8 ms·
Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service
- xyzal 7mo agoThe title says for me 'Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.' No editorializing guys! :)
- hn_acker 7mo agoThe original title is: > Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.
- robtherobber 7mo agoWow, Microsoft is really pushing the wrong boundaries in every direction, isn't it? Executives must be thinking, like many before them, that Microsoft is too big to fail.
- joe_mamba 7mo agoExecutives only react to share price movements. If share prices are high because whatever investors think, then execs will just open another champagne bottle. Steve Jobs was the last tech CEO who didn't care about wall street and only care about quality products and consumers saying that if customers are happy, then the share price will take care of itself. But most companies are share price first, customer later.
- jbombadil 7mo ago> [...]And because federal agencies were allowed to deploy the product during the review, GCC High spread across the government as well as the defense industry. By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used across Washington. This sounds like the crux of the issue. The combination of: "tool can be used during analysis" and "analysis takes long" shifts the barrier of rejection from "is this tool safe?" to "is this tool so unsafe that we're willing to start a fight with a lot of other government agencies to remove it, find an alternative, etc?". Not criticizing FedRAMP. Proper security review takes time. And probably more when dealing with vendors.
- chii 7mo agoIt's why these enterprise vendors want foot in the door at all costs. They know that if they get entrenched first, it's impossible to migrate away. That's basically free money from a customer that has zero cost ceiling.
- andychase 7mo agoThat's false that Government agencies have 0 cost ceiling. Maybe DoD does, but most offices have extremely tight budgets.
- kipchak 7mo agoAs far as I know numbers aren't reported, but there's probably at least as many DIB GCC-H customers as government, who in part use it because the government does and it's compliant. Once they're locked in it's very hard to migrate.
- cuuupid 7mo ago> Not criticizing FedRAMP Think it's very important to criticize FedRAMP. The FedRAMP board is extremely slow moving and continuously disregards industry feedback. As a result, FedRAMP is essentially a Palantir tax, where nearly every startup hoping to sell to government (including larger ones like Anthropic, xAI, Cognition AND OpenAI) is forced to pay Palantir to deploy in their FedRAMP enclave. This has a sticker price of 200-500k/y before we get into compute premiums. Going through FedRAMP yourself requires a staff who is willing to put in a dedicated effort on the compliance paperwork (not the controls, which you could knock out in ~1mo easily, just the paperwork) for 6-8mo before getting into a line to hopefully get a 3PAO audit and then remediations followed by another audit which is followed by needing to get agency sponsorship for a FedRAMP board review. This costs $2-3M minimum including the amount of security software needed for evidencing and policy, which rules out nearly every small business. This process also can easily take 2-3 years of waiting, which forces out enterprise. So anyone entering the ecosystem is essentially forced to pay Palantir (or 2F which is a distant 2nd) a tax that is entirely enforced by government regulation. They are not any kind of 'Federal Cyber Experts' either as that work is primarily outsourced to Schellman etc.
- Eridrus 7mo agoI think plenty of software is a pile of shit and still derive value from it.
- mock-possum 7mo agoExactly, better the pile of shit you know than the pile of shit you don’t know - or the pile of shit that is u knowable.
- snovymgodym 7mo agoYeah I'd go so far as to say that most useful software is "bad" in some way.
- Y_Y 7mo agoWorse is Better
- exabrial 7mo agoI'm guessing the requirements were written in a way that only Microsoft's cloud could with the bid. Thats why you have Windows in the Pentagon instead of something secure.
- ovidev 7mo agoThe Justice Department CIO who pressured FedRAMP to approve GCC High was hired by Microsoft the next year. I wonder if this shouldn't invalidate the authorization in the first place?
- hulitu 7mo agoNo. We live in a democracy. Everyone can work where he wants. See Poettering. Or US generals who went to work for Pentagon contractors. Or politicians who work/have worked/will work for private companies which benefitted from laws enacted by those politicians.
- dogleash 7mo ago> By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used across Washington. The article talks a lot about conflicts of interest, but this is the line I went looking for. A bureaucracy fighting itself over goal prioritization, and what's a necessary roadblock vs red tape is the less sexy but more meaningful problem at the core of this. Once the government decided they wanted the product, they were going to find a patsy.
