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I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every day this would explain so much. The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held toget
by yoyohello13 7mo ago
I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every day this would explain so much.
The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held together. The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is constantly out of date or wrong. They offer such a huge volume of services it's nearly impossible to figure out what service you actually want/need without consultants, and when you finally get the services up who knows if they actually work as advertised.
I'm honestly shocked anything manages to stay working at all.
- mettamage 7mo agoQuestion: how would you compare it to AWS or GCP?
- ragall 7mo agoWe migrated some services to AKS because the upper management thought it was a good deal to get so many credits, and now pods are randomly crashing and database nodes have random spikes in disk latency. What ran reliably on GCP became quite unpredictable.
- SeriousM 7mo agoInteresting! We're using AKS with huge success so far, but lately our Pods are unresponsive and we get 503 Gateway Timeouts that we really can't trace down. And don't get me started on Azure Blob Tables...
- ragall 7mo agoIn our case this was only a month ago, and now we're stuck because management thought it was a good idea to sign a hefty spend commitment.
- a012 7mo agoIn our case, we spent to much time of engineer time just to put up with Azure but there’s no good ROI. It took sometime for the upper management to realize Azure is shit and cut the cost
- jacquesm 7mo agoDon't they have an SLA? You can break that open if they don't perform.
- fakedang 7mo agoExactly what I was thinking. But then again, from what I've seen, the persons responsible for monitoring uptimes are often much further removed from the C suite in these "committed-spend" companies.
- oasisbob 7mo agoTo what end? I've never seen an SLA which is clear cut enough to be worth pursuing if you want more than a free t-shirt.
- jacquesm 7mo ago> I've never seen an SLA which is clear cut enough to be worth pursuing if you want more than a free t-shirt. I have, regularly. I am not sure what kind of business you are running but parties that rely on service providers for critical (primary business process driving) components routinely agree to SLAs with large penalties and the ability to open up an existing contract in case of non-performance. Obviously you would have to be willing to pay for such a service in the first place otherwise there is no point in setting up an SLA, this won't be cheap. But we're definitely not talking about 'free t-shirts' here, more about direct liability, per hour penalties and so on.
- oasisbob 7mo agoI'm thinking ISPs, colo, cloud. By the time SLA thresholds are being breached you've been through months (or years) of pain. They're not strong enough or specific enough to save you from a bad provider. ymmv
- jacquesm 7mo agoColo and cloud providers that provide real SLAs exist. But they're pricey because they tend to insure against breach of that that SLA and they pass on the cost of that insurance. If you're a run-of-the-mill e-commerce company then it probably doesn't make much sense. But if you yourself are providing critical services to others and they have you by the short hairs in case you don't perform you better make sure that you're not going to end up holding the bag. One simple example: energy market services, 15 minute ahead and day ahead markets require participants to have the ability to perform or they will be penalized severely, to the point where they can lose that access, the damage of which could easily be in the 10's of millions to 100's of millions depending on their size. Asset owners and utilities both would be able to hit them hard if they do not perform, the asset owners for lost income and the utilities for both government penalties and possibly for outages and all associated costs. These are not the kind of contracts you enter into lightly.
- nibbleyou 7mo agoExact same story at my place. Upper management decided it's a good idea to build on Azure because Microsoft promised some benefits. Things that ran reliable on GCP now need active firefighting on Azure
- Bombthecat 7mo agoGcp is hard to beat on k8s stuff. Performance and stability is crazy good. But it's not aws are famous and costs money. Hence moving away seems like a good idea :)
- ryoshu 7mo agoI’ve worked with their consultants and they were lovely. They hate Azure too.
- everdrive 7mo agoI imagine that no one likes Azure.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoThe only good thing Microsoft azure ever did for me was provide a very easy way to exploit their free trial program in the early 2010s to crypto mine for free. It couldn’t do much, but it was straight up free real estate for CPU mining. $200 or 2 weeks per credit/debit card.
- tmpz22 7mo agoI used it for MMO goldfarming - circa 2012/2013
- Forgeties79 7mo agoDamn that’s impressive. Wasn’t it all command line at the time?
- riffraff 7mo agoAh, I did the same, but wasn't the experience/UI back then pretty nice too? I haven't used azure since then, but I remember the web interface was way more polished than aws and things worked ok (spinning up a VM was fast etc). So I'm confused by how everyone seems to hate it now.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoI did it all in the command line so can’t say
- a012 7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- chillfox 7mo agoI remember being impressed with the Azure docs... until I spend a week implementing something, only to have it completely fail when deployed to the test environment because GraphAPI did not work as documented. The beautiful docs were a complete lie. These days I don't even bother looking at the docs when doing stuff with Azure.
