here, and my company is certainly not going to ever pay the big bucks for real talent. So instead, I have to design everything knowing that my ops team is going to be mostly $100K / year "devops" guys with a few "cloud" certs but no real CS, dev, or even Linux knowledge (yes it's that hard to hire good people now (at the low rates my employer wants...)). I've gotten to the point where I absolutely mandate that they don't try to use Terraform or CloudFormation scripts, because in the end, there are so many edge cases or glitches that it's easier to just write an install guide that shows them which buttons to click in the AWS or Azure console. <sigh> And when I look at the costs we spend per month - including all the unanticipated charges like NAT Gateways and $20 / day "managed" Postgres instances, I assume we'd be better off dumping the cloud and reverting to our 2008 setup: Spending $10K on some Dell servers in a managed data center and hiring an old-school Linux admin to manually install and manage it all.
AcerbicZero 5y ago
I’d say my limited experience (in prod, with only like 50K a month bills) AWS and Azure are functionally identical. Anything I need to do, that I haven’t done before (or recently) requires roughly the same spin up time to get familiar with how each provider functions anyway.
markus_zhang 5y ago
One thing I want to say is that while the clouds are frustrating at the end of the day, in-house premise solutions sometimes share the same caveats (Little support for small users, gigantic mazes of solutions with little doc, etc.). I think once you reach certain level of complexity these issues pop up eventually. One major difference perhaps is on the expenses, but are you sure you are hiring the right number of engineers and paying the right amount of $$ for those software and machines? To provide some context: I figured eventually the configuration as code will reach the point that essentially people start to implement their own DSLs. When new people join they are easentially config boys/girls who needs to spend a lot of time to learn and unlearn a few DSLs created by the smartest guy/gal in the company who moved on to greemer pasteries...
donatj 5y ago
It's been about 10 years, but Azure lost one of my volumes with important data on it out of nowhere, and refused to offer me any support until I made a huge stink in the support forum. When I finally got my data back, I moved to DigitalOcean and haven't looked back.
edandersen 5y ago
Bafflingly there still isn't an Azure service to send email, like AWS SES.
msravi 5y ago
Not directly Azure, but related: OneDrive Business (which is built atop Azure, I think) I recently moved off Amazon Cloud storage to OneDrive because Amazon didn't support rclone. Microsoft's OneDrive is quite a bit less expensive than either Google or Dropbox or Amazon. The storage is there but managing it - what a mess it is! First, there are like a gazillion URLs to access: azure.com onedrive.live.com admin.microsoft.com microsoftonline.com office.com office365.com onedrive.com onmicrosoft.com sharepoint.com windowsazure.com Each one of those portals take you to SOME view of your account with a gazillion settings. Many of them are repeated, and changing it on one portal doesn't necessarily reflect in others. For example, I enabled 2FA (I seriously don't know how or where - but I was able to login using the 2FA), but going to admin.microsoft.com showed 2FA disabled for the user - go figure! Something as simple as figuring out how much space is currently used on your OneDrive is a challenge. There's a set ritualistic series of incantations and clicks that will get you there, but you really need to be persistent. Googling for it gives you an answer, but most answers will lead you to live.com which is only for personal accounts and not business accounts - it won't allow you to login. office.com/launch/forms takes you to, and allows login to your business account, but going to forms.office.com (which is the top search result in google) redirects you to live.com and doesn't allow login to your business account!
animex 5y ago
All of these arguments are presented weakly and self-admittedly compared to similar AWS failures in every instance. Maybe rename the article "Cloud Computing isn't a Magic Bullet".
brainzap 5y ago
We are on Azure, and migrating away from functions, Azure Sql, log workspace to just VMs and kubernetes
pojzon 5y ago
My latest favourite issue with Azure is Azure DevOps. It can randomly add extra quites to your bash script variables for w/e reason. Azure Support is aware of the issue, it happens to many of their clients, but they have no idea why it is happening. Hilarious. But still managememt was sold a vision of the #1 Cloud, so here we are writing more and more bandaids on issues Azure has. Another one from the top of my head is Scheduled Events for AKS nodes. Azure provides you with a managed nodegroups solution, but has no project to support those events and you have to rely on not-supported community projects. Which often die simply because of lack of interest in Azure.
l-p 5y ago
I've never heard a single good thing about Azure, and now that I have to work with it I understand why. The most egregious thing (for now) was an Auto Scale failure. For an entire business day the autoscaler failed to spin up VMs which effectively killed our product for the day. We could not scale manually either. No logs, no errors, absolutely no idea what happened. Support tried to convice us for an entire month that it was our own fault for misconfiguring the autoscaler by quoting the documentation that was saying another entirely different thing. After insisting for a month the issue was finally escalated to someone who could read the logs and immediately see what went wrong: they had run out of VMs and could not scale up. So we have : 1. Unreliable services, breach of SLA. 2. Zero ability to anticipate, prevent, debug, or ensure the problem will not happen again. 3. Incompetent support lacking basic reading abilities trying to gaslight me. 4. An obvious issue that should have raised alarms long before it arose. Thanks Azure. This week I spend half a day trying to understand why Azure would not create an Application Gateway using a configuration that was identical to another one we had already (do _not_ attempt Azure without Terraform). Turns out it was another outage with absolutely no way to know it. Best part is the official fix: "Please, retry in case of failure during the deployment." It takes 30 minutes to create said resource before it enters a failed state. XKCD 303 applies.
thrower123 5y ago
I've never used this az tool that is being complained about in all the years I've used Azure. The Azure powershell cmdlets are ever-changing and sometimes frustrating , but theyre certainly not bloated to the tune of a 1 GB download.
robertlagrant 5y ago
> Azure often has a feeling of being held together with a lot more sticky tape behind the scenes than I would want to know about. This is my feeling. And I think it makes sense - vast swathes of how Google and Amazon work already rely on cloudy engineers (although they were there before cloud was a thing). Microsoft has much more split focus, with Windows, SQL Server, AD, Dynamics, Xbox, and Office all being large areas of engineering specialism that in no way feed into cloudy areas. Bing and Xbox Live do, I suppose, but I bet they're built in a totally different way to both each other and, say, Teams, which I think is k8s in the back. So my theory is there's much less of the company that does cloudy things, and even when they do (e.g. Bing, Xbox Live), there's probably a lack of a commonality of technical approach compared to what Azure exposes to customers.
Diggsey 5y ago
The Azure web console is light-years ahead of GCP's console, it's so much nicer to use. GCP's console is just stupid though. It takes so long to load, and instead of just making it faster, they made it load in incrementally, so you just have to sit there waiting for whatever widget you actually want to use, load in correctly. And even when it has loaded, the entire thing is extremely laggy.
lbriner 5y ago
I think Azure suffers in the same way as MS development tools generally, they are racing to try and make so many new things that their "legendary" backwards compatibility feels more like neglect than support. Sure, Webforms still works (which is nice, 1000s of companies have legacy apps) but they still haven't fixed the problem that nuget installs reformats web.config even if it doesn't change it, meaning you have to delete all the redirects, get VS to add them back in and only then do you see the actual changes. I would see that as a "Major" bug because it is so unecessary and been there so long. MS's attitude? Bit too hard to fix, just use dotnet core instead, like we can all just do that with our legacy production apps! VS is also pretty cool function-wise but still too many lockups, cache corruption causing strange compiler errors and files left locked after exiting but instead of doubling-down and refactoring the core code to work properly (I think that is a "thing"), instead they kind of start using VSCode instead even though it doesn't have half the functionality of VS but don't make VS become the thing of beauty it is supposed to be.
- codeflo 5y ago
  This used to be very different one or two decades ago, when Microsoft's backwards compatibility meant you could migrate your existing code to the new thing with minimal changes. This era is where the "legends" come from. Nowadays, it's exactly as you describe, unfortunately.
  - blowski 5y ago
    Agreed. Now, they'd make "Doors" (which doesn't run anything from Windows) instead of Windows 95, just leaving Windows 3.1 to rot as is. It's more likeways "sideways-incompatibility".
mschuster91 5y ago
It's not easier to be an AWS or GCE fan, though. I'd love to go cloud computing for my personal stuff instead of physical servers - but I don't want to go AWS because I don't want to get blacklisted from Amazon shopping or losing my Kindle library due to hitting a runaway AI flagging my cheap EC2 instance as "potentially fraudulent/hacked" or whatever, and for Google... well, losing that account would be way more disastrous. Can we just have a decent cloud provider offering services on a reliability and scale level as AWS/GCE/Azure, but with decent customer support and no way for (necessary) anti-fraud/abuse mechanisms to kill off entire digital lives?
nopcode 5y ago
My problem with Azure is that stuff is constantly being rebranded, 3rd party integrations being added/dropped without notice, etc. And all of that without a changelog... I just run a change detector on a bunch of Microsoft docs urls.
bucksteamy 5y ago
Azure Primitives (Compute, Networking, Storage) are a dumpster fire. Paas Services can only be as good as these primitives. Friends don't let friends use Azure. Just don't.

