4 ms·

Because it is a legitimately good platform. For some of us, being completely locked in is an explicit objective. We brag to our customers about the fact that o

Because it is a legitimately good platform. For some of us, being completely locked in is an explicit objective. We brag to our customers about the fact that our only major technology vendor is Microsoft. We use AWS but only incidentally for things Azure isn't fantastic at right now. It's nice not having to constantly think about what to paint on the canvas. If you allow them to, Microsoft can completely guide your IT journey. If you don't constantly dig your heels in and keep your arms and legs inside the ride, this generally works out. The part where it gets shitty is when you absolutely insist on fighting against their patterns. You may win in the short term, but you have to be prepared for the long term effects and downstream frustration. A good example of the "don't fight it" for us was throwing away our custom logger in favor of Microsoft's application insights crap. I don't like it in nerd terms (because I still think the custom system was better in most ways), but in business terms, it's infinitely better for all involved - The chances I can find someone on LinkedIn who can manage my Azure logging infrastructure are infinitely greater than finding someone who has experience with my custom logger's private repository.

arrakeenrevived 3y ago
>We brag to our customers about the fact that our only major technology vendor is Microsoft. If anyone bragged to me about this I would laugh in their face. You're putting your entire company at major risk. Sometimes it has benefits, and sometimes its necessary, to use something like Azure. But I would never actively seek tying your existence solely to a single company, nor would I be happy about it. And I would certainly never _brag_ about it. That's insane.
- gregd 3y ago
  Oh for crying out loud, I’m so over this holier than thou attitude. Every company and every vendor has strengths and weaknesses. Laughing in someone’s face for choosing to use one platform is ridiculous at best. My entire almost 30 year career has been Microsoft centered, except for brief stints with Novell, mainframes, and OS/2. And based on my anecdotal evidence over many companies and many years, Microsoft has been pretty solid.
  - danseop08 3y ago
    Very bad rebuttal. You effectively just demonstrated you got stuck with MS for 30 years. You have not seen any others other than MS. You likely downplay the bad and overtly having good image of MS. My experience with multiple cloud systems CANNOT conclude Azure in the top 5. At best maybe 6th with occasionally hitting 5th or 4th depending on some specific tech metrics.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      AWS, Azure, GCP followed by everyone else.
  - Jgrubb 3y ago
    I assume the poster to whom you're responding just hasn't been in the industry long enough to understand that the entire point of gigantic platforms like Microsoft or AWS is specifically to create ecosystems of vendors that provide service around that platform.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      You can tell by who is fighting the current. Some get paid in ideology, some in fiat. Which are they here for? That's the question. I'm just here to get paid, and enjoy working with others desiring the same outcome (strong opinions weakly held while bank acct goes brrr). We can chat war stories at the hotel bar with a comfortably large investment account from the work.
      - tpush 3y ago
        I guess that's why technology abuses the user so much these days.
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Unethical implementations are distinct from agnostic technology implementation choices. I don’t care about the underlying tech (Windows, Linux, Mainframe), but I’m certainly never working at Meta, for example. New FedNow instant payments runs on a mainframe. New hotness? No! Built to run for decades? Yes.
- GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
  Larger enterprise customers have problems with vendor finger pointing. Let's say you have a database transaction that intermittently fails and you decide to (pay) ask your vendors to help. The DB vendor says it must be the network or application, the network vendor doesn't seen any problems, the application platform vendor or consultant says it must be the network or database. Even getting all these people on one call takes a lot of time and isn't helpful. Honestly Microsoft isn't any better, but if buy Premier Support (expensive), you can eventually talk to the actual development teams. You also get a person in a suit who will talk to your execute team and take the blame, which is an important feature for managers.
- maccard 3y ago