- fdghrtbrt 7mo agoIf you "went looking for" this line, you're just reading into the statements your preconceptions. I on the other hand have no expectation, and so it's not clear whether the "bureaucracy fighting itself" is a cause or a symptom. You're implying it's a cause and the solution is "less red tape". But it could be just a symptom of conflicts of interest, and less red tape just leads to more efficient corruption. Again, you're just reading into it what you already believe in.
- ddtaylor 7mo agoThe government does most things poorly and with little regard to budget or quality. They can't solve problems that are much simpler than cloud computing, so why should I expect them to perform better at a more complex problem?
- hiddencost 7mo agoBasically false. They're better at health care. Better at education. Better at feeding people. Better at charity.
- MrBuddyCasino 7mo agoTheres no need to be THIS cynical.
- Hizonner 7mo agoSure. Your average private corporation would do much better at sanely evaluating Microsoft's cloud, and sanely acting on that evaluation. Right. You bet. Absolutely.
- ContDestroyer 7mo agoNope neither the public entity nor the private corporation... it should be the market. WE decide with our business who is worthy, or not. Nice try, comrade!
- Hizonner 7mo agoFascinating. Enlighten me further. How exactly will "the market" decide where the government, or a corporation, or even an individual, chooses to buy computing services? I'm very stupid, so you're going to have to explain step by step exactly how "the market" will do this. I mean, here I thought that choices like that were the inputs to the market. Let's do it for the corporations first. I'm Microsoft. I need the market to decide for me where I should buy motherboards for my cloud data centers. Where do I apply to get "the market" to tell me that?
- debarshri 7mo agoRecently tried using Entra ID. There are 12 ways to enforce MFA, 20 days ways to disable users, 4 ways to authenticate users, Add conditional access stuff with 50 variables and templates etc. You can customize the way you want. After configuring it, my colleagues could not log in. Thats one way to secure your organization.
- yoyohello13 7mo agoThat’s Microsoft. 1000s of features and none of them really work the way they are supposed to.
- b0rgedhuman 7mo ago[dead]
- ploxiln 7mo agoit's "Enterprise" grade software! need to check the boxes for the procurement process (actually working is a separate department)
- yoyohello13 7mo agoExactly! I can’t even count the number of times we’ve been in the discovery phase of a project and see “Oh this MS product does that! Cool”. Then when we get to the actual implementation realize it’s a broken mess. It’s sales driven software development, they just need to get you far enough along to sign the contract, then it’s too late to back out.
- joezydeco 7mo agoThere are extra ways to do that, but they're on a document deep in a Sharepoint directory that you can't access.
- debarshri 7mo agoMoments like this, I miss clippy.
- gertrunde 7mo agoThe sheer amount of conflict of interest with folk involved in this later getting employed by Microsoft is a bit crazy.
- flir 7mo agoThere was definitely a point (late 90s?) when Microsoft finally figured out how to play the game. Coincided with the antitrust stuff.
- scottyah 7mo agoTo be fair, it's not always out of maliciousness. A lot of gov workers/contractors join the supplier company because they know the product and how to fix it better than the people currently at the company. Similar to the guy who infamously got hired at Apple just to fix a bug. You're just forced to use vendors and if you actually care about the mission, it's just a different team on the same mission. Of course you know you're being taken advantage of, and long-term maybe you should have gone to the non-technical side to fight it, but at the end of the day you just want to keep the young boys being shipped off to war safe, and you're much better suited to achieve that by remaining on the technical side. ...or so I've heard.
- gertrunde 7mo agoIt's not very clear from the article, but I get the feeling from the context that the 'pile of shit' quote referenced the package of documentation about the service rather than the service itself. (That seems to be the main complaint, that Microsoft never provided the clear information required to conduct the assessment properly).
- 21asdffdsa12 7mo agoWait- so they basically threw up their hands? No documentation! Not evaluable? Thus clearly of value for somebody? Big stamp, job well done! NEXT?
