6 ms·

The 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

The 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 ago
Azure 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 ago
How 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 ago
  I love https://github.com/lucagrulla/cw https://github.com/lucagrulla/cw , it's like tail for cloudwatch. It's super fast.
  - bmurphy1976 7mo ago
    That'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.
    - bob778 7mo ago
      Which ones are a good example of how things could be?
- debarshri 7mo ago
  Amazon is selling servers and storage. If you need to see logs properly, then get a right tool for it. Cloudwatch is a stop gap solution.
  - bmurphy1976 7mo ago
    See my other comment. Logs are just one small symptom of a larger problem of poorly integrated very complex services where the complexity is pushed onto the users and not properly managed by Amazon. Which sounds very much like the problems with Azure.
    - lokar 7mo ago
      My general approach is to only use the most basic services from each cloud. VMs, networks, L3 load balancers, blob storage, etc Build the rest yourself. In many cases their higher level service is just the same open source package you would run, just managed worse.
      - r_lee 7mo ago
        this. with Kubernetes, you can get very far with just this and you won't have to deal with lock in BS either
- cyberax 7mo ago
  [flagged]
markus_zhang 7mo ago
> Everything feels evolutionary. That's total "normal" for Microsoft at least from 2018, the year I started working with some of their products (Power BI mostly). They adopted a development model that is early release, fast iteration, and users as testers. No wonder everything feels experimental until much later. Back then I just couldn't use Power BI. But fast forward a few years, I think it got a lot better since maybe 2020. You just have to stick with it for a few years.
- dietr1ch 7mo ago
  > You just have to stick with it for a few years. So, you have to be a paying tester? Incredible that MS can keep enough businesses as hostage to be able to operate like that.
  - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
    a LOT of stuff comes for free or marginal (10-100$ a month) so yes, you do pay but it's already 'baked into' the contracts people generally carry with microsoft, or something for IT to worry about when the yearly renewals show up
  - markus_zhang 7mo ago
    Most of the time it's just part of the bundle. If you are heavy into SQL Server, Office 365 and Power BI then there is a BIG chance you are going to use Azure for whatever the reason. People who take Azure up without previous MS product experience...not sure about those.
    - thewebguyd 7mo ago
      There's a few, mostly retailers who don't want to give money to Amazon as a direct competitor, for them Microsoft/Azure is more of a neutral party, and most businesses already use Microsoft in at least some fashion so already have staff internally familiar with MS products (as opposed to say, going to GCP instead). For everyone else, it's like you said. "Eh, we are already knee deep in the Microsoft stack, why would we pick anything else?"
andy_ppp 7mo ago
I’ve seen this in other “follow the leader” businesses too, they are not looking to even have working features, just parity on a spreadsheet with the market leader… I’m looking at you Gitlab.
DrewADesign 7mo ago
Absolute contempt for their users at every level. It’s so transparent. This is the end game of anticompetitive practices for decades— they just don’t have to try anymore… for now. Some day they’ll either have to compete in good faith or sink. I doubt that will happen soon, but someday.
- pluc 7mo ago
  It's hard to argue against contempt but... I'm gonna try. It feels like at the end of the line it's just a checkbox someone gets without having to consider the consequences of the changes. Either it's too big or there's too many levels where decisions get made and handed down to drones (or AI), but the people who decide seem to have no concept of what their products are used for and the people who implement features seem to have accepted that the system is so big that they can't understand all the impacts of their changes and have to rely on trusting commands from above - who may expect them to challenge from the POV of users or question things but never do. Anyway, this feels like what happens when managerial overhead and marketing KPIs smash into a complex product ecosystem. It all smells of IBM to be honest
  - Spooky23 7mo ago
    Microsoft was always afraid of being IBM. They are more IBM than IBM. When they started flying people in the beg that I buy 100 Surface Laptops, that was the confirmation of everything I had been thinking. All I could think of was IBM flying a dude from Italy in to talk for 15 minutes about their version of TeamViewer back in the day. We ended up talking about shoes.
    - dralley 7mo ago
      It's a shame. In the late 2010s there was a lot of hope for Satya Nadella, but it seems like the organization has regressed back to the mean.
      - BizarroLand 7mo ago
        Which is sad because the CEO's job is not to focus on the individual body parts but to make sure that the whole system is strong, beautiful, and healthy. They can afford people who would do better. Windows 11 is trash. Azure is trash. Onedrive is trash. Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before, but it's not quite trash yet. Word is trash. Excel is rapidly enshittifying. Copilot is hot flaming radioactive tar cancer. Does microslop even have a single thing left that isn't either completely terrible or worse than it used to be a mere 5 years ago?
anonymsft318 7mo ago
As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this. We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it. We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth? We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.) I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out. These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-data-processing-at-microsoft-hyper-scale-massive-complexity-and-minimal-cost/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-dat...
- pram 7mo ago
  Ugh this sounds like when I worked at Oracle/OCI. Some environments required a VPN, some a jumpbox, and some required logging into a virtual desktop, and then logging into a jumpbox. Just thinking about it gives me PTSD
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    any sufficiently large organization that is around for a decade or two trends towards spaghetti-access
cj 7mo ago
I sometimes wonder if I would feel the same about AWS if I hadn’t already invested a significant amount of time learning the entire ecosystem, nomenclatures, patterns/best practices, etc.
- manphone 7mo ago
  As someone who has worked with all three in many capacities, as is the worst by a mile. Don’t get me wrong. They are all very bad, but Azure is the king of shit.
lokar 7mo ago
And the same applies to regions. Try running is most of the regions, each is a bit different. And its not historical / sequential differences, just random.
siva7 7mo ago
Did someone say Active Directory?

