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Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

propublica.org

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Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#61

Post by bmurphy1976 »

everdrive wrote: post #51

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…

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.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#62

Post by andychase »

chii wrote: post #17
jbombadil wrote: post #5

> [...]And because federal agencies were allowed to deploy the product during the review, GCC High spread across the government as well as the defense industry. By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used acro…

It's why these enterprise vendors want foot in the door at all costs. They know that if they get entrenched first, it's impossible to migrate away. That's basically free money from a customer that has zero cost ceiling.

That's false that Government agencies have 0 cost ceiling. Maybe DoD does, but most offices have extremely tight budgets.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#64

Post by b0rgedhuman »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #20
debarshri wrote: post #13

Recently tried using Entra ID. There are 12 ways to enforce MFA, 20 days ways to disable users, 4 ways to authenticate users, Add conditional access stuff with 50 variables and templates etc. You can customize the way you want. After configuring it, my colleagues could not log in. Thats one way to secure your organization.

That’s Microsoft. 1000s of features and none of them really work the way they are supposed to.

[dead]

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#65

Post by markus_zhang »

everdrive wrote: post #51

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…

> 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.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#67

Post by klooney »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #61
everdrive wrote: post #51

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…

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.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#68

Post by andy_ppp »

everdrive wrote: post #51

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…

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.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#70

Post by mrguyorama »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #19
gertrunde wrote: post #16

It's not very clear from the article, but I get the feeling from the context that the 'pile of shit' quote referenced the package of documentation about the service rather than the service itself. (That seems to be the main complaint, that Microsoft never provided the clear information required to conduct the assessment properly).

Wait- so they basically threw up their hands? No documentation! Not evaluable? Thus clearly of value for somebody? Big stamp, job well done! NEXT?

Yes. US bureaucracy regularly gets told "You have to have " but because it's against a lot of people's ideology, they aren't allowed to build it internally or develop any sort of actual expertise for such a thing, so their only choice is to buy whatever is offered no matter how bad it is.

For example, our state government says "We will do X Y and Z which all require data science expertise, but we did not approve the $60k a year Data Science position, so instead we are forced to hire a Data Science contractor for $120k a year, and they can't really be fired, and they are terrible at their job"

And then people wonder why things suck all the time.

A lot of state's buy their Obamacare marketplace service from a company I am familiar with. That company is entirely incompetent. They cannot follow basic instructions. They cannot triage a bug at all. They do not read freaking tickets. They take weeks to respond to an issue. They cause bugs regularly in ways that imply they don't have functional source control. They continually fuck up basic feature requests. They change the service in ways that contravene the literal law. The law that was comprehensively explained to them by people I know.

But they can't be fired, because the state is legally compelled to provide this service, and is not really allowed to hire a few engineers to build it in house. They could go to a different software contractor, but all the options are just as bad because it's an entirely captured market.

Obama started a "Digital Services" group in the federal government to actually build systems internally and develop expertise to mitigate some of this, and they built stuff like tax filing solutions for free for Americans. So Trump killed it and hollowed out it's corpse for DOGE.

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