- mrguyorama 7mo agoYes. US bureaucracy regularly gets told "You have to have <thing>" but because it's against a lot of people's ideology, they aren't allowed to build it internally or develop any sort of actual expertise for such a thing, so their only choice is to buy whatever is offered no matter how bad it is. For example, our state government says "We will do X Y and Z which all require data science expertise, but we did not approve the $60k a year Data Science position, so instead we are forced to hire a Data Science contractor for $120k a year, and they can't really be fired, and they are terrible at their job" And then people wonder why things suck all the time. A lot of state's buy their Obamacare marketplace service from a company I am familiar with. That company is entirely incompetent. They cannot follow basic instructions. They cannot triage a bug at all. They do not read freaking tickets. They take weeks to respond to an issue. They cause bugs regularly in ways that imply they don't have functional source control. They continually fuck up basic feature requests. They change the service in ways that contravene the literal law. The law that was comprehensively explained to them by people I know. But they can't be fired, because the state is legally compelled to provide this service, and is not really allowed to hire a few engineers to build it in house. They could go to a different software contractor, but all the options are just as bad because it's an entirely captured market. Obama started a "Digital Services" group in the federal government to actually build systems internally and develop expertise to mitigate some of this, and they built stuff like tax filing solutions for free for Americans. So Trump killed it and hollowed out it's corpse for DOGE.
- yoyohello13 7mo agoBasically exactly what my org did. The momentum of being a Microsoft shop is hard to fight against.
- iamleppert 7mo agoAzure is easily the most expensive, least reliable and worst cloud available. It's borderline scam. An example today, I provisioned high IOPS SSDs (supposedly) and what is actually connected to the instance? A spinning hard drive! I didn't even know they were still made, but I guess Azure uses them and scams their users into thinking you're getting an SSD for $700/mo when its really an old hard drive. I would warn anyone far and wide to avoid Azure at all costs, especially if you are a startup. And especially if you are doing any kind of AI because the only GPUs they have available are ancient and also crazy over-priced. If I cared more, I'd try to migrate away from Azure. But I don't, and that's probably Azure's business model at this point.
- otterley 7mo agoI’d love to see proof of your claim that they provisioned a hard disk when you requested an SSD, or, at the very least, tests that showed that the IOPS you requested were not delivered. Can you show us the receipts?
- stackskipton 7mo agoAzure using SRE, I call BS. You don’t see underlying storage, it’s mounted as either SCSI or NVMe device as one HD. It’s obviously backed by massive fleet of drives just like EBS.
- iamleppert 7mo agoI was wrong about it being a spinning disk, ROTA=1 is just how Linux reports Azure virtual disks. But the underlying frustration stands: my home NVMe does the same copy in a fraction of the time because it can do 500K+ IOPS with no virtualization overhead. Azure caps this "Premium SSD" at 7,500 IOPS, so a small-file-heavy copy crawls at 85 MB/s despite 250 MB/s provisioned throughput. You're paying SSD prices for artificially throttled performance — the hardware may be SSD, but the performance is just awful. Paying $900/month for the highest level Premium SSD, attached to a large instance, and it's significantly slower than a $200 SSD from 5 years ago.
- 7mo ago
- markstos 7mo agoFrustrating that FedRAMP is both a pain to get compliant with and also apparently is not a strong signal of actual security.
- colechristensen 7mo agoI see you've never worked in a compliance environment before.
- Havoc 7mo agoAnd may such evil days never come to past
- j45 7mo agoMaybe the gaps are a frature or benefit at the same time.
- brudgers 7mo agoGiven the scale and scope of the Federal Government. what are the alternatives to Microsoft? Building in house. Outsourcing to consultants.
- realo 7mo agoIBM? Redhat?
- nonameiguess 7mo agoI think there's some context missing here. For those who don't remember, the CIA back in like 2014 or so built out private data centers with classified versions of AWS services and all IC workloads that don't require specialized hardware was supposed to be using. DOD historically used it as well for classified cloud workloads, but wanted its own, and this was the JEDI contract, which was also supposed to go to Amazon, until Trump got into a fight with Jeff Bezos in 2019, canceled the contract, and awarded it to Microsoft instead. Amazon sued, and Biden decided to just award the contract to everyone and split it between all the major cloud vendors. That still doesn't mean anyone can actually use it without FedRAMP approval, but well, there you go. The alternative was AWS, which has been operating at every classification level for over a decade at this point. It's now split between Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google, which is especially amusing because Google withdrew from the original bid process when they were still pretending to give a shit that their employees don't like working for the military.