reactordev 7mo ago

Azure 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 ago

How 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 ago
I love https://github.com/lucagrulla/cw https://github.com/lucagrulla/cw , it's like tail for cloudwatch. It's super fast.
- bmurphy1976 7mo ago
  That'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.
  - bob778 7mo ago
    Which ones are a good example of how things could be?
debarshri 7mo ago
Amazon is selling servers and storage. If you need to see logs properly, then get a right tool for it. Cloudwatch is a stop gap solution.
- bmurphy1976 7mo ago
  See my other comment. Logs are just one small symptom of a larger problem of poorly integrated very complex services where the complexity is pushed onto the users and not properly managed by Amazon. Which sounds very much like the problems with Azure.
  - lokar 7mo ago
    My general approach is to only use the most basic services from each cloud. VMs, networks, L3 load balancers, blob storage, etc Build the rest yourself. In many cases their higher level service is just the same open source package you would run, just managed worse.
    - r_lee 7mo ago
      this. with Kubernetes, you can get very far with just this and you won't have to deal with lock in BS either
cyberax 7mo ago
[flagged]

markus_zhang 7mo ago

> Everything feels evolutionary. That's total "normal" for Microsoft at least from 2018, the year I started working with some of their products (Power BI mostly). They adopted a development model that is early release, fast iteration, and users as testers. No wonder everything feels experimental until much later. Back then I just couldn't use Power BI. But fast forward a few years, I think it got a lot better since maybe 2020. You just have to stick with it for a few years.

dietr1ch 7mo ago
> You just have to stick with it for a few years. So, you have to be a paying tester? Incredible that MS can keep enough businesses as hostage to be able to operate like that.
- calvinmorrison 7mo ago
  a LOT of stuff comes for free or marginal (10-100$ a month) so yes, you do pay but it's already 'baked into' the contracts people generally carry with microsoft, or something for IT to worry about when the yearly renewals show up
- markus_zhang 7mo ago
  Most of the time it's just part of the bundle. If you are heavy into SQL Server, Office 365 and Power BI then there is a BIG chance you are going to use Azure for whatever the reason. People who take Azure up without previous MS product experience...not sure about those.
  - thewebguyd 7mo ago
    There's a few, mostly retailers who don't want to give money to Amazon as a direct competitor, for them Microsoft/Azure is more of a neutral party, and most businesses already use Microsoft in at least some fashion so already have staff internally familiar with MS products (as opposed to say, going to GCP instead). For everyone else, it's like you said. "Eh, we are already knee deep in the Microsoft stack, why would we pick anything else?"

andy_ppp 7mo ago

I’ve seen this in other “follow the leader” businesses too, they are not looking to even have working features, just parity on a spreadsheet with the market leader… I’m looking at you Gitlab.

DrewADesign 7mo ago

Absolute contempt for their users at every level. It’s so transparent. This is the end game of anticompetitive practices for decades— they just don’t have to try anymore… for now. Some day they’ll either have to compete in good faith or sink. I doubt that will happen soon, but someday.

pluc 7mo ago
It's hard to argue against contempt but... I'm gonna try. It feels like at the end of the line it's just a checkbox someone gets without having to consider the consequences of the changes. Either it's too big or there's too many levels where decisions get made and handed down to drones (or AI), but the people who decide seem to have no concept of what their products are used for and the people who implement features seem to have accepted that the system is so big that they can't understand all the impacts of their changes and have to rely on trusting commands from above - who may expect them to challenge from the POV of users or question things but never do. Anyway, this feels like what happens when managerial overhead and marketing KPIs smash into a complex product ecosystem. It all smells of IBM to be honest
- Spooky23 7mo ago
  Microsoft was always afraid of being IBM. They are more IBM than IBM. When they started flying people in the beg that I buy 100 Surface Laptops, that was the confirmation of everything I had been thinking. All I could think of was IBM flying a dude from Italy in to talk for 15 minutes about their version of TeamViewer back in the day. We ended up talking about shoes.
  - dralley 7mo ago
    It's a shame. In the late 2010s there was a lot of hope for Satya Nadella, but it seems like the organization has regressed back to the mean.
    - BizarroLand 7mo ago
      Which is sad because the CEO's job is not to focus on the individual body parts but to make sure that the whole system is strong, beautiful, and healthy. They can afford people who would do better. Windows 11 is trash. Azure is trash. Onedrive is trash. Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before, but it's not quite trash yet. Word is trash. Excel is rapidly enshittifying. Copilot is hot flaming radioactive tar cancer. Does microslop even have a single thing left that isn't either completely terrible or worse than it used to be a mere 5 years ago?

anonymsft318 7mo ago

As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this. We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it. We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth? We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.) I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out. These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-data-processing-at-microsoft-hyper-scale-massive-complexity-and-minimal-cost/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-dat...

pram 7mo ago
Ugh this sounds like when I worked at Oracle/OCI. Some environments required a VPN, some a jumpbox, and some required logging into a virtual desktop, and then logging into a jumpbox. Just thinking about it gives me PTSD
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  any sufficiently large organization that is around for a decade or two trends towards spaghetti-access

cj 7mo ago

I sometimes wonder if I would feel the same about AWS if I hadn’t already invested a significant amount of time learning the entire ecosystem, nomenclatures, patterns/best practices, etc.

manphone 7mo ago
As someone who has worked with all three in many capacities, as is the worst by a mile. Don’t get me wrong. They are all very bad, but Azure is the king of shit.

lokar 7mo ago

And the same applies to regions. Try running is most of the regions, each is a bit different. And its not historical / sequential differences, just random.

siva7 7mo ago

Did someone say Active Directory?