357 points by ealexhudson 5y ago

>> Conclusion -- I’ll still continue to use Azure, but the proposition is becoming weaker I do appreciate the detailed list of current failings, to add to my own systemic rejection of this system based on their management objectives you are under an illusion, you are REQUIRED to use it in service of The Company

redwood 5y ago

The tech is definitely third tier. And if you ever need to actually talk to someone over there, it's a nightmare.

aabaker99 5y ago
I work at a large company but I find Azure wants to talk to us too much.
- ishjoh 5y ago
  It always depends on your scale. I was at a company that had a month spend in the 6 figures and they wanted to constantly talk. A different company I was at the spend was 3 figures a month, and we couldn't get any help at all, even knowing some internal folks in different areas of the company.
- oneplane 5y ago
  We don't get much spam from Azure reps, but APM/metrics/logs companies like DataDog really are trying hard to schedule free-of-charge "presentations" with our teams. Unless they are faking out MTA headers and mail client details, the mail templates are actually edited and sent from a desktop by an actual sales/advocate/devrel guy. Yuck.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  They want to talk, “ connect” and “align” all the time but not really help with issues you may have.
- redwood 5y ago
  Right but the quality of the conversation is so low it's a waste of time, hard to find the right people. It's like talking to a borg cube
jamespwilliams 5y ago
Yes. We found a problem with Azure’s IPv6 support a while back. It took quite literally months to get the issue escalated to someone who could do anything about it, and as far as I know it’s still broken, although it’s scheduled to be fixed this year. We had to pay for this “support” too. We worked around the problem in the end, but still.
beh9540 5y ago
I always dreaded talking to support - AKS would routinely break in weird and ways, and it was always super frustrating waiting for support to fix things that shouldn’t have happened. We once had an error with Azure MySQL and AKS, where it would just stop dropping packets with basic instance types. Support could never fix it, we ended up just upgrading to standard because that worked. I will say this - the manager of the team at Azure did comp our upgrade, because they couldn’t figure out why it was happening. I tried very hard to get our project off Azure, but because it was negotiated as part the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, it was “free” so the CTO wouldn’t budge. I assume this is how many people end up needing to deal with Azure.
Avalaxy 5y ago
> And if you ever need to actually talk to someone over there, it's a nightmare I never understand it when I see people say this about Azure. Did you ever try creating a support ticket through the Azure portal? My experience has been nothing but stellar. They respond very fast, they provide very in-depth expert knowledge, and they seem to be quite thorough, escalating any issues if needed. This is my experience with creating tickets for various organizations, both big and small.

CosmicShadow 5y ago

I was all in on Azure for years, but once my BizSpark wore off and died I was shocked at how expensive it was to run the most trivial side project or seedling of an idea or non-money making project. As a .NET full stack web dev for like 14 years, I finally decided to put all my new learnings into just doing static sites on React and trying to figure out some AWS stuff because I wasn't going to try and use .NET on AWS when I had it so fairly figured out on Azure. For a serial entrepreneur and maker, it just couldn't cut it anymore. Now I do NextJS on Vercel with minimal extra services out of what they provide and I get way faster stuff for free pretty much and I guess I'm no longer the only .NET guy struggling to hold the fort in a big tech community that also thinks .NET is too old or boring or non-sexy. I still do like Azure better than AWS. The stupid, weird UX is still nicer than AWS. The docs by MS are 1000x better than everything on AWS. I miss MSSQL and the SQL Server Management Studio, but I don't miss the cost for scaling it enough to actually use it for scraping or data processing. I tried to sell friends on Azure and even got a part time gig from MS themselves to try and help local startups use it, but no one cared or was interested. It just doesn't have that same "standard" or "sexyness" or "built into every new tech" feel to it, so I doubt it'll ever really change or pull ahead in comparison.

metaltyphoon 5y ago
I've never used Azure and always use .NET on AWS and have been for the past 5 years. I haven't hit any problem on it so far. .NET is not tied to a specific cloud provider.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Do you mean .NET is not tied to a specific cloud?
  - mkl 5y ago
    .NET is not tied to cloud at all. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ lists Web, Mobile, Desktop, Microservices, Cloud, Machine Learning, Game Development, Internet of Things.