- throwaway173738 7mo agoI can’t count the number of times the docs have been totally wrong.
- GCUMstlyHarmls 7mo agoPretty surprised to hear this. I would think (assuming they are LLM written as parent suggests), that MS could throw a large context "pro" LLM at the code base and you should get perfect docs, updated every release? More perfect than a person where I might mistakenly copy/paste or write "Returns 404" but the LLM can probably see actually return a 401. I'm not a stranger to LLMs hallucinating things in responses but I'd always assumed that disappeared when you actually pointed it at the source vs some nebulous collection of "knowledge" in a general LLM.
- gzread 7mo agoIs it your first time using an LLM? No, they generate plausible-sounding bullshit no matter the input. Sometimes that bullshit is useful. Other times it isn't.
- h6d_100c 7mo agoAnd they were actually like that pre-LLM, in 2019, when I was implementing stuff for a car company on azure. They spent _hundreds of thousands_ on cosmosDB, for less performance than a raspberry pi running Postgres.
- jiggawatts 7mo agoEvery marketing page and just about every second documentation page goes on and on about how fantastic CosmosDB performance and scalability is. Meanwhile, the best performance I have ever managed to squeeze out of it could be generously classified as "glacial". Whenever I read its docs I feel like I'm being gaslit.
- macNchz 7mo agoI’ve created a bunch of fresh Azure accounts over the past few years and each time I’ve found myself sitting there dumbfounded anew at how garbage the experience is. There has been weird broken jank at just about every step of the process at one point or another. Like, I’m a serious person trying to set something up for a production workload, and multiple times along the way to just having a working account that I can log into with billing configured, I’ll get baffling error messages like [ServiceKeyDepartureException: Insufficient validation expectancy. Sfhtjitgfxswinbvgtt-33-664322888], and the whole thing will simply not work until several hours later. Who knows why!? I evaluated some Azure + Copilot Studio functionality for a project recently, which required more engagement with their whole 365 ecosystem than I’d had in a long time and it had many of the same problems but worse. Just unbelievably low quality software for the price and how popular it is. Every step of the way I hit some stupid issue. The people using this stuff are clearly not the people buying it.
- doubled112 7mo agoI've joked that on some services, when you're clicking buttons, you're actually opening tickets that a human needs to action. That scenario is an example. You complete an action on a web page and nothing works. You make no further changes and hours later it works perfectly. Your human wasn't fast enough that day.
- pjc50 7mo agoThat's the "digital escort" process mentioned in the very long OP. Understandably, the US government got mad when they found out that cheap Chinese tech support staff were being used for direct intervention on "secure" VMs.
- locusofself 7mo agoThat's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to. And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be accessed by anyone who doesnt have a TS clearance and physically go into a SCIF. source: I work in a team very closely related the team who designed digital escort.
- rk06 7mo agoThe part about prioritizing "aggressive feature velocity" over "core fundamentals" is true. The push is as insane as push to AI. At the same time fundamental improvements like migrating to .net core, or reducing logs is actively deprioritised. If it were not for compliance, we would not have any core engineering improvement at all Honestly, I was not even aware of rust push, probably cause no one in my org could do rust. I am glad we did not move to AKS though
- kbrkbr 7mo agoOh my goodness, yes. And how often their role assumption does not work! I need privileges to do thing A, so I assume the role, and even though the role is shown as active, the buttons are still greyed out. Sometimes it works after 10 minutes and 7x F5, most often however I do a complete relogin with MFA in an incognito window. Not distracting at all, and even that does not work sometimes.
- hypeatei 7mo agoUsing a magic link[0] from Microsoft refreshes the token instantly, but you have to do in a new tab. It's worked for me anytime permissions don't update after checking out a PIM role. 0: https://aka.ms/pim/tokenrefresh https://aka.ms/pim/tokenrefresh
- jjkaczor 7mo agoThank-you! thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. [This is the single most helpful tip/link from HN I have ever found, much appreciated]
- bwfan123 7mo agoI have been a frustrated user as well. Their services seem to be held together by duct tape. For instance, an online endpoint creation failed after 90minutes with internal-error and no clue what the error is. Support tickets are routed overseas to consultants who dont have a clue - and their job is a daily email keeping the customer warm. All-in-all, and as OP says, its amazing that it is still hanging together. Some services work reliably but not all.