5 ms·

Anecdotally - working with Azure has been hell on earth for me. Insanely unintuitive and buggy interface. Many cryptic errors preventing me from doing anything.

by rohan_ 1y ago

comrade1234 1y ago
Yes it sucks and the documentation sucks even more. I think azure and whatever you call the google cloud configuration site are both so complicated because they're best for giant corporations with thousands of employees and many many roles in the organization with different privileges. However if you're just a single developer setting up something simple it's hellish. It would be nice if they provided a simple setup configuration option for simple setups.
- patmorgan23 1y ago
  Is AWS any better? (Genuine question)
  - felixgallo 1y ago
    (I used to work for AWS and am long Amazon stock. In no way do I speak for Amazon) With Amazon, you are genuinely the customer. AWS may do many things in a bizarre or byzantine way, but it is constantly trying to be there for the developer in ways that many competitors in my opinion are not.
    - arccy 1y ago
      be there for the customer on AWS means adding another half baked config option that now all future users have to think about if they will need it
  - programmertote 1y ago
    Not from my experience. I've worked with all three of them. If one can stick with the web UI to provision permissions and the permissions required are simple/straightforward, Google Cloud (again, this is my personal opinion, so please take it with a grain of salt) is the most usable among the three. BUT all three of them (AWS, Azure and GCP) have pros and cons, so you just have to spend a good amount of time learning their quirks.
  - everfrustrated 1y ago
    AWS IAM is very very well designed. They clearly have some sort of internal security & architecture review process that works.
    - arccy 1y ago
      AWS IAM isn't well designed, policy attachments all over the place making it near impossible to figure out what set of permissions you might actually have and too much string to hang yourself with
      - mdaniel 1y ago
        As hair-splitting, its IAM can be well designed but the management tooling/observability can be lacking. In my mind, "not well designed" would be "I cannot represent my security need in this policy language" versus the more common opinion "AWS IAM is a black box" means "I cannot understand why I am getting a 403" GCP's IAM is, in this premise, not well designed because I cannot express ReadOnlyAccess in their policy language without having a constantly updating policy job, because they do not have wildcards in the Action as does AWS. Contrast `Action: ["s3:Get*"]` which would cheerfully include access to a future GetBucketV7 verb to GCP's "storage.buckets.get" which must always be specified, in full, and when storage2.buckets.get comes out, it's my job to find all references and patch them
  - coredog64 1y ago
    There is similar issue with AWS. AWS provides a "ReadOnlyAccess" managed policy that has additional privileges that you probably don't want folks to have (e.g. can read S3 bucket content, not just see bucket names/key names). They recognized this and created a more limited "ViewOnlyAccess" that doesn't have access to content. There's another common fix, which is to apply a permission boundary to IAM roles. This allows the use of generic policies like "ReadOnlyAccess" but can then be further downscoped to resources by tag (or other similar ABAC schemes)
    - belter 1y ago
      You should not be using any of their managed policies, but creating your own. Using their own managed policies is a strong misunderstanding of how to use IAM.
      - belter 1y ago
        Downvoting without discussion? That’s not critique, that’s cowardice. Tell me what is wrong about this factual statement.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > Is AWS any better? (Genuine question) It is, without any question. Even of you work at a Microsoft shop, the benefits you get from vertical integration isn't that clear. Azure requires a far greater cognitive load to handle and to make matters worse ultimately experiences far more outages.
- Anon1096 1y ago
  Quite honestly a single person working at a micro scale is not the target market for the hyperscalers. You're better served not going for managed services (and buying unmanaged services on the big clouds also doesn't make sense without needing the entire ecosystem around it).
lifty 1y ago
Microsoft doesn’t really respect their users because most of the users don’t decide by themselves to use Azure. Someone else make the decision for them. And it’s probably like that for many of their other products.
- p_ing 1y ago
  How does this not apply to - insert any product - in an enterprise space? With rare exceptions, users don't decide which software they use.
  - lifty 1y ago
    You’re right. It’s the embodiment of enterprise software sales. But some how AWS and GCP do it a bit better.