NoNameProvided 5y ago

We use Azure at work and this article hit home hard. As we just have been burned recently by Azure pricing. I am in the same spot as the author: liking Azure but being put off by all the weird stuff sometimes they are doing. In our case, all we wanted was a static IP in front of an Azure Container Instance. Easy right? Let's put the container in a vNET, place a NAT Gateway in front of it and we are done. However, for some reason NAT Gateway is not supported for Container instances, instead, the official documentation suggests setting up an Azure managed firewall in front of your container that starts at a whopping 600EUR/month. That is a steep price increase from your ~30ish EUR/month for a basic container instance and it doesn't seem to be any other official alternative. I have opened an issue with the docs team [1] about it and I hope there is another way of doing this that doesn't incur a doubling of our Azure monthly spending. [1]: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/81274 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/81274

amir734jj 5y ago
I don't think azure-docs repo is the right place to ask for help/suggestions as maintainers are not very responsive because their sole job is to push internal docs to public docs. But I understand your frustration. However, I believe you could have set up "public IP prefix" using azure cli. I do not think you needs a azure managed firewall. Adding managed firewall just to have edge IP is like saying I want to add a outside patio to my house, sure let's add a security check point for the neighborhood first.
- NoNameProvided 5y ago
  > I don't think azure-docs repo is the right place to ask for help/suggestions as maintainers are not very responsive because their sole job is to push internal docs to public docs. What place would you suggest? We had bad experience with Azure support we could never fight through on the first support line. > However, I believe you could have set up "public IP prefix" using azure cli. I do not think you needs a azure managed firewall. I don't have deep experience in networking stuff on Azure so my understanding can be wrong, but I think "public ip prefix" is just a group of continuous IP addresses what you can reserve. You still need to assign those to something eg a NAT Gateway. As far as I know you cannot assign them directly to an Container Instance.

JohnFen 5y ago

I have a funny story about Azure. Our company was looking for a cloud provider, and Microsoft sent a couple of salespeople to talk to us about theirs. Their salespeople were very condescending, talking like they'd be doing us a favor by allowing us to become customers and failing to take any of our questions and concerns seriously. I think it's because we aren't a large corporation in terms of headcount. In any case, that meeting ensured that no further consideration of Azure would take place, and it's very unlikely that it would be considered in the future.

edoceo 5y ago
Efficient that you got it sorted out in one go. Well done!
loeg 5y ago
We (different organization) had a similar conversation with GCP, with similar results.
- chunkyks 5y ago
  Dodged a bullet there, I'd say. You can safely assume that google will EOL anything in GCP that you might actually start relying on for business function. "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You": https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
  - VirusNewbie 5y ago
    What service has GCP deprecated?
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      I don't fully agree with parent, and GCP is differently managed compared to other Google products. That said, the k8s version deprecation policies, mixed with significant changes in cluster setup from times to times you have to keep up with is peculiar. I kind of think this is something we accept when going into k8s, but I'd understand people not at ease with that philosophy.

jorams 5y ago

> I’ll still continue to use Azure And this is the actual problem. Azure doesn't compete on quality. Microsoft rarely does. They have a few products and a market position that make them the default choice for countless customers. Nobody punishes them for their failings as long as the feature boxes keep being checked, and so the cycle continues.

sjtindell 5y ago
What’s that logic anyway? “It’s hard to be a fan” sounds to me like you’re not really a fan, you’re just in a sunk cost fallacy. Bail out.
sli 5y ago
A previous employer switched everything over to Azure and it was nothing but constant problems and nobody liked it except for the CEO, which meant everyone had to put up with it and nobody had a say. Teams and Azure DevOps are some of the worst software I've ever used in my life. I've used worse software before, but it was hobbyist stuff written by single developers, and therefore don't really compare fairly.
- AlfeG 5y ago
  Azure Pipelines is just slow. I'm not sure even how to fix it. Checkout stage of our code from Azure Repos easily count for half a minute. Npm install goes for a 1.5 minute with npm cache hit. Total build times are around 20 minutes...
  - dachryn 5y ago
    there is an undocumented feature, called zip deploy, if you deploy to an app service. Give it a go, it might just work. I use it to deploy a Python Django website. You need to add a setting in your App Service environment variables. It took me an escalation from our account manager, to get a good support guy, who informed me of this functionality. Here is the summary of my support ticket: WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE” and value as 1. We performed deployment and it took around 30 secs. We also verified that the app is working fine. Now you will do some changes and deploy once more to verify end to end pipeline. Zip deployment is a feature of Azure App Service that lets you deploy your function app project to the wwwroot directory. The project is packaged as a .zip deployment file. The same APIs can be used to deploy your package to the d:\home\data\SitePackages folder. With the WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE app setting value of 1, the zip deployment APIs copy your package to the d:\home\data\SitePackages folder instead of extracting the files to d:\home\site\wwwroot. It also creates the packagename.txt file. After a restart, the package is mounted to wwwroot as a read-only filesystem. Article for reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/run-functions-from-deployment-package#integration-with-zip-deployment https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/run-f...

reducesuffering 5y ago

Azure is and will continue to creep into GitHub. Pretty sure my new projects will be on GitLab now just to get a headstart on using who the cutting edge service is a few years from now.

oneplane 5y ago
The biggest issue is that I've experienced some of that creep with GitHub Actions. It's a mess, doesn't do what it needs to do and besides "presenting" features/functionality it can't actually do even the basic things a nasty old Jenkins installation in an AWS ASG does. They practically just copied some Azure CI stuff over (which was obviously written from a completely different perspective/mindset) using a tech stack that is old yet immature when compared to even relatively young products like GitLab CI. If a company wants to come up with a CI product but can't even get on par with basic nominal GitLab CI features and usability, what's the point...
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  even from a documentation perspective, GitLab CI is so much easier to digest then azure pipeline docs.
  - FridgeSeal 5y ago
    Azure pipelines is the most verbose and confusing CI tool I’ve had the misfortune of using. Why does it require so many steps? Why are they so verbose? It feels like writing glorified bash scripts (in which case why am I using a CI tool?) but worse.
- wussboy 5y ago
  “Old, yet immature”. Perfect description.

