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.
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-dat...
> I probably have five different systems
This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.
And now slap widespread vibe coding and PRs that reviewed by LLMs without anyone giving it a proper look.
We are now definitely doing a lot of that. My manager has been saying things like, "I don't even know how it works, but I used AI to build [thing], and I just sent it to a PR." He's very strong technically, but the mindset has absolutely shifted to, "move fast and break things, yoloooooo". It's frustrating to say the least.
And most of that is done on Macbooks by people that either can not or will not use Windows OS.
Wait, is this true? I would have imagined unless it’s about porting software or testing it, everyone would be forced to use Windows.
If it is true, wonder what the proportion is then: 25%, 50%?
It's not true. Source - me, MSFT for 25 years.
I’ve seen Microsoft employees run public presentations from MacBooks on multiple occasions.
Yes, because you know what all of the 200,000+ employees are doing in every wing and branch of the entire company.
Then again, Microsoft themselves directly dispute your statement:
Across the landscape of more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft, we support Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices. Windows devices account for approximately 60 percent of the total employee-device population, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Our employees are empowered to access Microsoft data and tools using managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.
https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/evolving-the-devi...
Not to mention that most app designers use OSX for the design tools, which means that there is going to be by default some bleed between the two systems on design choices alone.
I don't mean this as a jab, but would you use Windows to develop software? Especially Windows that has AD teeth sunk into it where everything is "managed by your organization." It's just a thousand small cuts for seemingly no good reason.
>>but would you use Windows to develop software?
I'm a c++ developer and I wouldn't use anything other than Windows to develop software, for one reason alone - Visual Studio is a fantastic tool that is better than any IDE I have ever tried it and imho it's the best product Microsoft makes. It just works and works well. And most console toolchains are only on Windows, so outside of iOS development I don't really have a choice.
No, but I also wouldn't let people who do not understand the soul of the OS to rewrite it.
If I were the microslop god for 6 weeks, I would force everyone to go to a boot camp and use Windows 7 for 4 of those weeks so they could see what made it so good.
No invasiveness, an OS that felt like yours. Just enough eye candy to not be distracting but to also feel like a clean modern system. Low system usage at idle. Calm, clean, and ready to roll when you clicked a button.
Windows is NEVER going to be MacOS, but the dev teams seem obsessed with macifying windows while also wedging that AI abomination copilot into every line of code, so windows is getting a tag team of rapid enshittification on top of already having been massively enshittified, and at least some portion of it is due to the people being paid to make it not understanding what it is supposed to be, the niche it held, and the reason for windows existence.
With no soul, windows has to go.
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
any sufficiently large organization that is around for a decade or two trends towards spaghetti-access
Yup, same boat here (mid-size company).
All the corporate stuff is behind Okta, so that easy enough.
But all the dev/test systems are a mix of SSO, individual logins, etc. At least they're all behind the same VPN (except when they aren't, but that's less common).
And of course, if you're a cloud engineer (vs "normal" software engineer), you also have to deal with AWS access, which is a whole different can of worms.
And yet, somehow AWS managed to get this right-ish. They evolved, learned by making mistakes, and created de-facto standards (like object storage protocol) on the way, while at the same time supporting decades-old services. And I'm sure they'll withstand the current AI craze.
AWS had the benefit of not trying to retrofit IaaS on top of a (already bad) PaaS.
So the problem is the team size, not culture?
Their support team likes to sit on things for a while too. I'm on day 4 of waiting for Azure to approve my support request to increase Azure Batch vCPUs from default of 4 to 20 for ESv3 series. I signed up last week and converted to a paid account. I'm going to use Google Cloud Batch today instead.
You’ve made a fundamental mistake and you’ll have the same result from every cloud provider.
You’re using a legacy v3 series that is being removed from the data centres in an era where you could be using v6 or newer instances that are being freshly deployed and are readily available.
If you can’t be bothered to keep an eye on these absolute basics, you’re going to have a rough time with any public cloud, no matter their logo design.
Right now you're paying more for less compute and having to deal with low availability too! Go read the docs and catch up to the last decade of virtual hardware changes.