    - everfrustrated 1y ago
      AWS and GCP started by engineers building products for engineers and later post success moved into enterprise sales (which AWS is doing well with, GCP not so much). Azure came late and decided by decree that they needed a Cloud thing and so various business units came together and offered up a "strategy" for how they could re-brand and re-market what they had into a "unified offering". And so you get things like Azure blob storage with fixed limits on performance per bucket. There's nothing cloud about it. Not so much leaky abstractions as a bucket of water labelled "cloud".
      - motorest 1y ago
        > AWS and GCP started by engineers building products for engineers and later post success moved into enterprise sales (which AWS is doing well with, GCP not so much). I think that product managers are AWS' and GCP's unsung heroes. One of the best things about AWS is how in contrast everything is designed to integrate exceptionally well with everything in the AWS ecosystem, and all services are designed to be simple, kept simple, and kept backwards compatible even when subjected to major upgrades. Which are always seamless. In contrast, can anyone explain why Azure has Table Storage but also Cosmos DB, and Cosmos DB is actually half a dozen storage services? Why isn't Table Storage also Cosmos DB, then? Table Storage shares SDKs with CosmosDB, too. The same applies to messaging. You have Storage Queues, Service Bus queues, Event Hub, and Event Grid. Even when you ask Azure experts what's the difference between, say, Storage Queues and Service Bus Queues, the answer is never clear, simple, straight-forward, or understandable. It's a mess, and those who have to deal with it are left to navigate this mess.
motorest 1y ago
> Anecdotally - working with Azure has been hell on earth for me. Insanely unintuitive and buggy interface. Many cryptic errors preventing me from doing anything. What pisses me off the most about Azure is now they designed it as the 90's view of what a cloud provider is. With Azure you don't just provision a VM or God forbid a web service. No no no. You need to provision an app service plan first, where you have to provision what computational resources you allocate to it, and then assign services and even gasp function-as-a-service apps. And even with FaaS stuff you don't just provision a handler. No, that would make too much sense. First you need to provision a function app running on your service plan, and you provision whatever azure functions you need as part of the function app. How much accidental complexity is that? Can't I just deploy an app or God forbid a function? The same think applies to storage, but it's even worse. You get your storage account, and you need to providion a storage account to be able to provision one or more blob storage containers, azure tables, even simple queues. But wait, you need a storage account to store data in a nosql services, but if you opt for the other nosql service then that's an entirely different thing. For that you can simply go ahead and create an account. You can use the same SDK for both? That's nice. Wait, why do they have two nosql services? Azure, man. It exists to make every single alternative look good.
- p_ing 1y ago
  You can provision an Azure Web Service (PaaS web server running IIS or whatever the Linux version runs) which provisions the computational resource, Azure App Service, as part of the deployment steps. You certainly can do it in the way you've specified but I only see that as useful if you're provisioning multiple Web Services to point to a single App Service. But to answer your question, yes you can "just" provision a Function or Web Service, the wizard walks you through it. The App Service behind the scenes is just details and not something you must interact with post-Function creation.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > You can provision an Azure Web Service (...) which provisions the computational resource, Azure App Service, as part of the deployment steps. That's not a solution because deployment steps aren't a problem. The brain-dead aspect of Azure is how it forces users to handle the complexity of having to deal with provisioning and budgeting what computational resources used to run a set of web apps. This doesn't even buy isolation. If I'm paying for cloud services, why on earth should I concern myself with how much RAM I need to share across N apps? It's absolutely brain dead.
p_ing 1y ago
Coming from a Windows enterprise background, the UI for the most part makes sense and not something I find difficult to navigate (the original UI was awful). I know your sentiment is not uncommon, but I'm unable to share it. I will agree, and this is a general Microsoft problem spanning back to the 90s, some error messages aren't useful what so ever. Others are clear and concise. I figure this is due to the different PGs following their own set of rules.

