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Tell HN: Azure outage

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Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#431

Post by lovich »

xmcp123 wrote: post #378
bob1029 wrote: post #362

For some reason an Azure outage does not faze me in the same way that an AWS outage does. I have never had much confidence in Azure as a cloud provider. The vertical integration of all the things for a Microsoft shop was initially very compelling. I was ready to fight that battle. But, this fantasy was quickly ruined by poor execution on Microsoft's part. They were able to convince me to move back to AWS by simply ma…

Many years back was the first time I used Azure, evaluating it for a client. I remember I at one point had expanded enough menus that it covered the entirety of the screen. Never before have I felt so lost in a cloud product.

I found it intuitive but admittedly it felt a lot like their Xbox UI which I used a lot during my formative years

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#432

Post by cyberax »

navane wrote: post #358
hedayet wrote: post #348

The sad thing is - $MSFT isn't even down by 1%. And IIRC, $AMZN actually went up during their previous outage. So if we look at these companies' bottom lines, all those big wigs are actually doing something right. Sales and lobbying capacity is way more effective than reliability or good engineering (at least in the short term).

Look how important we are, is what these failures show

So we can look forward to "accidental" cloud outages just to show their importance?

I guess the GCP is next.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#433

Post by btown »

WorldMaker wrote: post #395
xmcp123 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years back was the first time I used Azure, evaluating it for a client. I remember I at one point had expanded enough menus that it covered the entirety of the screen. Never before have I felt so lost in a cloud product.

The "Blades" experience [0] where instead of navigating between pages it just kept opening things to the side and expanding horizontally? Yeah, that had some fun ideas but was way more confusing than it needed to be. But also that was quite a few years back now. The Portal ditched that experience relatively quickly. Just long enough to leave a lot of awful first impressions, but not long enough for it to be much more…

Azure to me has always suffered from a belief that “UI innovations can solve UX complexity if you just try hard enough.”

Like, AWS, and GCP to a lesser extent, has a principled approach where simple click-ops goals are simple. You can access the richer metadata/IAM object model at any time, but the wizards you see are dumb enough to make easy things easy.

With Azure, those blades allow tremendously complex “you need to build an X Container and a Container Bucket to be able to add an X” flows to coexist on the same page. While this exposes the true complexity, and looks cool/works well for power users, it is exceedingly unintuitive. Inline documentation doesn’t solve this problem.

I sometimes wonder if this is by design: like QuickBooks, there’s an entire economy of consultants who need to be Certified and thus will promote your product for their own benefit! Making the interface friendly to them and daunting to mere mortals is a feature, not a bug.

But in Azure’s case it’s hard to tell how much this is intentional.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#434

Post by danielovichdk »

bob1029 wrote: post #362

For some reason an Azure outage does not faze me in the same way that an AWS outage does. I have never had much confidence in Azure as a cloud provider. The vertical integration of all the things for a Microsoft shop was initially very compelling. I was ready to fight that battle. But, this fantasy was quickly ruined by poor execution on Microsoft's part. They were able to convince me to move back to AWS by simply ma…

What did you do when AWS was down last week?

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#435

Post by WD-42 »

otterdude wrote: post #418
bob1029 wrote: post #362

For some reason an Azure outage does not faze me in the same way that an AWS outage does. I have never had much confidence in Azure as a cloud provider. The vertical integration of all the things for a Microsoft shop was initially very compelling. I was ready to fight that battle. But, this fantasy was quickly ruined by poor execution on Microsoft's part. They were able to convince me to move back to AWS by simply ma…

What Amazon, Azure, and Google are showing with their platform crashes amid layoffs, while they supports governments that are Oppressing's Citizens and Ignoring the Law, is that they do not care about anything other than the bottom line. They think they have the market captured, but I think what their dwindling quality and ethics are really going to drive is adoption of self hosting, distributed computing frameworks.…

Preach

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#436

Post by WD-42 »

bob1029 wrote: post #362

For some reason an Azure outage does not faze me in the same way that an AWS outage does. I have never had much confidence in Azure as a cloud provider. The vertical integration of all the things for a Microsoft shop was initially very compelling. I was ready to fight that battle. But, this fantasy was quickly ruined by poor execution on Microsoft's part. They were able to convince me to move back to AWS by simply ma…

Azure outages don’t faze anyone because nobody notices when it happens.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#437

Post by jlarocco »

locusofself wrote: post #379
hedayet wrote: post #348

The sad thing is - $MSFT isn't even down by 1%. And IIRC, $AMZN actually went up during their previous outage. So if we look at these companies' bottom lines, all those big wigs are actually doing something right. Sales and lobbying capacity is way more effective than reliability or good engineering (at least in the short term).

AMZN went up almost 4 percent between the day of the outage and the day after. Crazy market.

Because it shows how much lock-in they have.

You know nobody is migrating off of AWS or Azure because of these.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#438

Post by lebski88 »

foresterre wrote: post #420
arccy wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason you'd notice MS was down was if Github was down....

GitHub doesn't use Azure yet, but has just published their migration path to azure a few days ago. I would link to that article, but that one does seem down ;)

At least some bits of it do. I was writing something to pull logs the other day and the redirect was to an azure bucket. It also returned a 401 with the valid temporary authed redirect in the header. I was a bit worried I'd found a massive security hole but it appears after some testing it just returned the wrong status code.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#439

Post by jeffrallen »

xmcp123 wrote: post #378
bob1029 wrote: post #362

For some reason an Azure outage does not faze me in the same way that an AWS outage does. I have never had much confidence in Azure as a cloud provider. The vertical integration of all the things for a Microsoft shop was initially very compelling. I was ready to fight that battle. But, this fantasy was quickly ruined by poor execution on Microsoft's part. They were able to convince me to move back to AWS by simply ma…

Many years back was the first time I used Azure, evaluating it for a client. I remember I at one point had expanded enough menus that it covered the entirety of the screen. Never before have I felt so lost in a cloud product.

Amazon: here's two buttons, some check boxes and a random popup.

MSFT : Hold my beer...

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#440

Post by foresterre »

xmcp123 wrote: post #378
bob1029 wrote: post #362

For some reason an Azure outage does not faze me in the same way that an AWS outage does. I have never had much confidence in Azure as a cloud provider. The vertical integration of all the things for a Microsoft shop was initially very compelling. I was ready to fight that battle. But, this fantasy was quickly ruined by poor execution on Microsoft's part. They were able to convince me to move back to AWS by simply ma…

Many years back was the first time I used Azure, evaluating it for a client. I remember I at one point had expanded enough menus that it covered the entirety of the screen. Never before have I felt so lost in a cloud product.

AWS' UI is similarly messy, and to this day. They regularly remove useful data from the UI, or change stuff like the default sort order of database snapshots from last created to initial instance created date.

I never understood why a clear and consistent UI and improved UX isn't more of a priority for the big three cloud providers. Even though you talk mostly via platform SDK's, I would consider better UI especially initially, a good way to bind new customers and pick your platform over others.

I guess with their bottom line they don't need it (or cynically, you don't want to learn and invest in another cloud if you did it once).

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