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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

#51

Post by netruk44 »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
axelriet wrote: post #2

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

Why do you speak about yourself in the third person? Also, after this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341022 You continued to work at Microsoft and now there is this takedown? I'm no friend of MS (to put it very mildly) but it seems to me your story is a bit inconsistent as well as the 7 year break between postings.

> Why do you speak about yourself in the third person?

When you submit a link to HN, there is an entry field for text in addition to the url.

It does not really describe what the text is used for. For links, the content of that field is simply added as the first comment.

Someone who is unfamiliar with the submission process may assume this field should describe what they are submitting, and not format it like a comment.

Then that text gets posted as the first comment and tons of people downvote it, jumping to the conclusion that the weird summary comment is from an AI, and not the submitter describing their own submission.

(I also assumed these comments were AI until someone else pointed this out)

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

#52

Post by SeriousM »

ragall wrote: post #42
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 The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is constantly out of date or wrong.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.

Interesting! We're using AKS with huge success so far, but lately our Pods are unresponsive and we get 503 Gateway Timeouts that we really can't trace down. And don't get me started on Azure Blob Tables...

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

#53

Post by everdrive »

ryoshu wrote: post #47
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.

I imagine that no one likes Azure.

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

#54

Post by rybosome »

ninininino wrote: post #28
axelriet wrote: 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)?

As a former GCP engineer, no, the systems are not generally unstable or insecure.

There is definitely manual access of data - it requires what was termed “break glass” similar to the JIT mechanism described by the author. However, it wasn’t quite so loose; there were eventually a lot of restrictions on who could approve what, what access you got after approval, and how that was audited.

It was difficult to get into the highest sensitivity data; humans reviewed your request and would reject it without a clear reason. And you could be 100% sure humans would review your session afterwards to look for bad behavior.

I once had to compile a large list of IP addresses that accessed a particular piece of data to fulfill a court order. It took me days of effort to get and maintain the elevated access necessary to do this.

I have a lot of respect for GCP as an engineering artifact, but a significantly less rosy opinion of GCP as an organization and bureaucratic entity. The amount of wasted effort expended on engaging with and navigating the bureaucracy is truly mind-boggling, and is the reason why a tiny feature that took a day to code could take months to release.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by ragall »

SeriousM wrote: post #52
ragall wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting! We're using AKS with huge success so far, but lately our Pods are unresponsive and we get 503 Gateway Timeouts that we really can't trace down. And don't get me started on Azure Blob Tables...

In our case this was only a month ago, and now we're stuck because management thought it was a good idea to sign a hefty spend commitment.

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

#57

Post by bumblehean »

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…

>Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience?

IME, yes.

I'm currently working as an SRE supporting a large environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP. In terms of issues or incidents we deal with that are directly caused by cloud provider problems, I'd estimate that 80-90% come from Azure. And we're _really_ not doing anything that complicated in terms of cloud infrastructure; just VMs, load balancers, some blob storage, some k8s clusters.

Stuff on Azure just breaks constantly, and when it does break it's very obvious that Azure:

1. Does not know when they're having problems (it can take weeks/months for Azure to admit they had an outage that impacted us)

2. Does not know why they had problems (RCAs we're given are basically just "something broke")

3. Does not care that they had problems

Everyone I work with who interacts with Azure at all absolutely loathes it.

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

#58

Post by _pdp_ »

The personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator.

The second thing is that this series of blog posts (whether true or not, but still believable) provides a good introduction to vibe coders. These are people who have not written a single line of code themselves and have not worked on any system at scale, yet believe that coding is somehow magically "solved" due to LLMs.

Writing the actual code itself (fully or partially) maybe yes. But understanding the complexity of the system and working with organisational structures that support it is a completely different ball game.

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

#59

Post by Forgeties79 »

everdrive wrote: post #53
ryoshu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I imagine that no one likes Azure.

The only good thing Microsoft azure ever did for me was provide a very easy way to exploit their free trial program in the early 2010s to crypto mine for free. It couldn’t do much, but it was straight up free real estate for CPU mining. $200 or 2 weeks per credit/debit card.

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

#60

Post by arccy »

from part 2:

> Worse, early prototypes already pulled in nearly a thousand third-party Rust crates, many of which were transitive dependencies and largely unvetted, posing potential supply-chain risks.

Rust really going for the node ecosystem's crown in package number bloat

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