privacyxpert 5y ago

If you run workloads in Azure, and you let their default agent run on your images, I'd highly consider you take 30 minutes to skim around this repo: `Azure/walinuxagent`. Go read through some issues, look at some closed ones, try and skim through the source code. Realize there's two enormous python scripts in the repo, one with "2.0" tacked on the end. If Azure is somehow not just rebooting/killing VMs that lack the magic handshake, I'd highly recommend dropping the agent. After all of this news, and what is on display in walinuxagent, do you really want some network-connected agent listening, who's often-most-touted feature is being a persistent backdoor? "It's tough being an Azure fan." Eh, it's a nice cyclic problem. They have no depth of caring about engineering (hence why Azure is littered with services that are impossible to fully utilize because their own engineers don't understand the how/why of what they're building half the time). Which in turn, along with crap career advancement and constant un-appreciated, unmitigated live-service burnout, is why they can't retain actual Linux talent to save their fucking lives.

Hikikomori 5y ago

As a network engineer writing code to automate aws and azure infrastructure I'm amazed at the number of pitfalls we've had with azure, they just keep popping up. Then the whole basic/standard options for every service. Feels like an order of magnitude higher in complexity for no reason, part of it is the abysmal documentation.

yoyohello13 5y ago
I find this to be a common theme with Microsoft products. I work heavily with SSIS and MS SQL. The Microsoft docs are so convoluted they are borderline useless for learning the products.
- oneplane 5y ago
  Same here, and not even GCP is that bad with the 'release' vs. 'beta' APIs that intermingle constantly. Most of the time Azure feels like just another 'we have virtual machines and a crappy API' service. Kinda like a pretend-cloud where a lot of products come almost together but never finish. Almost similar to the way Windows and backwards compatibility means you end up with 100 libraries, frameworks, languages and versions all sitting side-by-side and not really working together, just differently in parallel. Not useful for automation at all, which makes it not useful at scale. (Except when scaling means: we want to run windows VMs with AD and go from 10 to 100 and change no parameters at all)
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    My theory is that all MS products are ultimately just a layer based on SharePoint :)
    - oneplane 5y ago
      That reminds me of a relatively old twitter thread (that I can't find of course) about systems that have become operating systems and computers upon themselves. It went something like this: Code used to be running on a processor, then it ran on an OS on a processor. Then it became on a runtime on an OS on a processor. Then it an abstraction layer was sandwiched in between. Then a filesystem. Then a compatibility layer. Then a database. Then a browser. Then we went and created a runtime in the browser to run code again. We have come full circle. This probably applies to SharePoint but also the real-time OS on your GPU, the MSSQL database which has its own OS facilities you can run stuff on. Add too many features and the application becomes the very thing we wanted to get away from...

fzingle 5y ago

We use Microsoft Azure AD B2C to manage users. AD itself is a nice (for enterprise software), is used all over the place and is pretty stable. B2C on the other hand is a different story. Every few months we have to roll out a new tenant in our system. Tenants are identified by B2C "applications". Every single time, the new application doesn't work. Every single time the fix involves editing the JSON spec, changing something random (like a "true" to a "false"), saving, and changing it right back again. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence... we're planning a migration to AWS. Also, try Googling for documentation related to "Microsoft Azure AD B2C". Almost every shred of internet wisdom is related to AD and not B2C. Even with Microsoft's own documentation you sometimes follow a link from a B2C API reference and find yourself in AD-only land and it isn't obvious. This makes the task of researching features and debugging infuriating.

edoceo 5y ago
Maybe Bing search would be better for MS docs? (ducks)
- liamwire 5y ago
  I got a full-blown belly laugh out of this, thank you.
davidspiess 5y ago
B2C is the worst product we have ever worked with. Outages on constant basis, an extremely complex XML configuration, translation bugs, unsupported features which are only available in AD but not AD B2C (e.g. M2M), and really bad documentation. We basically had to dive in their github examples and issue tracker to make it work. Do yourself a favor and stay away from it.

qbasic_forever 5y ago

I'm surprised Azure still doesn't have any ARM processors to compete with AWS' Graviton instances. It's been nearly a full year since rumors of Azure working on ARM chips (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-designing-its-own-arm-chips-for-datacenter-servers-report/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-designing-its-own...), and going back further it's close to 5 years since they talked up Windows Server on ARM (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/2-years-later-theres-still-no-windows-server-arm-in-microsoft-azure/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/2-years-later-theres-st...) on Azure. Where is any of it though? I can go to AWS right now and spin up multiple different types of ARM processor instances, most of which are cheaper and more efficient for web-like workloads. It's really surprising that Azure hasn't been able to get anything out in all these years.

smoldesu 5y ago
It's very possible that there just isn't much demand. This is likely for a number of reasons: - x86 just has better support for the stuff Azure's "enterprise" customers want - ARM servers are often more expensive to spin up than an equivalently specced x86 option - PRISM compliance is easier on x86 (half-joking, half not) I like ARM, and I owned a Rev1 Raspberry Pi when those were cool. But even now, ARM still has yet to make a strong case for existing on the server. And that's before we even discuss architectures like RISC-V that are out on the horizon, much better suited for servers than ARM. I'm not planning on an "ARM revolution" taking place in the next decade unless x86 is critically compromised in some way.
- donavanm 5y ago
  Can you clarify point two? I was under the impression that the wide consensus was for Graviton instances to have significantly better price performance for most workloads. And the current state of arm support is surprisingly good for opensource or linux based server software.
- acdha 5y ago
  > But even now, ARM still has yet to make a strong case for existing on the server This is several years out of date: AWS Graviton instances are usually a fairly substantial savings over similar Intel, with AMD in between, and Cloudflare has been reporting rather good numbers as well: https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-cpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-... The main reason I suspect Azure doesn't have it is both Windows' legacy x86 hyper-focus (the days where NT ran on half a dozen platforms never really panned out) and a smaller number of managed services. AWS has very popular services like RDS, ElastiCache, ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, etc. where you can simply check a box and wait a couple minutes to see savings, not to mention things like Lambda being only slightly more work for many users, and that's a great way to get volume usage even if the average enterprise IT department is scared to go near it for VMs.

bluedino 5y ago

It's a mess from an admin standpoint, but I like to think most of our issues are from running hybrid with on-prem Also, lots of stuff doesn't worth with GCC High

unemphysbro 5y ago
another team in my org is trying to configure the same but it's been challenge. I don't know specifics but it's taken considerable time to set-up the environment.

wkirby 5y ago

My company once took a project on Azure, and ended up giving a 35% cut on our invoices to move to AWS. The bugs I filed while working on that project are still not closed. That was 4 years ago.

m0zg 5y ago

It's tough being an AWS fan for that matter too. Aside from the simplest things, every time you need to do something there are huge reams of "documentation" in various stages of decay, and each doc is comprised of dozens of (unnecessarily) manual steps. Error messages are shit, too, and the whole thing has this stench of massive engineering debt and duct tape to it. I was told this stuff was supposed to be built by people who know what they're doing, but apparently not. It's duct tape all the way down it seems like.