  > You're putting your entire company at major risk. We use AWS but, the same argument applies here. It's far, far, far more likely that the developer who implemented the solution leaves than AWS or MS pull the rug from under us. Given the choice between setting up an ad-hoc solution with one developer, or using an existing managed offering, putting all your eggs in an employee when they have an average tenure of 2 years is _way_ more risky.
- ako 3y ago
  My expectation would be that anything other than Microsoft offers higher risk. They will most likely be around for a long time, and they keep their products around for a long time, with proof of focussing on backwards compatibility. Is it without risk? Probably not, but i doubt you can show me a IT company with lower risk.
- robjan 3y ago
  If you work in a regulated environment it's so much easier to explain to a regulator that you work with a single SOC 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified cloud provider rather than a mishmash of services.
whalesalad 3y ago
I had to check your post history to confirm you’re the same person who was preaching Microsoft in the thread yesterday. You’ve got a major case of Stockholm syndrome bröther.
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack. We've had to warn you about that before, and also about other guideline violations recently. Could you please review the rules and stick to them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
karmakaze 3y ago
I can't speak for the whole platform but when we were having problems with S3 uploads, I evaluated both GCP and Azure. Both were better and Azure seemed best possibly because they didn't have different tiered services (only the good one). We ended up going with GCP at the time because of specifics of resumable uploads IIRC.
- jen20 3y ago
  Azure has multiple tiers of almost everything. A couple of examples: - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-sku-tier https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-sku-ti... - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/windows/#pricing https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-servic...
The_Colonel 3y ago
I think that aligning the company with MS vision has some strong advantages, if they cover your needs. But being locked in itself is certainly a very weird objective.
devoutsalsa 3y ago
I haven’t done much with Azure. Out of curiosity, do they offer any AWS API compatible service, in the same way that Backblaze B2 has an S3 compatible API?
- belltaco 3y ago
  Azure Blob Storage is S3 compatible I think
pydry 3y ago
My experience was that salespeople bugged managers who bugged me to use cosmos because or course I want to use Microsoft's take on Mongo. It wasnt just that. They also advised managers to enforce the use of teams for security reasons - which is a bit like advising that you install windows for open source reasons. And while SQL server worked fine, postgres and mariadb were initially "unapproved" for security reasons and dog slow once they were (& support couldnt help for some reason). In business terms Microsoft seems to be basically be a rebranded Oracle - playing an elaborate game of vendor lock in using every trick available while trying to maintain a thin veneer of deniability, circumventing the need to compete on the quality of their software. Now if youll excuse me I have an unwieldy YAML github actions mess to unwind so we can move to a different CI platform. I wonder why they let it get so bad.
xyst 3y ago
> Because it is a legitimately good platform Are you a business consultant for MS
Jochim 3y ago
Curious to hear more of your thoughts on Application Insights. I've always been fond of it due to how much it gives you straight out of the box. I'm on AWS now and sadly it doesn't seem to compare whatsoever. A custom solution seems like it would take a fair bit of effort just to reach basic parity.
thiht 3y ago
> I can find someone on LinkedIn who can manage my Azure logging infrastructure are infinitely greater than finding someone who has experience with my custom logger's private repository Why not do something standard with no platform lock-in? We do structured logging and push them to an Elastic stack with fluentd. For now we use an Elastic we deployed on a Linux VM but 1) we can move at any time, either from cloud provider, or stop using Elastic if we want to, and 2) we can probably find more people who can manage that than whatever Azure solution you’re using I see no reason for getting locked in for something like logs. We actually did that with AWS Cloudwatch at some point and it was a horrible experience
albert180 3y ago
Imagine bragging about full vendor lock-In
- kcartlidge 3y ago
  > Imagine bragging about full vendor lock-In As a dev I agree with you entirely. However for a business this is very definitely a valid stance to take (as covered by some sibling posts). To dismiss it out of hand is a failure to accept that business priorities and concerns can, and often do, differ from technical ones.