- FrustratedMonky 7mo agoIs this just a case of MS needing to merge a lot of platforms, and there are gaps and overlaps.? Maybe the critical question, are they making continuing improvements? Especially to merge conflicting functions. Like when they bought Minecraft, or Skype. Each already had user management. Xbox was a mess. Merging them all took a lot of years.
- iscoelho 7mo agoMicrosoft has never been good at security, and that is why their centralization to cloud is absolutely terrifying. I'm reminded of Storm-0558 [1] where a stolen signing key was able to forge authentication tokens for any MSA / Azure AD / Government AD user. They downplayed the severity. Just imagine if that level of access was used to pull a Stryker on a nation-wide scale. That is an economic disaster waiting to happen. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/14/analysis-of-storm-0558-techniques-for-unauthorized-email-access/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/14/ana...
- Rygian 7mo agoI'll do you one better: stealing the signing key was not even necessary. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-entra-id-flaw-allowed-hijacking-any-companys-tenant/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-ent...
- iscoelho 7mo agoI knew there was another incident that I was forgetting, insanity... I don't understand how Microsoft keeps getting away with this and everyone just forgets.
- someguyiguess 7mo agoWhen people's income depends on them forgetting... they tend to become amnesiacs.
- hulitu 7mo agoMicrosoft has a very good PR department: they invest a lot in lobby/corruption, they pay for articles in big media companies. And Microsoft is too big to fail.
- natas 7mo agobecause time to market is more important than security (at microsoft)
- 7mo ago
- dwa3592 7mo agoExactly, and that is the moat- a pile of shit that everyone can smell from afar.
- jakubadamw 7mo agoLittle has changed since Bill Gates tried to install Movie Maker.
- caseysoftware 7mo agoWas this approval before or after evaluators discovered this? > Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services. Ref: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-escorts-pentagon.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-esco...
- fredgrott 7mo agoits as funny as the IA research reports from DORA dev which all seem to be sponsored AI provider ads instead....
- pissedoffadmin 7mo ago[flagged]
- pissedoffadmin 7mo ago[flagged]
- everdrive 7mo agoThe experts were correct. Azure is the biggest pile of shit I've ever had to work with. Everything feels evolutionary. In other words, a new product in azure is barely a product at all, but a small appendage which totally inherits a bunch of preexisting Azure "stuff." And all this preexisting stuff may not really make sense for the product, and it might inherit stuff that makes the product much worse. But, it doesn't matter. To even think about using the product, you need to learn way more about the larger Azure ecosystem than you ever bargained for, and of course deal with Microsoft products that do not really integrate well because the teams don't talk to each other. Log formats, conventions, everything will be different as you float around to different parts of Azure. Basic security concepts, such as a SIEM will be implemented in such strange ways that you wonder if Microsoft has any idea what a SIEM even is.
- reactordev 7mo agoAzure is the color of the face you have after Microsoft beats you with your own wallet. They don’t want to give you access to anything, they want to own it and make you pay for it.
- bmurphy1976 7mo agoHow is this different than Amazon? Same problem there. Oh, you're using this new service? Need to view the logs? Want a nice friendly UI to do that? Fuck you here's Cloudwatch. Good luck. Just to be clear, I'm responding to the parent comment not the article.
- klooney 7mo agoI love https://github.com/lucagrulla/cw https://github.com/lucagrulla/cw , it's like tail for cloudwatch. It's super fast.
- bmurphy1976 7mo agoThat's great but that's not really the problem. The real problem is Amazon likes to release services that depend on other services, but leave the integration work to us. I'm convinced Amazon has many teams crapping out new features but they don't have the political clout (or manpower) to create a comprehensive product. They are mandated by management to use existing services, and thus we the users suffer because we have to manage all this extra crap and noise just to enable basic functionality. It's maddening. And then also it's maddening to see another service from a different team that was able to throw off these shackles and actually make a product that is self contained. You get a taste of how good things could be, and then you're thrown right back into the IAM/SQS/Cloudwatch/Cloudformation/Policy/everything else under the sun soup.