CosmicShadow 5y ago
Yeah, when I finally switched over to using it from Azure I was shocked at how horrid the docs are. I would have assumed by now they would have been cleaned up, but no, time does not heal these wounds.
danjac 5y ago
The individual services maybe are built by people who know what they're doing, sure. But the aggregate is a mess because Amazon ships its org chart.

FridgeSeal 5y ago

I’ve had what can only be described as the unfortunate displeasure of using Azure. Unnecessarily complex, arcane and frustrating is how I’d describe basically everything we had to do. The fact that they ship a whole Python runtime is basically the least shocking thing I’ve learnt about Azure.

TheBill 5y ago

I spent ~6 months getting them to properly delete a unprovisioned, un attached, properly shut down disk.

unemphysbro 5y ago
Deleting any resource has a 70% success rate simply mindboggling
- handrous 5y ago
  Judging from the stories posted here, can you even imagine what the stories from the poor souls working on this would be like, if only they could tell us without violating an NDA? Must be the stuff of nightmares.

zz865 5y ago

I miss my on prem data center. Life was so easy then. I dont even need scalability but my dumb bosses think the cloud is cool.

datavirtue 5y ago
Yeah...and if I have to sit through one more week of managers and devs freaking out about lambda cold starts Im probably going to quit tech altogether. It is the most dumb ass broken record. Torture. Read the manual before you write two hundred functions and bet the whole project on fantasies next time.

selimnairb 5y ago

Don’t know if this is still the case, but I always felt more nickled and dimed on Azure (than AWS). For example, the base SKU for their managed PostgreSQL compatible service did not allow use in a VPC/behind a DMZ. You had to pay substantially more for the mid level SKU. This was not the case with AWS’s equivalent service.

selimnairb 5y ago
Also, I may have missed something, but cloning VMs in Azure used to be (still is?) a destructive process. WTF?
- MBCook 5y ago
  How could it possibly be a destructive process? Do you mean like cloning VM A destroys it and creates identical VMs B and C?
  - selimnairb 5y ago
    I think what was happening was, if you wanted to make a VM image (which you could then later clone to new instances), it would result in the original VM (i.e., the source of the image) being no longer usable.
nsatya_msft 5y ago
Did you try Azure Flexible server offering for PostgreSQL? It is in preview and addresses this exact issue.
- selimnairb 5y ago
  No, I haven’t used Azure since changing jobs two years ago. Thanks for the heads up.

atlgator 5y ago

I’ve been using Azure since the old portal and it always feels like Microsoft is just checking the box. AWS launches some innovative new service and Azure copies them with a half-as-capable alternative.

rhacker 5y ago

We moved EVERYTHING to Teams and ADO (for git, backlog, pipelines) except our actual product is still on AWS. If we didn't have a couple things like encryption, S3 and some fargate usage, we'd probably start fresh on Azure.

cure 5y ago

Azure is a typical Microsoft product: it doesn't work all that well, but you can get the job done if you just buy more of it (to work around the deficiencies). From a business perspective, this is brilliant. From a technical perspective it's not awesome, obviously.

uuddlrlr 5y ago
Bill gates.

acdha 5y ago

The mention of AWS ECS made me curious — does Azure have the equivalent of Fargate, where they manage the host and you only pay for the container's actual usage? The O&M wins on that have been really substantial and I recommend it for anyone who doesn't have sufficiently large scale that the savings will fund an ops team capable of running something like ECS or Kubernetes. One of the reasons why is the challenge of avoiding over-allocated instances — every time I've seen people running AWS ECS/EKS, Google GKE, etc. they've been substantially over-provisioned because someone's always meaning to get around to looking at that but the time never seems to materialize.

pjgalbraith 5y ago
Their closest Fargate equivalent is probably Azure Container Instances. I haven't tried it recently but last time I did the startup time was very slow for new containers (5mins+). However that may have improved now.
- acdha 5y ago
  Thanks — I'll have to take a look at that sometime.
pram 5y ago
You can do Fargate with EKS now too, but it has sizing limitations that aren’t present in ECS last time I tried.
- acdha 5y ago
  Yes - and they had limits with EBS, too. It’s not perfect but it’s really handy for cutting out maintenance for a substantial fraction of my tasks which don’t hit the edges.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

I find Azure to be expensive. Microsoft is not accountable for service issues and bugs. Support is just a wall of consultants that mostly cannot help and then reach back to actual Microsoft for help (which makes everything really really slow). Garbage.

thayne 5y ago

The AWS cli has much the same problem as the az cli. Especially v2, which bundles the python runtime as well. Not that that is an excuse for azure of course (or conversely the fact azure does it isn't an excuse for aws).

zeronine 5y ago

I don't think being a "fan" of tech products/services is healthy. Having a preference is fine, but loyalty won't work in your favour.

jrochkind1 5y ago
It's a good article, check it out. It's really just about being a heavy Azure user and considering whether to recommend it to others, with the bulk of the article being a critique of various issues. "fan" is just in the title.

dudus 5y ago

> Every cloud provider has their expensive “thing”. Ingress is always cheap, egress always expensive. AWS has their “Managed NAT Gateway”, after all, the sit-in-the-corner money printer that never fails. This is my pet peeve with cloud providers. Each one of them seem to have a gotcha somewhere hidden. It's very hard to compare what your final costs will be early in the project. You try to compare GCloud, AWS and Azure on VM, ingress, egress. After that comparisons become harder as services don't necessarily map 1:1. You end up choosing one and always find something else that adds to the cost you forgot to include, or maybe you just underestimated some metric. Egress feels abusive pretty much across the board. Without really a good reason. Feels like they all sat at a table and decided to fix the price there. While you are developing your business you find you want to use some feature (like managed VMs on Azure's case) that is priced way out of a reasonable amount. You feel robbed, maybe you can still pay for it with your budget, but even then it leaves a bad taste, like you are getting a bad deal.

