Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by blizdiddy » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #70

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Emergency notifications are done the same way! Its communism to fucking build it, so let’s have a team of a few engineers make an API to control government infrastructure from incompetent contractors on AWS, offer no real means of testing, breaking changes, downtime… and folks wonder why Hawaii is told bombs are coming

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

#92

Post by TYPE_FASTER » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #65

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 m…

> You just have to stick with it for a few years.

Also see: SharePoint

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

#93

Post by genthree » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

alexpotato wrote: post #39

hedora wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, except with Minecraft and XBox One. I don’t understand how they have non-zero market share.

For Minecraft they inherited a gigantic userbase from Mojang and then made it 10x harder to add new users.

I did it for my kids to have accounts and I do not understand how anyone who hasn't built a Gentoo from Stage 1 has a prayer of managing to buy Minecraft Java Edition for their kid, and making it actually work.

Then you've got the hell of overlapping permissions systems on the console and the Microsoft account, to get any amount of online play working on a console if you also get Bedrock. On the Playstation, especially, the error messages also love to not tell you which of the two systems is blocking you, so you get to guess. And Microsoft's site for managing those permissions is so confusingly-laid-out that even after doing it three times in a row I still felt lost on it.

I never did solve the problem of getting Minecraft Java Edition to run on a kid's MacBook with allowlist-only Web access. It wants to contact ten or so apparently-randomly-selected-from-an-enormous-pool IP addresses on every launch. I never did find documentation of which IP blocks I needed to allow, and couldn't guess at it from the IPs themselves. If they'd just used domain names... I must have manually hit "allow" a bunch of times during twenty separate launches, and it was still presenting me the same number of prompts every time, because there was no overlap in the IPs contacted (adding insult to injury is that I'm sure all but at-most two of these were spyware horse-shit that had no actual generously-necessary role in running the software, but it'd fail if it couldn't reach them)

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

#94

Post by snapetom » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #65

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 m…

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."

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

#95

Post by pram » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

anonymsft318 wrote: post #87

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…

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…

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

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

#96

Post by gffrd » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

A pile of shit you have leverage over is better than a pile of diamonds you don’t.

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

#97

Post by john_strinlai » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

pram wrote: post #95

anonymsft318 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#98

Post by pluc » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

DrewADesign wrote: post #79

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…

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

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

#99

Post by cj » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

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 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.

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

#100

Post by bigbuppo » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

snapetom wrote: post #94

markus_zhang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

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 frustratio…

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.