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Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

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Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#21
I had the misfortune of having to use Azure back in 2018 and was appalled at the lack of quality, slowness. I was in GitHub forums, helping other customers suffering from lack of basic functionality, incredible prices with abysmal performance. This article explains a lot honestly.

Google’s Cloud feels like the best engineered one, though lack of proper human support is worrying there compared to AWS.

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#22

What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a whistleblower or an ex employee with a grudge? The appearance is the first. Is it? They’ve put their name to some clear and worrying statements. > On January 7, 2025… I sent a more concise executive summary to the CEO. … When those communications produced no acknowledgment, I took the customa…

He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference?

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#23

What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a whistleblower or an ex employee with a grudge? The appearance is the first. Is it? They’ve put their name to some clear and worrying statements. > On January 7, 2025… I sent a more concise executive summary to the CEO. … When those communications produced no acknowledgment, I took the customa…

Azure is when you have a different version of the same product/api in each region.

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#24
The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with a grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is trying to be made, if there is any.

From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly Sev2 is hardly notable for anyone actually working on the foundational infra. There are certainly problems in Azure, but it's huge and rough edges are to be expected. It mostly marches on. IMO maturity is realizing this and working within the system to improve it rather than trying to lay out all the dirty laundry to an Internet audience that will undoubtedly lap it up and happily cry Microslop.

Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks to national security and sending letters to the board, really? Azure is still chugging along apparently despite everything being mentioned. People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true.

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#25
post #5

> The direct corollary is that any successful compromise of the host can give an attacker access to the complete memory of every VM running on that node. Keeping the host secure is therefore critical. > In that context, hosting a web service that is directly reachable from any guest VM and running it on the secure host side created a significantly larger attack surface than I expected. That is quite scary

Scary is the understatement of the day. I can't imagine the environment where someone think that architecture is a good idea.

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#26
This reads pretty bad, and I believe it was. I worked on (and was at least partly responsible for) systems that do the same thing he described. It took constant force of will, fighting, escalation, etc to hold the line and maintain some basic level of stability and engineering practice.

And I've worked other places that had problems similar to the core problems described, not quite as severe, and not at the same scale, but bad enough to doom them (IMO) to a death loop they won't recover from.

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#27
I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every day this would explain so much.

The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held together. The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is constantly out of date or wrong. They offer such a huge volume of services it's nearly impossible to figure out what service you actually want/need without consultants, and when you finally get the services up who knows if they actually work as advertised.

I'm honestly shocked anything manages to stay working at all.

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#28
post #2

A former Azure Core engineer’s 6-part account of the technical and leadership decisions that eroded trust in Azure.

What's your assessment of AWS and GCP? Do you think it's likely they suffer from some of the same issues (eg the manual access of what should be highly secure, private systems, the instability, the lack of security)?

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#29

The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with a grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is trying to be made, if there is any. From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly Sev2 i…

He might sound like he has a grudge but you sound like you’re personally invested. Shill?

Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

#30

The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with a grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is trying to be made, if there is any. From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly Sev2 i…

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