pram 5y ago
I wouldn’t call that particular thing hidden. You can roll your own NAT setup in a VPC, but that still costs money.
rkrzr 5y ago
> Egress feels abusive pretty much across the board. Without really a good reason. Feels like they all sat at a table and decided to fix the price there Indeed. You can significantly lower your price for hosting static files by using an external CDN in front of S3 or GCS. Little known fact: egress from GCS to Cloudflare is half the price than their usual egress fees. So combining the Cloudflare CDN for caching static files with this egress discount can lead to a 3-4x saving over just serving files out of GCS directly.

smackeyacky 5y ago

I once ran up a $15,000 bill on Azure completely by accident when trying to get one of their video processing services to work. Once I figured out the service wasn't going to do what I wanted at a price I could afford, I tried to detach it and shut it down and thought I had succeeded. I didn't. The offending process costing me money didn't appear on the Azure console and I had no idea it was running, how to access it to stop it or even to know what was going on. When it turned up on my bill I nearly had a heart attack. Thankfully they let me out of it once I pointed out I was getting billed for something I couldn't see. I appreciated that greatly but I've never gone back to Azure and the experience scarred me so much I don't think I ever will. This was about 4 years ago so more than likely they have sorted it out. They keep reminding me I have $50 of test/dev credit on Azure through my Visual Studio subscription but it flat out frightens me to even try to use it. AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.

mrits 5y ago
It took me 2 years to get AWS to stop billing me a few cents a month. I didn't try that hard but every month or so I'd get another bill for like 23 cents. I'd login and try to figure out what was still turned on.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  i have this happening on gcp and aws. i get a text from my credit card each month for like 10-25 cents. i’ve gone in multiple times all the consoles show $0 it’s impossible to track down. it’s so cheap i haven’t cared enough to dig more
  - bspammer 5y ago
    https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=2021&month=9 https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=202... This page should show you a full breakdown of exactly what’s costing you money across all regions.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago

ctvo 5y ago

The security issues are very worrisome. They're the type of mistakes where it looks like there's no process or culture in place. Not a good thing for a cloud provider.

vyrotek 5y ago

Pretty happy Azure & DevOps fan here. Been using it since day-1. I've helped build large platforms at several companies completely on Azure with great success. They were all small teams that shared all responsibilities across FrontEnd/BackEnd/DB/DevOps. Our current project uses what I feel like are pretty standard features for a SaaS app. They include C#/.NET Core, Linux App Services, SQL Server, FrontDoor, SignalR, Functions, etc. Functions is the only feature that has been bumpy for us deployment-wise. The journey of the various portals has been fun. The current one isn't perfect but it's far better than my experience using AWS. It's got to be a challenge to organize such a massive portal developed by so many teams. The effort MS has put into documentation has been really great as well. That said, there's a lot that could be better. A lot of the PMs are on Twitter I tend to be a squeaky wheel there about various problems so hopefully they're listening.

throw1234651234 5y ago
I have had the same experience - the entire package works really well for a small team. We had a really easy time configuring our builds, but we don't do anything fancy - install things, run unit tests, create a build artifact. Haven't had issues with Azure functions, though DI is wonky in them if you try to build anything complex (imo you shouldn't). Other than that, I guess I just don't use them often to really understand what all the boilerplate does. Finally, when we switched to Python from .NET, it didn't feel like any of the function knowledge carried over somehow. Felt like developing on a different platfom. I also HATED the Azure certification exam compared to GCP. GCP tried to actually teach you something practical, Azure tested a bunch of memorization that you can google.
nickkell 5y ago
There’s a nice bug with azure functions where it reports the environment it’s running in as “development” when it should be “production”, which means the app uses the wrong settings. Nothing in the documentation to mention this, you just need to deploy and learn from your mistakes!
- stillblue 5y ago
  I remember this one!!!! I spent about a week and a half trying to figure this one out. Holy shit. Has your trauma waned off?

datavirtue 5y ago

Are the security issues (that are fresh of mind!) just Microsoft being open and proactive about... security? Is AWS this open? Everything else could have been written about AWS as well. They all feel duct taped when you know what's going on behind the curtain. Enterprise developers spend a crapload of time messing with infra on AWS. I think it all sucks. Unfortunately its better than nagging the BOFH for a few VMs (which you are only going to get this month if he knows you AND likes you, AND you can keep info-sec off everyone's back).

dandotway 5y ago

2010: Move to cloud hosting to save yourself from scalability hassles. 2020: Move from cloud hosting to save yourself from surprise billing hassles.

betaby 5y ago
Is it even a trend? I still see org are moving everything to cloud despite the much higher expenses. Beside Dropbox II didn't hear any other story https://www.techrepublic.com/article/dropbox-saved-75m-by-dumping-the-cloud-but-your-company-wont/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/dropbox-saved-75m-by-du...
- dandotway 5y ago
  It's slowly starting to trend because of three realizations backend developers are having: (1.) Although scalability is hard, distributed apps are really hard, particularly distributed debugging and logging. (2.) Monolithic servers are now powerful enough to host an entire billion dollar internet business with millions of simultaneous users.[*] (3.) Cloud providers make their huge profits in part by carefully engineering their billing to maximize how much they dark-pattern surprise-bill their clients the moment they have unexpected growth. [*] In early 2010s, WhatsApp could handle 2M connections on a single 1U with Erlang; MigratoryData could handle 10-12M connections with Java on Linux. Epyc servers are even more powerful now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem

bbkane 5y ago

Just today I got this notification after submitting this broken link issue through the "Feedback" button at the bottom of the docs page a month and a half ago: https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/issues/20249#event-5351038485 https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/issues/20249#e... I wish the people in charge of these docs cared a bit more about their quality...

