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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

#41

Post by ohyoutravel »

bigbuppo wrote: post #13
vintagedave wrote: post #9

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…

The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in their obligations to the company, that's where you need to raise a stink so they can fix it.

Well, yeah, that’s what a board does, but I think the issue is whether it is customary to go to the board directly in this situation. The answer is a resounding NO. Very odd, but cool idea and approach.

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

#42

Post by ragall »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #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 The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is constantly out of date or wrong.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 t…

We migrated some services to AKS because the upper management thought it was a good deal to get so many credits, and now pods are randomly crashing and database nodes have random spikes in disk latency. What ran reliably on GCP became quite unpredictable.

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

#43

Post by lll-o-lll »

andrewstuart wrote: post #11

Any complex system - and these cloud systems must be immensely complex - accumulate cruft and bloat and bugs until the entire thing starts to look like an old hotel that hasn’t been renovated in 30 years.

It’s not inevitable. Absolutely this is true without significant effort, but if you’ve been around the traps for long enough (in enough organisations), you get to see that the level of quality can vary widely. Avoiding the mud-pit does require a whole org commitment, starting from senior leadership.

This story is more interesting, in my opinion, in how quickly things devolved and also how unwilling the more senior layers of the org were to address it. At a whole company level, the rot really sets in when you start to lose the key people that built and know the system. That seems to be what’s happening here, and it does not bode well for MS in the medium term.

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

#44

Post by convexly »

vintagedave wrote: post #9

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…

Large orgs make decisions that prioritize short-term metrics over long-term quality all the time and nobody tracks whether those tradeoffs actually paid off. The decision to ship fast and fix later sounds reasonable in a meeting setting until articles like this surface and the reality comes through clearly.

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

#45

Post by reddozen »

ludwigvan wrote: post #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.

GCP's support is abysmal. Our assigned customer support agent has changed 3 times in as many months. it's really a dice roll if our quota increase requests are even acknowledged or we can get clarification on undocumented system limitations.

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

#46

Post by chasd00 »

vintagedave wrote: post #9

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…

Yeah I thought that was extreme. An engineer going to the board of any corporation let alone Microsoft is not normal or customary IME. That could explain why they got no response.

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

#47

Post by ryoshu »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #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 t…

I’ve worked with their consultants and they were lovely. They hate Azure too.

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

#50

Post by abtinf »

Anon1096 wrote: post #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 i…

> risks to national security …really?

Really. Apparently the Secretary of War agrees with him.

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