Azure’s design is elegant and even — dare I say it — beautiful.
Its implementation is clumsy and ugly.
Its documentation is worse.
Its support… isn’t.
Azure’s design is elegant and even — dare I say it — beautiful.
Its implementation is clumsy and ugly.
Its documentation is worse.
Its support… isn’t.
I think Azure’s design is fine. Some cool ideas that work, some “cool ideas” that are a pain in the ass. The implementation is complete dog shit. Barely anything works the way it’s supposed to, and when something works, better not touch it or you can’t touch it. Many times the answer is “why don’t you delete everything and try this other thing?”
The documentation is indeed worst than that still. It’s a maze of articles, none of them actually answer your questions because in Azure the answer to everything is “it depends”. Every doc page has to also be a sales pitch for something. They love inventing skus and features that are basically “now if you want this service to work, you must enable this feature. Otherwise, this is not supported. And to enable this feature, you must delete and recreate your instance” you know, just figure it out.
IME the diferent components of Azure vary quite a bit. Some of them are great, others are pretty inconvenient or weirdly designed. I personally feel the web UI is terrible. I like that the APIs follow consistent rules and seem to follow good practices across the board. The documentation is hit or miss, kind of like the components themselves.
Honestly that's kind of been my experience with all of the cloud providers I've had to work with.
What I meant by good design is the "core" Azure Resource Manager (ARM) design. It's straightforward and elegant: single "pane of glass", single API surface, but it is extensible and scalable.
> I personally feel the web UI is terrible.
AWS tried to keep these things isolated so there isn't one AWS Console, but dozens, and each regional instance is separate. Every task requires admins to "context switch" at least three or four times.
I much prefer the Azure web UI where everything is a single UI and you can search and filter across regions, subscriptions, and resource types without having to "switch" to a totally different console linked only through SSO.