- _slih 7mo agothe product got deployed across the government while the security review was still in progress. then fedramp approved it because it was already everywhere. seem like i saw a lobbyist or two with a broom sweeping something under a rug...
- SanjayMehta 7mo agoA rigged RFP, and some very happy lobbyists, chortling into their single malt all the way to the bank.
- shrubble 7mo agoThis fits perfectly with traditional Microsoft strategies of getting a foot in the door and then having the users’ internal pressure on the organization to help get the Microsoft product established. Decades ago, Lotus 1-2-3 on top of MSDOS was the lever; today it’s GCC High.
- robutsume 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- sam-cop-vimes 7mo agoMicrosoft has been selling piles of shit since the beginning of time. The fact that they keep selling is the biggest triumph of sales/marketing over decent engineering.
- klooney 7mo ago> Potential Conflict of Interest: The government relies, in part, on third-party firms to vet cloud technology, but those firms are hired and paid by the company being assessed. Hah. First time looking at FedRAMP? The real reason for this, of course, is accounting, it moves it off of the government's books.
- SamuelAdams 7mo agoIt feels a lot like the FAA and NTSB moving safety checks of the Max 8 to Boeing engineers. Like of course they’re going to OK it…
- skywhopper 7mo agoAzure is bad. But to be fair, every security summary of IT services I’ve ever read — or written! — for over 25 years has also been a “pile of shit”. It seems to be inherent to the cybersecurity game that everything is judged based on meaningless check boxes and nonsensical explanations. Meanwhile the actual security posture is obscured and ignored.
- scottyah 7mo agoStaying afloat on cyber compliance takes so much time and energy there's no room for actual cybersecurity analysis.
- gffrd 7mo agoA pile of shit you have leverage over is better than a pile of diamonds you don’t.
- Heer_J 7mo ago[dead]
- Arubis 7mo agoI mean, they also bought the F-35.
- hunterpayne 7mo agoIn all fairness, the F-35 does what it says on the tin. Azure doesn't. That you bring this up says a lot more about you than government purchasing.
- Arubis 7mo agoIt does _now_, since the deliverable capabilities and pricing changed well after the ink on the contracts was dry. The F35 program was picked over by experts and denounced internally, but went forward as a purchase anyway.
- babypuncher 7mo agookay what the hell is a "cyber expert"?
- alexjplant 7mo agoAlthough "cyber" is a prefix used to denote a relationship to high technology there exist people who use it as a stand-alone term to mean "cybersecurity", e.g. "I work in cyber." It's very confusing given that it came from the word "cybernetic", the hundreds of other words that begin with it as well, and the existence of the term "cybersec" which is unambiguous and only a bit longer.
- gurjeet 7mo ago> These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. It's unfortunate that people have to claim the authenticity, rather than the users of AI having to disclose use of AI/LLM. I wish it was the other way around.
- franktankbank 7mo agoMicrosoft is great at greasing palms
- kqgnkqgn 7mo agoThis is my opinion only, I'm sure some have had different experiences - but: Azure's success as a cloud provider is mostly a result of their sales team and having an existing relationship with non-technical leadership. "We already pay them for Office and Exchange, let's just buy this new 'cloud' thing from them too". Azure is barely considered an option at all within tech companies, yet is surprisingly widely adopted by non-technical companies that don't know any better (ie, that don't have a technical / engineering voice or representation within leadership). AWS = Likely technically the best, for now. Mostly unreasonable pricing, and less motivation to seriously negotiate given they are the 'default' cloud provider for most of the industry. Kind of feels like they have peaked though, and are slipping more recently. Inevitable, or bad leadership changes? OCI = New-comer, attractive pricing and hungry for business. Might be able to avoid mistakes other providers have made? Reliability struggles though. Parent company has a bad reputation in some circles - but probably not with decision makers. Making huge (unwise?) investments - that will either come crashing down in 5 years, or seriously pay off. Layoffs, but going for massive growth...huh? GCP = Notably different underlying technical choices than other providers. Folks are maybe a bit less pragmatic, and more academic. This helps them in unique services (Spanner?) but hurts in most other areas. They've matured, and are btwn AWS and OCI in reliability. They are probably not as hungry for business as they should be given how far behind they are.