Or, just run this and pick a size:
Thanks I will try that!
So the internal Cosmos DB has nothing to do with Cosmos DB the Azure product, which was an unwieldy assemblage of a graph DB, a NoSQL DB, a time series DB and an RDBMS last time I looked at it, but seems to have morphed into a "vector DB for AI" according to today's marketing?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cosmos-db
Ah, I remember Cosmos and SCOPE from my time at MS ~15 years ago! It was actually pretty cool technology. So is it still around?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?"
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
I worked at a hospital in that timeframe and they rolled out Teams. Up until they, shadow IT teams were running Slack just fine.
Man, what a horrendous pile of crap Teams was back then. The Slack teams were griping that they should just buy Slack, but Teams was the "enterprise solution." The problems were amplified during remote COVID work. Teams is fine now, but how many corporations went through years of frustration just because some IT decision maker said "Teams. Because it's enterprise."
Yeah that's the thing. Management who made the deals are never put into that frustration, or very rarely, and I always wonder, at least for the big corporations, if there is any greasy palms...
Manager humans will sell out your workflow,
and indeed your entire workplace,
for as little as a steak dinner.
Man, at least make a few dinners…
Teams is still a horrendous pile of crap. It's just that you've gotten used to the stench. It has few redeeming qualities other than, "we don't have to pay for another subscription" and that's not even the case in the EU.
Yeah but today you can at least have a video call more or less normally. Back then it was a hiccup after a hiccup, it was impossible to work normally, and yet orgs pushed it down everybody's throats as it was bundled.
Definitely. Besides the performance issues, back then, Teams barely had any features. One example was that it wouldn't show you who was talking. First time we had a call was with 30 people and I remember a manager calling out a director responsible for this decision jokingly saying, "and you don't know who I am because Team doesn't show you who's talking."
The UI is an overengineered mess and I'd rather use literally anything else, but to say it's still unusable is disingenuous.
> You just have to stick with it for a few years.
Also see: SharePoint
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
> Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before
Which one? There’s two now! Lol
Both. "New" outlook doesn't work with all of the add-ons and plug ins that "classic" outlook did. Both new and classic have copilot wedged into them. Classic has unasked for and unwanted Linkedin integrations that have to be turned off on a per-user basis, and it is patently clear that microslop has every intention of abandoning classic outlook the instant they believe that they can do so without severely alienating their userbase.
I don’t perceive benign neglect when they disregard UX for a product they’ve positioned so people essentially have to pay for and use it, while force-feeding them features they actively and vocally hate. Treating your customers as cash cows is fundamentally contemptful.
If not contempt, at least disregard or indifference
They have to compete in good faith for developers, which is why VS Code does not suck.
But yes, normal Office users, where the company pays the bills, pay the price.
I agree that VSC is solid for web dev or other script language workflows, and VS is fine, if a bit heavy-handed. That said, Windows native development is a freaking mess. Try figuring out what their recommended native UI kit is these days. Everything is half-assed and half-supported at best. Unless it’s going to either feed them a ton of marketing telemetry or let them bump up their supposed copilot adoption statistics, you’re yesterday’s news to MS.
VS Code is also open source and forkable, the Windows kernel or Azure tech stack not so much
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did someone say Active Directory?
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.
I love https://github.com/lucagrulla/cw , it's like tail for cloudwatch. It's super fast.
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.
Amazon suffers from severely fractured teams. They had a "two pizza" team policy, after all.
So you get a lot of disconnected services that work fairly well on their own and provide you GREAT building blocks if you're a developer. For example, 10 years ago, I wrote a task orchestration service that used CloudWatch Logs for task log storage. The viewer simply used the CW APIs to tail the logs from tasks, not having to worry about storage, updates, etc.
But the reverse side is that cross-team projects often languish. Especially in the UI section. Obvious things like showing logs in the reverse order (newest entries first) get overlooked and ignored.
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.
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.
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.
this. with Kubernetes, you can get very far with just this and you won't have to deal with lock in BS either