Anecdotally - working with Azure has been hell on earth for me. Insanely unintuitive and buggy interface. Many cryptic errors preventing me from doing anything.

by rohan_ 1y ago

Anecdotally - working with Azure has been hell on earth for me. Insanely unintuitive and buggy interface. Many cryptic errors preventing me from doing anything.

comrade1234 1y ago

Yes it sucks and the documentation sucks even more. I think azure and whatever you call the google cloud configuration site are both so complicated because they're best for giant corporations with thousands of employees and many many roles in the organization with different privileges. However if you're just a single developer setting up something simple it's hellish. It would be nice if they provided a simple setup configuration option for simple setups.

patmorgan23 1y ago
Is AWS any better? (Genuine question)
- felixgallo 1y ago
  (I used to work for AWS and am long Amazon stock. In no way do I speak for Amazon) With Amazon, you are genuinely the customer. AWS may do many things in a bizarre or byzantine way, but it is constantly trying to be there for the developer in ways that many competitors in my opinion are not.
  - arccy 1y ago
    be there for the customer on AWS means adding another half baked config option that now all future users have to think about if they will need it
- programmertote 1y ago
  Not from my experience. I've worked with all three of them. If one can stick with the web UI to provision permissions and the permissions required are simple/straightforward, Google Cloud (again, this is my personal opinion, so please take it with a grain of salt) is the most usable among the three. BUT all three of them (AWS, Azure and GCP) have pros and cons, so you just have to spend a good amount of time learning their quirks.
- everfrustrated 1y ago
  AWS IAM is very very well designed. They clearly have some sort of internal security & architecture review process that works.
  - arccy 1y ago
    AWS IAM isn't well designed, policy attachments all over the place making it near impossible to figure out what set of permissions you might actually have and too much string to hang yourself with
    - mdaniel 1y ago
      As hair-splitting, its IAM can be well designed but the management tooling/observability can be lacking. In my mind, "not well designed" would be "I cannot represent my security need in this policy language" versus the more common opinion "AWS IAM is a black box" means "I cannot understand why I am getting a 403" GCP's IAM is, in this premise, not well designed because I cannot express ReadOnlyAccess in their policy language without having a constantly updating policy job, because they do not have wildcards in the Action as does AWS. Contrast `Action: ["s3:Get*"]` which would cheerfully include access to a future GetBucketV7 verb to GCP's "storage.buckets.get" which must always be specified, in full, and when storage2.buckets.get comes out, it's my job to find all references and patch them
- coredog64 1y ago
  There is similar issue with AWS. AWS provides a "ReadOnlyAccess" managed policy that has additional privileges that you probably don't want folks to have (e.g. can read S3 bucket content, not just see bucket names/key names). They recognized this and created a more limited "ViewOnlyAccess" that doesn't have access to content. There's another common fix, which is to apply a permission boundary to IAM roles. This allows the use of generic policies like "ReadOnlyAccess" but can then be further downscoped to resources by tag (or other similar ABAC schemes)
  - belter 1y ago
    You should not be using any of their managed policies, but creating your own. Using their own managed policies is a strong misunderstanding of how to use IAM.
    - belter 1y ago
      Downvoting without discussion? That’s not critique, that’s cowardice. Tell me what is wrong about this factual statement.
- motorest 1y ago
  > Is AWS any better? (Genuine question) It is, without any question. Even of you work at a Microsoft shop, the benefits you get from vertical integration isn't that clear. Azure requires a far greater cognitive load to handle and to make matters worse ultimately experiences far more outages.
Anon1096 1y ago
Quite honestly a single person working at a micro scale is not the target market for the hyperscalers. You're better served not going for managed services (and buying unmanaged services on the big clouds also doesn't make sense without needing the entire ecosystem around it).

lifty 1y ago

Microsoft doesn’t really respect their users because most of the users don’t decide by themselves to use Azure. Someone else make the decision for them. And it’s probably like that for many of their other products.