CyanLite2 5y ago

Am I the only one who thinks it's incredibly suspicious that the folks that "discovered" the Azure security issues were the same guys who were responsible for Cloud Security at Azure? https://www.wiz.io/press-releases/wiz-emerges-from-stealth-with-100-million-series-a-financing-and-a-mission-to-reinvent-cloud-security https://www.wiz.io/press-releases/wiz-emerges-from-stealth-w...

munchbunny 5y ago
Suspicious as in they might have left Microsoft knowing about these issues, or that they're a plant by Microsoft? It's quite likely they had insider knowledge and therefore had a better idea of where to look. But I'm not sure that makes it "suspicious", as opposed to... well, what else would you expect in those circumstances? Or are you saying that the unfair advantage of insider knowledge is what makes it suspicious?
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
At a previous job I was tasked with writing our bug bounty policy. I was also in charge of running and reviewing all of the SAST and DAST scans. It was tempting to monetize that potential conflict of interest, especially after I left the company.

jiggawatts 5y ago

A moral hazard with all cloud providers is that their PaaS services are typically billed on consumption. So what incentive do you image they have to make those services efficient? My favourite example is Log Analytics. It can easily cost up to 20% of the virtual machines it is monitoring! If you have a very heavily loaded website and you're logging every HTTP request, it can exceed the cost of the service it is monitoring. They charge you a ludicrous $2,380 per terabyte of ingested data. This is 20x the cost of the underlying storage, even if it's Premium SSD! For comparison, AWS charges just $500, which is still overpriced. Now consider: If you're an Azure software developer and you find a way to reduce the bloat in the log data stream format, what do you think the chances are of getting that approved with management? They have a firehose spewing money in their cloud. I can't imagine them ever saying: "I think it's a good idea to turn that down to a mere trickle!" As others have pointed out, all of their other services have similar moral hazards: Bastion, NAT Gateways, Private Endpoints, Backup, Snapshots, etc...

afiori 5y ago
internally it will probably be approved, for example I am sure that Google drive applies basic compression and deduplication to uploaded files, but if I upload 10 files of 10GB of zeros they are gonna count 100GB, not the few MB they are actually writing to disk (there are good reasons for this, but still declared consumption is different from internal consumption)
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Log Analytics uses a columnar compression format on-disk, so ingested data is likely compressed by anywhere between 10:1 and 100:1, maybe even higher. However, the wire format is super verbose JSON. They bill per GB of the latter, not the former. To put things in perspective: How many $ of CPU time do you imagine it takes to column-compress 1 TB of data? I would estimate that a single modern CPU core could do this in a minute or so. Factor in various inefficiencies and make it a super generous 1 hour. At spot pricing, that's about $0.01! One cent!!! The larger cost would be bandwidth. Azure charges a huge markup for traffic (just like AWS), so for example zone-to-zone data costs $10 per terabyte at retail pricing (not internal costing). They store that data for 30 days "for free" (lol). Assume a worst-case compression ratio of 10:1 and then that means that they have to retain 100 GB for 30 days. That's $9.43 for a Premium SSD at retail pricing. So their hosting costs for Log Analytics is something like $20 per TB ingested, but they charge well over $2000 for it. That 100:1 markup is pretty sweet if your KPIs are based on recurring revenue. There is no way in hell they will ever "optimise" this. Any accidental improvement will be rolled back or "adjusted" to ensure the revenue stream doesn't fall off a cliff. Have you not wondered why it's taken them so long -- over ten years -- to enable any feature to filter logs at the source?

ericd 5y ago

I always wonder if going all-in on cloud services actually saves most people time, after hearing about all the weird corner cases that need debugging. Because leased dedicated hardware really doesn’t take much time to manage, it’s entirely fungible and easy to switch off of if you’re not happy with support, it can support an enormous amount of traffic, and it does it for relatively low cost (especially if you need eg high bandwidth).

randomdude402 5y ago
It doesn't seem to. My current place is all in on AWS and we have about 6 "DevOps" people dedicated to dealing with it all. Last place we did pretty similar stuff with 3 data centers, all self hosted, self managed, mostly OSS stuff with about 6 sysadmins and way less hassle.
hiram112 5y ago
> I always wonder if going all-in on cloud services actually saves most people time... Agreed. The apps and services I manage aren't very big compared to a lot of posters here, and my company is certainly not going to ever pay the big bucks for real talent. So instead, I have to design everything knowing that my ops team is going to be mostly $100K / year "devops" guys with a few "cloud" certs but no real CS, dev, or even Linux knowledge (yes it's that hard to hire good people now (at the low rates my employer wants...)). I've gotten to the point where I absolutely mandate that they don't try to use Terraform or CloudFormation scripts, because in the end, there are so many edge cases or glitches that it's easier to just write an install guide that shows them which buttons to click in the AWS or Azure console. <sigh> And when I look at the costs we spend per month - including all the unanticipated charges like NAT Gateways and $20 / day "managed" Postgres instances, I assume we'd be better off dumping the cloud and reverting to our 2008 setup: Spending $10K on some Dell servers in a managed data center and hiring an old-school Linux admin to manually install and manage it all.

AcerbicZero 5y ago

I’d say my limited experience (in prod, with only like 50K a month bills) AWS and Azure are functionally identical. Anything I need to do, that I haven’t done before (or recently) requires roughly the same spin up time to get familiar with how each provider functions anyway.

markus_zhang 5y ago

One thing I want to say is that while the clouds are frustrating at the end of the day, in-house premise solutions sometimes share the same caveats (Little support for small users, gigantic mazes of solutions with little doc, etc.). I think once you reach certain level of complexity these issues pop up eventually. One major difference perhaps is on the expenses, but are you sure you are hiring the right number of engineers and paying the right amount of $$ for those software and machines? To provide some context: I figured eventually the configuration as code will reach the point that essentially people start to implement their own DSLs. When new people join they are easentially config boys/girls who needs to spend a lot of time to learn and unlearn a few DSLs created by the smartest guy/gal in the company who moved on to greemer pasteries...

donatj 5y ago

It's been about 10 years, but Azure lost one of my volumes with important data on it out of nowhere, and refused to offer me any support until I made a huge stink in the support forum. When I finally got my data back, I moved to DigitalOcean and haven't looked back.

edandersen 5y ago

Bafflingly there still isn't an Azure service to send email, like AWS SES.

