Errors from Microsoft's Cloud

There are a few issues, but to be fair I've encountered similar things in all the cloud and VPS hosting services I've used. However, I do remember that I was once trying to push Azure as a solution and they promptly had an outage. We went with AWS instead. It's not that AWS don't have outages, they do, just that the timing was really bad.

Also, don't use the preview services in Azure apart from to try them out. They really are previews.

I've recently written a three part series of blog posts on AWS vs Azure. The third part, on pricing, is out today.

https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...

Edit: One plus of Azure (at least for me) is that it runs on renewable energy. https://www.microsoft.com/about/csr/environment/renewable_en...

These are mostly issues with the two web portals. The portal is awkward and slow, and doesn't have a table view of my stuff. Azure has been fine for us for provisioning vms via pythons scripting. Of course, the API suffers the same problems as the portals, there are two, and it's kind of awkward and slow. Neither is it well documented. (I had to use an undocumented feature for months for something basic... Might have been auth with the certificate. I'd also say azure is the slowest out of it, gce, and aws for provisioning a VM and installing a bunch of crap. I don't have real data, just been my impression comparing similar cost plans. That said, it does run Linux VMs.

The main shocking thing for me was learning that for all of these cloud APIs the calls fail with regularity, and you can waste a lot of time retrying shrugging "we dunno what happened" server side API problems.

The 'undefined' error in the CLI tool, the generic "this operation failed" messages in the dashboard, the unexplained authentication failures. If I encountered those multiple times when trialing a service like this, I would abandon it.

It's one thing for there to be errors in OSS code that I can fix, but with a huge and complex service stack like this you're basically at its mercy, and generic errors and failures leave you completely powerless. When something goes wrong with AWS, I've always gotten extensive information which aided in debugging.

I guess if you're part of a large enterprise you have a support contract with MS which gives you leverage around issues like this, but that doesn't apply at the level I currently work at.

I know multiple customers with significant free Azure credit that prefer to pay for Google Cloud or AWS over using Azure for anything critical.

The management system is a mess - the new portal is nutty and slow. The old one lacks key features and operations are still slow. I can't understate how frustrating and time consuming this is. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but whatever. Using GCP is a blast of fresh air - light, fast, straightforward.

VMs are way overpriced and have poor performance. Windows boxes not-so-infrequently get stuck during reboot, and we were told to resize them to get them going again. "Premium" storage aka SSDs have a terrible design. The temp disk system is nonsensical. It just goes on and on.

It's obvious Azure is a great play for MS. They need to convert their enterprise customers that were spending tons on MS before to spending tons on MS online. And I'm sure they'll do fine there (recent earnings confirm?).

Oh man, so true.