p_ing 1y ago
How does this not apply to - insert any product - in an enterprise space? With rare exceptions, users don't decide which software they use.
- lifty 1y ago
  You’re right. It’s the embodiment of enterprise software sales. But some how AWS and GCP do it a bit better.
  - everfrustrated 1y ago
    AWS and GCP started by engineers building products for engineers and later post success moved into enterprise sales (which AWS is doing well with, GCP not so much). Azure came late and decided by decree that they needed a Cloud thing and so various business units came together and offered up a "strategy" for how they could re-brand and re-market what they had into a "unified offering". And so you get things like Azure blob storage with fixed limits on performance per bucket. There's nothing cloud about it. Not so much leaky abstractions as a bucket of water labelled "cloud".
    - motorest 1y ago
      > AWS and GCP started by engineers building products for engineers and later post success moved into enterprise sales (which AWS is doing well with, GCP not so much). I think that product managers are AWS' and GCP's unsung heroes. One of the best things about AWS is how in contrast everything is designed to integrate exceptionally well with everything in the AWS ecosystem, and all services are designed to be simple, kept simple, and kept backwards compatible even when subjected to major upgrades. Which are always seamless. In contrast, can anyone explain why Azure has Table Storage but also Cosmos DB, and Cosmos DB is actually half a dozen storage services? Why isn't Table Storage also Cosmos DB, then? Table Storage shares SDKs with CosmosDB, too. The same applies to messaging. You have Storage Queues, Service Bus queues, Event Hub, and Event Grid. Even when you ask Azure experts what's the difference between, say, Storage Queues and Service Bus Queues, the answer is never clear, simple, straight-forward, or understandable. It's a mess, and those who have to deal with it are left to navigate this mess.

motorest 1y ago

> Anecdotally - working with Azure has been hell on earth for me. Insanely unintuitive and buggy interface. Many cryptic errors preventing me from doing anything. What pisses me off the most about Azure is now they designed it as the 90's view of what a cloud provider is. With Azure you don't just provision a VM or God forbid a web service. No no no. You need to provision an app service plan first, where you have to provision what computational resources you allocate to it, and then assign services and even gasp function-as-a-service apps. And even with FaaS stuff you don't just provision a handler. No, that would make too much sense. First you need to provision a function app running on your service plan, and you provision whatever azure functions you need as part of the function app. How much accidental complexity is that? Can't I just deploy an app or God forbid a function? The same think applies to storage, but it's even worse. You get your storage account, and you need to providion a storage account to be able to provision one or more blob storage containers, azure tables, even simple queues. But wait, you need a storage account to store data in a nosql services, but if you opt for the other nosql service then that's an entirely different thing. For that you can simply go ahead and create an account. You can use the same SDK for both? That's nice. Wait, why do they have two nosql services? Azure, man. It exists to make every single alternative look good.

p_ing 1y ago
You can provision an Azure Web Service (PaaS web server running IIS or whatever the Linux version runs) which provisions the computational resource, Azure App Service, as part of the deployment steps. You certainly can do it in the way you've specified but I only see that as useful if you're provisioning multiple Web Services to point to a single App Service. But to answer your question, yes you can "just" provision a Function or Web Service, the wizard walks you through it. The App Service behind the scenes is just details and not something you must interact with post-Function creation.
- motorest 1y ago
  > You can provision an Azure Web Service (...) which provisions the computational resource, Azure App Service, as part of the deployment steps. That's not a solution because deployment steps aren't a problem. The brain-dead aspect of Azure is how it forces users to handle the complexity of having to deal with provisioning and budgeting what computational resources used to run a set of web apps. This doesn't even buy isolation. If I'm paying for cloud services, why on earth should I concern myself with how much RAM I need to share across N apps? It's absolutely brain dead.

p_ing 1y ago

Coming from a Windows enterprise background, the UI for the most part makes sense and not something I find difficult to navigate (the original UI was awful). I know your sentiment is not uncommon, but I'm unable to share it. I will agree, and this is a general Microsoft problem spanning back to the 90s, some error messages aren't useful what so ever. Others are clear and concise. I figure this is due to the different PGs following their own set of rules.