- notepad0x90 7mo agoSuddenly everyone on HN is an expert on Azure infrastructure. it isn't the best but it's really great at a lot of things feature-wise. top-notch documentation as well (despite what these "experts" said). Most companies literally run on Azure these days. Persistent hackers will get into any network, that's a guarantee, that's APT 101. It's law of averages. If it truly is "a pile of shit" given how it is probably the most used cloud platform by the most customers, including governments, and endless plethora of features and services it offers, shouldn't there be more compromises? 2-3 in a decade is hardly above what you expect for law of averages right? Screw ups happen, but if it is systemic, you can't use one instance as evidence, you must establish a pattern of mishaps.
- lokar 7mo agoI ran a one of the largest multi-cloud service across azure, aws and gcp. Azure was hands down, obvious to everyone involved the worst technically. In capabilities, bugs/correctness, availability and support.
- notepad0x90 7mo agoI can only speak from the perspective of someone who used/admined in all those 3 environments. I'm surprised you ranked google's support above microsoft. I've also seen bugs that would be unusual in other clouds, but other clouds have other pros/cons as well. GCP for example is capable, but it is tedious to use, and even harder to log/audit. Of all 3 CSPs azure has the best identity management system. they're the worst in terms of charging for critical security measures that should be free, but when you pay for it, none of the other providers even come close to that capability. The main reason people use Azure is easy integration. You're probably right when it comes to availability, no argument there, except maybe how AWS region outages seem to be a bi-annual holiday. In practical terms, different CSPs might annoy people differently, but availability aside, I think they all suck in their own special way from a user experience perspective. AWS had to recently tell their devs/engs to have a senior dev review their vibe code because of all the outages it was causing.
- 7mo ago
- mystraline 7mo agoYeah, but this is how things work at that level. Microsoft can be abhorrent. They will always get the contracts. Why? Corporate welfare. Microsoft will drive the rules. Why? Too big to fail. Microsoft will push their slop. Why? Cause they have contractors after contractors in the federal government pushing MS solutions. Doesnt matter if they're bad. And, who'd pay for a 3PAO audit of a Linux distro? Ubuntu and Redhat have. Its a $120k moat.
- wsesamemr81 7mo ago[dead]
- DeathArrow 7mo agoIs there a big cloud platform that isn't a pile of shit?
- riffic 7mo agoall clouds are.
- rukuu001 7mo agoJust like everyone else tasked with buying Microsoft
- bigfatkitten 7mo ago[dead]
- natas 7mo ago[dead]
- thayne 7mo agoI don't have much experience with Azure but I was amazed at how many things in AWS GovCloud don't meet FedRAMP encryption requirements. For example, none of the lambda runtimes have FIPS certified encryption libraries available, and you have to bring you own, which is rather complicated to do.
- NoSalt 7mo agoEVERYTHING about the federal government contracts program sucks ass! In the beginning, it was good as you didn't want people forcing through their brother, mother, 2nd cousin, next door neighbor, Satya Nadella and their "company" as a contractor without oversight cough Kristi Noem cough. However, it has devolved into a mess. The entire thing needs to be scrapped and re-engineered.
- stainablesteel 7mo agowhen someone says they work at meta, they get weird looks, but no one assumes they're incompetent when someone says they work at microsoft, they get weird looks, and people assume they're incompetent
- crawdog 7mo agoEntropy is real. Microsoft has lessened the friction of purchasing vs their competitors. Public Sector this may be their only choice because they set the groundwork decades ago to do business with most organizations. It may not be the best solution, but it offers the least resistance to getting something up and running.
- GeoSys 7mo agoSo which is the most consistent cloud offering, that doesn't seem like a bunch of disparate services loosely wired together? GCP? AWS?
- sysops9x 7mo agoThe vendor lock-in angle is the real story. Once you have AD, Exchange, Teams, and Azure all tangled together, the exit cost is enormous. I've watched orgs get approval for a full cloud migration based on cost savings projections that completely ignored the engineering cost of the decade-long migration that follows. The security issues are real but the procurement inertia is what keeps them renewing.