arrakeenrevived 3y ago

>We brag to our customers about the fact that our only major technology vendor is Microsoft. If anyone bragged to me about this I would laugh in their face. You're putting your entire company at major risk. Sometimes it has benefits, and sometimes its necessary, to use something like Azure. But I would never actively seek tying your existence solely to a single company, nor would I be happy about it. And I would certainly never _brag_ about it. That's insane.

gregd 3y ago
Oh for crying out loud, I’m so over this holier than thou attitude. Every company and every vendor has strengths and weaknesses. Laughing in someone’s face for choosing to use one platform is ridiculous at best. My entire almost 30 year career has been Microsoft centered, except for brief stints with Novell, mainframes, and OS/2. And based on my anecdotal evidence over many companies and many years, Microsoft has been pretty solid.
- danseop08 3y ago
  Very bad rebuttal. You effectively just demonstrated you got stuck with MS for 30 years. You have not seen any others other than MS. You likely downplay the bad and overtly having good image of MS. My experience with multiple cloud systems CANNOT conclude Azure in the top 5. At best maybe 6th with occasionally hitting 5th or 4th depending on some specific tech metrics.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    AWS, Azure, GCP followed by everyone else.
- Jgrubb 3y ago
  I assume the poster to whom you're responding just hasn't been in the industry long enough to understand that the entire point of gigantic platforms like Microsoft or AWS is specifically to create ecosystems of vendors that provide service around that platform.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    You can tell by who is fighting the current. Some get paid in ideology, some in fiat. Which are they here for? That's the question. I'm just here to get paid, and enjoy working with others desiring the same outcome (strong opinions weakly held while bank acct goes brrr). We can chat war stories at the hotel bar with a comfortably large investment account from the work.
    - tpush 3y ago
      I guess that's why technology abuses the user so much these days.
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Unethical implementations are distinct from agnostic technology implementation choices. I don’t care about the underlying tech (Windows, Linux, Mainframe), but I’m certainly never working at Meta, for example. New FedNow instant payments runs on a mainframe. New hotness? No! Built to run for decades? Yes.
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
Larger enterprise customers have problems with vendor finger pointing. Let's say you have a database transaction that intermittently fails and you decide to (pay) ask your vendors to help. The DB vendor says it must be the network or application, the network vendor doesn't seen any problems, the application platform vendor or consultant says it must be the network or database. Even getting all these people on one call takes a lot of time and isn't helpful. Honestly Microsoft isn't any better, but if buy Premier Support (expensive), you can eventually talk to the actual development teams. You also get a person in a suit who will talk to your execute team and take the blame, which is an important feature for managers.
maccard 3y ago
> You're putting your entire company at major risk. We use AWS but, the same argument applies here. It's far, far, far more likely that the developer who implemented the solution leaves than AWS or MS pull the rug from under us. Given the choice between setting up an ad-hoc solution with one developer, or using an existing managed offering, putting all your eggs in an employee when they have an average tenure of 2 years is _way_ more risky.
ako 3y ago
My expectation would be that anything other than Microsoft offers higher risk. They will most likely be around for a long time, and they keep their products around for a long time, with proof of focussing on backwards compatibility. Is it without risk? Probably not, but i doubt you can show me a IT company with lower risk.
robjan 3y ago
If you work in a regulated environment it's so much easier to explain to a regulator that you work with a single SOC 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified cloud provider rather than a mishmash of services.

whalesalad 3y ago

I had to check your post history to confirm you’re the same person who was preaching Microsoft in the thread yesterday. You’ve got a major case of Stockholm syndrome bröther.

dang 3y ago
Please don't cross into personal attack. We've had to warn you about that before, and also about other guideline violations recently. Could you please review the rules and stick to them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

karmakaze 3y ago

I can't speak for the whole platform but when we were having problems with S3 uploads, I evaluated both GCP and Azure. Both were better and Azure seemed best possibly because they didn't have different tiered services (only the good one). We ended up going with GCP at the time because of specifics of resumable uploads IIRC.

jen20 3y ago
Azure has multiple tiers of almost everything. A couple of examples: - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-sku-tier https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-sku-ti... - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/windows/#pricing https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-servic...

The_Colonel 3y ago

I think that aligning the company with MS vision has some strong advantages, if they cover your needs. But being locked in itself is certainly a very weird objective.

devoutsalsa 3y ago

I haven’t done much with Azure. Out of curiosity, do they offer any AWS API compatible service, in the same way that Backblaze B2 has an S3 compatible API?

belltaco 3y ago
Azure Blob Storage is S3 compatible I think

pydry 3y ago

My experience was that salespeople bugged managers who bugged me to use cosmos because or course I want to use Microsoft's take on Mongo. It wasnt just that. They also advised managers to enforce the use of teams for security reasons - which is a bit like advising that you install windows for open source reasons. And while SQL server worked fine, postgres and mariadb were initially "unapproved" for security reasons and dog slow once they were (& support couldnt help for some reason). In business terms Microsoft seems to be basically be a rebranded Oracle - playing an elaborate game of vendor lock in using every trick available while trying to maintain a thin veneer of deniability, circumventing the need to compete on the quality of their software. Now if youll excuse me I have an unwieldy YAML github actions mess to unwind so we can move to a different CI platform. I wonder why they let it get so bad.

xyst 3y ago

> Because it is a legitimately good platform Are you a business consultant for MS

Jochim 3y ago

Curious to hear more of your thoughts on Application Insights. I've always been fond of it due to how much it gives you straight out of the box. I'm on AWS now and sadly it doesn't seem to compare whatsoever. A custom solution seems like it would take a fair bit of effort just to reach basic parity.

thiht 3y ago

> I can find someone on LinkedIn who can manage my Azure logging infrastructure are infinitely greater than finding someone who has experience with my custom logger's private repository Why not do something standard with no platform lock-in? We do structured logging and push them to an Elastic stack with fluentd. For now we use an Elastic we deployed on a Linux VM but 1) we can move at any time, either from cloud provider, or stop using Elastic if we want to, and 2) we can probably find more people who can manage that than whatever Azure solution you’re using I see no reason for getting locked in for something like logs. We actually did that with AWS Cloudwatch at some point and it was a horrible experience

albert180 3y ago

Imagine bragging about full vendor lock-In

kcartlidge 3y ago
> Imagine bragging about full vendor lock-In As a dev I agree with you entirely. However for a business this is very definitely a valid stance to take (as covered by some sibling posts). To dismiss it out of hand is a failure to accept that business priorities and concerns can, and often do, differ from technical ones.