msravi 5y ago

Not directly Azure, but related: OneDrive Business (which is built atop Azure, I think) I recently moved off Amazon Cloud storage to OneDrive because Amazon didn't support rclone. Microsoft's OneDrive is quite a bit less expensive than either Google or Dropbox or Amazon. The storage is there but managing it - what a mess it is! First, there are like a gazillion URLs to access: azure.com onedrive.live.com admin.microsoft.com microsoftonline.com office.com office365.com onedrive.com onmicrosoft.com sharepoint.com windowsazure.com Each one of those portals take you to SOME view of your account with a gazillion settings. Many of them are repeated, and changing it on one portal doesn't necessarily reflect in others. For example, I enabled 2FA (I seriously don't know how or where - but I was able to login using the 2FA), but going to admin.microsoft.com showed 2FA disabled for the user - go figure! Something as simple as figuring out how much space is currently used on your OneDrive is a challenge. There's a set ritualistic series of incantations and clicks that will get you there, but you really need to be persistent. Googling for it gives you an answer, but most answers will lead you to live.com which is only for personal accounts and not business accounts - it won't allow you to login. office.com/launch/forms takes you to, and allows login to your business account, but going to forms.office.com (which is the top search result in google) redirects you to live.com and doesn't allow login to your business account!

animex 5y ago

All of these arguments are presented weakly and self-admittedly compared to similar AWS failures in every instance. Maybe rename the article "Cloud Computing isn't a Magic Bullet".

brainzap 5y ago

We are on Azure, and migrating away from functions, Azure Sql, log workspace to just VMs and kubernetes

pojzon 5y ago

My latest favourite issue with Azure is Azure DevOps. It can randomly add extra quites to your bash script variables for w/e reason. Azure Support is aware of the issue, it happens to many of their clients, but they have no idea why it is happening. Hilarious. But still managememt was sold a vision of the #1 Cloud, so here we are writing more and more bandaids on issues Azure has. Another one from the top of my head is Scheduled Events for AKS nodes. Azure provides you with a managed nodegroups solution, but has no project to support those events and you have to rely on not-supported community projects. Which often die simply because of lack of interest in Azure.

l-p 5y ago

I've never heard a single good thing about Azure, and now that I have to work with it I understand why. The most egregious thing (for now) was an Auto Scale failure. For an entire business day the autoscaler failed to spin up VMs which effectively killed our product for the day. We could not scale manually either. No logs, no errors, absolutely no idea what happened. Support tried to convice us for an entire month that it was our own fault for misconfiguring the autoscaler by quoting the documentation that was saying another entirely different thing. After insisting for a month the issue was finally escalated to someone who could read the logs and immediately see what went wrong: they had run out of VMs and could not scale up. So we have : 1. Unreliable services, breach of SLA. 2. Zero ability to anticipate, prevent, debug, or ensure the problem will not happen again. 3. Incompetent support lacking basic reading abilities trying to gaslight me. 4. An obvious issue that should have raised alarms long before it arose. Thanks Azure. This week I spend half a day trying to understand why Azure would not create an Application Gateway using a configuration that was identical to another one we had already (do _not_ attempt Azure without Terraform). Turns out it was another outage with absolutely no way to know it. Best part is the official fix: "Please, retry in case of failure during the deployment." It takes 30 minutes to create said resource before it enters a failed state. XKCD 303 applies.

thrower123 5y ago

I've never used this az tool that is being complained about in all the years I've used Azure. The Azure powershell cmdlets are ever-changing and sometimes frustrating , but theyre certainly not bloated to the tune of a 1 GB download.

robertlagrant 5y ago

> Azure often has a feeling of being held together with a lot more sticky tape behind the scenes than I would want to know about. This is my feeling. And I think it makes sense - vast swathes of how Google and Amazon work already rely on cloudy engineers (although they were there before cloud was a thing). Microsoft has much more split focus, with Windows, SQL Server, AD, Dynamics, Xbox, and Office all being large areas of engineering specialism that in no way feed into cloudy areas. Bing and Xbox Live do, I suppose, but I bet they're built in a totally different way to both each other and, say, Teams, which I think is k8s in the back. So my theory is there's much less of the company that does cloudy things, and even when they do (e.g. Bing, Xbox Live), there's probably a lack of a commonality of technical approach compared to what Azure exposes to customers.

Diggsey 5y ago

The Azure web console is light-years ahead of GCP's console, it's so much nicer to use. GCP's console is just stupid though. It takes so long to load, and instead of just making it faster, they made it load in incrementally, so you just have to sit there waiting for whatever widget you actually want to use, load in correctly. And even when it has loaded, the entire thing is extremely laggy.

lbriner 5y ago

I think Azure suffers in the same way as MS development tools generally, they are racing to try and make so many new things that their "legendary" backwards compatibility feels more like neglect than support. Sure, Webforms still works (which is nice, 1000s of companies have legacy apps) but they still haven't fixed the problem that nuget installs reformats web.config even if it doesn't change it, meaning you have to delete all the redirects, get VS to add them back in and only then do you see the actual changes. I would see that as a "Major" bug because it is so unecessary and been there so long. MS's attitude? Bit too hard to fix, just use dotnet core instead, like we can all just do that with our legacy production apps! VS is also pretty cool function-wise but still too many lockups, cache corruption causing strange compiler errors and files left locked after exiting but instead of doubling-down and refactoring the core code to work properly (I think that is a "thing"), instead they kind of start using VSCode instead even though it doesn't have half the functionality of VS but don't make VS become the thing of beauty it is supposed to be.

codeflo 5y ago
This used to be very different one or two decades ago, when Microsoft's backwards compatibility meant you could migrate your existing code to the new thing with minimal changes. This era is where the "legends" come from. Nowadays, it's exactly as you describe, unfortunately.
- blowski 5y ago
  Agreed. Now, they'd make "Doors" (which doesn't run anything from Windows) instead of Windows 95, just leaving Windows 3.1 to rot as is. It's more likeways "sideways-incompatibility".

mschuster91 5y ago

It's not easier to be an AWS or GCE fan, though. I'd love to go cloud computing for my personal stuff instead of physical servers - but I don't want to go AWS because I don't want to get blacklisted from Amazon shopping or losing my Kindle library due to hitting a runaway AI flagging my cheap EC2 instance as "potentially fraudulent/hacked" or whatever, and for Google... well, losing that account would be way more disastrous. Can we just have a decent cloud provider offering services on a reliability and scale level as AWS/GCE/Azure, but with decent customer support and no way for (necessary) anti-fraud/abuse mechanisms to kill off entire digital lives?

nopcode 5y ago

My problem with Azure is that stuff is constantly being rebranded, 3rd party integrations being added/dropped without notice, etc. And all of that without a changelog... I just run a change detector on a bunch of Microsoft docs urls.

bucksteamy 5y ago

Azure Primitives (Compute, Networking, Storage) are a dumpster fire. Paas Services can only be as good as these primitives. Friends don't let friends use Azure. Just don't.