- kajecounterhack 7mo ago+10000 that Azure is a steaming pile of shit. Like what's this -- `azcopy` broken at head, and the working one doesn't guarantee correctness after a copy (99.6% copied successfully! good luck figuring out what went wrong!) compare that to migrating data with GCS or S3 -- they provide first class tools that do it right quickly (aws-cli, gsutil). Want a VM? You'll also need this network security group, network interface, network manager, ip, virtual network... and maybe it'll be connected to the internet so you can SSH in? Compare to GCP or EC2 -- you just pick an instance and start it. You can SSH in directly, or even do it in the browser. Billing also a nightmare: if you're running a startup, AWS and Google make it relatively easy to see how many credits you have left. The Azure dashboard makes you navigate a maze, and the button to click that says "Azure Credits" is _invisible_ for 30s until ostensibly some backend system finds your credits, then it magically shows up. Most people don't wait around and just assume there's no button. And if you click it, maybe you will happen to be in the correct billing profile, maybe not! Don't get confused: billing profile and billing scope are different concepts too! And in your invoice, costs just magically get deducted, until they don't. No mention of any credits. Credits inaccessible through API (claude tried everything). VMs, bucket storage, and copying data are the _simplest_ parts of the stack. Why would anyone bother trying to use other services if they can't get these right? They literally give startups 2x the credits as GCP, 20x the credits of AWS and nobody wants to use them.
- jiggawatts 7mo agoAzcopy is special bad, the team that looks after it is made up entirely of junior developers that obstinately refuse to listen to feedback. Its documentation title is "Copy or move data to Azure Storage by using AzCopy v10" but it can’t actually do trivial operations like “move” because the devs are too scared to write code that deletes files: https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-azcopy/issues/1650#issuecomment-1006827727 https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-azcopy/issues/1650#is... I recommend switching to “rclone” instead to avoid the frustration. It won't fill your entire system disk up with unnecessary log files unlike azcopy, which is a significant source of production server outages where I work because of this default behaviour.
- NandinoAI37 7mo ago[dead]
- davidliu847386 7mo ago[flagged]
- rawgabbit 7mo ago“GCC High reviewers saw problems everywhere, both in what they were able to evaluate and what they weren’t. To them, most of the package remained a vast wilderness of untold risk. Nevertheless, FedRAMP and Microsoft reached an agreement, and the day after Christmas 2024, GCC High received its FedRAMP authorization.” How big was the ballroom donation?
- jongjong 7mo agoIt sucks so bad to be a software dev today. We simultaneously have to worry about: - Market monopolies reducing options/leverage - Outsourcing - AI automation - Complexity explosion These days, every company which has money is using some horrible clunky platform/infra and we spend 99% of our time just working around limitations of those platforms; Problems which were created artificially and don't need to exist... And at the same time we're expected to meet deadlines while almost all of the challenges we face involve certain critical aspects that are totally outside of our control and require us to wait for someone else to fix stuff while we work around it with some crappy solution and we can't just switch platforms or write it from scatch (which would be easier for a lot of us) because the organization forces us to use a particular platform because of the pretext that they are SOC2 compliant. It's total BS! Not only we have to worry about threats to our jobs, when you look at who is being rewarded in this industry; it's essentially people who create bloat/unnecessary complexity and build these horrible products. The industry is full of horrible products that everyone uses. There is no incentive for software engineers to be competent because look at what the market rewards! This in turn affects organization politics; everyone who has some leverage over the platforms is (at least subconsciously) looking for ways to sabotage the tech to maximize billable hours to fix it later... Fixing the platform is their bread and butter so of course they never want to fix it completely. Anyone who tries to do the right thing runs into issues with managers for missing deadlines which they have ZERO control over due to underlying constraints of the platforms they are forced to use. The people 'maintaining' the platforms don't have deadlines do they? They can keep making money from the shit they produce by ensuring they stay shitty and ensuring that the people who actually have deadlines and actually try to get stuff done can't meet them!
- jamesvzb 7mo ago[flagged]
- HBARLARI91 7mo ago[dead]
- captain_coffee 7mo agoSo, Microsoft products still are a garbage fire in March 2026. Fully aligned with the expectations
- maxothex 7mo ago[dead]
- Areena_28 7mo ago[dead]