12 ms·

Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux

by Sytten 8mo ago

d4lt4 8mo ago
[dead]
osigurdson 8mo ago
I can't believe it is that bad!
- yoyohello13 8mo ago
  My company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out. The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not. And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described. I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.
  - jaboutboul 8mo ago
    Would love to hear more about your frustration and how it can be fixed. Message me at my nick @microsoft.com please.
    - yoyohello13 8mo ago
      Thanks, sorry for my tone yesterday. It was the end of a long frustrating work day. Azure Linux does look interesting, thank you for working on it. Fedora is a great choice as a base image. Having a Fedora based distro designed to work well with WSL would be amazing! As a base image for apps though I'm curious how you manage the 6month release cycle. Are you planning on expended support, or would people using it need to upgrade every 6 months. I think the appeal of a Debian base is we only need to think about big upgrades every 2 years. A few bits of Azure feedback I can think of now. Probably not directly related to what you work on, but just some of my experiences working with Azure for the last year. 1. The CLI is good, I think maintaining feature parity between the CLI and portal is really helpful and allows us to integrate with our internal infra more easily. Azure CLI is really the best part working with the service. 2. The management portal is really flaky. Like unknown error messages pop up when clicking on deployment logs. Sometimes the SSH or log tail functions just don't load at all and overall the experience just feels sluggish. I'm really not sure what can be done about this but I've been moving to the CLI just because the web interface is frustrating to work with. 3. The Microsoft documentation is really verbose and difficult to navigate in my opinion. Like we were looking in to hosting a Teams bot and those docs are full of emoji and full page articles like 'why did we make an SDK?'. I have to jump around several pages to get to what I need and even then the code examples in the docs are not actually in sync with the current version of the SDK library. It feels like AI was just set loose to write as much as possible. I think the problem is the information density of much of the documentation is very low. Maybe that's something that can be addressed going forward.
  - RockRobotRock 8mo ago
    Don't forget the part where blades will often be different from what's described in the docs, because Microsoft loves changing/renaming shit for no reason.
  - kuerbel 8mo ago
    I like working with the cli instead of the portal. But even the cli is clunky.
    - yoyohello13 8mo ago
      I do have to give them credit. The cli is pretty good. And Azure Storage Explorer is probably the best Microsoft app I’ve ever used. So props to the team who made that.
  - Datagenerator 8mo ago
    Ditch the VScode virus before it hurts. LLM based action infiltration will rise in 2026 but rest assured, that doesn't work in NeoVIM/VIM.
    - yoyohello13 8mo ago
      For sure, I don’t use VSCode and that’s part of what makes Azure so hard to use. All their stuff is built to support VSCode first.
  - mrsmrtss 8mo ago
    I have worked with AWS, Google and Azure. Google Cloud has the worst UI of them, it slow, broken and just horrible. UI in AWS may be faster than Azure, but overal layout and organization feels a lot better in Azure. I would strongly recommend clearly separating builds from deployments, if you don't want bad surprises. In the age of containers there should really be no difference in how, where or what you deploy.
  - senectus1 8mo ago
    pro tip: build a VM in azure and run your management portal from there. I find it a lot more reliable
- pjmlp 8mo ago
  It isn't. I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure. AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works. GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated. Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort. Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.
  - earthnail 8mo ago
    Just doesn’t match my experience at all. AWS isnsuper complex but stuff works. GCP has clearly the nicest interface but not every feature that AWS has. Azure is complex, slow, hard to use and incredibly opaque. No way I’ll use it again out of my own free will.
    - pjmlp 8mo ago
      Well then we have to agree to disagree, I will keep Azure on top of my list, AWS second and GCP last.
    - Underphil 8mo ago
      We've been through the big three, starting with AWS, then GCP and now Azure. I long for the days of AWS and GCP.
jaboutboul 8mo ago
Neat. What can we do better?
- rolph 8mo ago
  seriously, there is a huge issue with reputation and trust. after what has happened with consumer products, how can anybody be sure its not going to happen on the server side?
- nophunphil 8mo ago
  “We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.
  - jaboutboul 8mo ago
    When I said "we" I meant the group of folks who work on and care about Linux and open source at Microsoft and in a position to help affect change that comes in via feedback from the community.
- fuzzer371 8mo ago
  Not be Microsoft, mostly.
  - rolph 8mo ago
    you know feedback is being requested, you could put a little more quality into it, pretend they dont know what has ever been said about them before. pretend your a manager, and you have to approach an employee about thier hygiene.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it. But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.

Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux

by Sytten 8mo ago

Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux

d4lt4 8mo ago

[dead]

osigurdson 8mo ago

I can't believe it is that bad!

yoyohello13 8mo ago
My company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out. The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not. And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described. I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.
- jaboutboul 8mo ago
  Would love to hear more about your frustration and how it can be fixed. Message me at my nick @microsoft.com please.
  - yoyohello13 8mo ago
    Thanks, sorry for my tone yesterday. It was the end of a long frustrating work day. Azure Linux does look interesting, thank you for working on it. Fedora is a great choice as a base image. Having a Fedora based distro designed to work well with WSL would be amazing! As a base image for apps though I'm curious how you manage the 6month release cycle. Are you planning on expended support, or would people using it need to upgrade every 6 months. I think the appeal of a Debian base is we only need to think about big upgrades every 2 years. A few bits of Azure feedback I can think of now. Probably not directly related to what you work on, but just some of my experiences working with Azure for the last year. 1. The CLI is good, I think maintaining feature parity between the CLI and portal is really helpful and allows us to integrate with our internal infra more easily. Azure CLI is really the best part working with the service. 2. The management portal is really flaky. Like unknown error messages pop up when clicking on deployment logs. Sometimes the SSH or log tail functions just don't load at all and overall the experience just feels sluggish. I'm really not sure what can be done about this but I've been moving to the CLI just because the web interface is frustrating to work with. 3. The Microsoft documentation is really verbose and difficult to navigate in my opinion. Like we were looking in to hosting a Teams bot and those docs are full of emoji and full page articles like 'why did we make an SDK?'. I have to jump around several pages to get to what I need and even then the code examples in the docs are not actually in sync with the current version of the SDK library. It feels like AI was just set loose to write as much as possible. I think the problem is the information density of much of the documentation is very low. Maybe that's something that can be addressed going forward.
- RockRobotRock 8mo ago
  Don't forget the part where blades will often be different from what's described in the docs, because Microsoft loves changing/renaming shit for no reason.
- kuerbel 8mo ago
  I like working with the cli instead of the portal. But even the cli is clunky.
  - yoyohello13 8mo ago
    I do have to give them credit. The cli is pretty good. And Azure Storage Explorer is probably the best Microsoft app I’ve ever used. So props to the team who made that.
- Datagenerator 8mo ago
  Ditch the VScode virus before it hurts. LLM based action infiltration will rise in 2026 but rest assured, that doesn't work in NeoVIM/VIM.
  - yoyohello13 8mo ago
    For sure, I don’t use VSCode and that’s part of what makes Azure so hard to use. All their stuff is built to support VSCode first.
- mrsmrtss 8mo ago
  I have worked with AWS, Google and Azure. Google Cloud has the worst UI of them, it slow, broken and just horrible. UI in AWS may be faster than Azure, but overal layout and organization feels a lot better in Azure. I would strongly recommend clearly separating builds from deployments, if you don't want bad surprises. In the age of containers there should really be no difference in how, where or what you deploy.
- senectus1 8mo ago
  pro tip: build a VM in azure and run your management portal from there. I find it a lot more reliable
pjmlp 8mo ago
It isn't. I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure. AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works. GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated. Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort. Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.
- earthnail 8mo ago
  Just doesn’t match my experience at all. AWS isnsuper complex but stuff works. GCP has clearly the nicest interface but not every feature that AWS has. Azure is complex, slow, hard to use and incredibly opaque. No way I’ll use it again out of my own free will.
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    Well then we have to agree to disagree, I will keep Azure on top of my list, AWS second and GCP last.
  - Underphil 8mo ago
    We've been through the big three, starting with AWS, then GCP and now Azure. I long for the days of AWS and GCP.

jaboutboul 8mo ago

Neat. What can we do better?

rolph 8mo ago
seriously, there is a huge issue with reputation and trust. after what has happened with consumer products, how can anybody be sure its not going to happen on the server side?
nophunphil 8mo ago
“We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.
- jaboutboul 8mo ago
  When I said "we" I meant the group of folks who work on and care about Linux and open source at Microsoft and in a position to help affect change that comes in via feedback from the community.
fuzzer371 8mo ago
Not be Microsoft, mostly.
- rolph 8mo ago
  you know feedback is being requested, you could put a little more quality into it, pretend they dont know what has ever been said about them before. pretend your a manager, and you have to approach an employee about thier hygiene.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it. But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.