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

isolveproblems.substack.com

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

#61

Post by axelriet »

netruk44 wrote: post #51
jacquesm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comme…

Could not have said it better myself. Thanks.

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

#62

Post by axelriet »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #12
axelriet wrote: post #2

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

I downvoted this comment for sounding like a summarizing LLM, not adding anything substantial beyond the title of the post, before realizing you were the poster and author.

I didn’t know that “subtitle” would appear as first comment.

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

#64

Post by axelriet »

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.

The comment comes from the input field on the post form. Not clear it would show up as a comment. The old thread you refer to had little to do with Microsoft per se. Let me known if I can help with the inconsistencies you mention?

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

#65

Post by staticassertion »

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

Microsoft is the go to solution for every government agency, FEDRAMP / CMMC environments, etc.

> People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true.

This I'm more sympathetic to. I really don't think his approach of "here's what a rewrite would look like" was ever going to work and it makes me think that there's another side to this story. Thinking that the solution is a full reset is not necessarily wrong but it's a bit of a red flag.

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

#66

Post by jldugger »

nope1000 wrote: 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

Like, what did the OP expect?

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

#67

Post by kklisura »

staticassertion wrote: post #65
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 Microsoft is the go to solution for every government agency, FEDRAMP / CMMC environments, etc. > People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true. This I'm more sympathetic to. I really don't think his approach of "here's what a rewrite would look like" was ever going to work and it makes me think that there's an…

At no point during the reading I got sense that he's suggesting something radical. Where specifically is he pointing out rewrite?

"The practical strategy I suggested was incremental improvement... This strategy goes a long way toward modernizing a running system with minimal disruption and offers gradual, consistent improvements. It uses small, reliable components that can be easily tested separately and solidified before integration into the main platform at scale." [1]

[1] https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

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

#68

Post by yoyohello13 »

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.

Yeah no shade on the consultants. I’ve worked with some good ones too.

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

#69

Post by staticassertion »

kklisura wrote: post #67
staticassertion wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> risks to national security Microsoft is the go to solution for every government agency, FEDRAMP / CMMC environments, etc. > People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true. This I'm more sympathetic to. I really don't think his approach of "here's what a rewrite would look like" was ever going to work and it makes me think that there's an…

At no point during the reading I got sense that he's suggesting something radical. Where specifically is he pointing out rewrite? "The practical strategy I suggested was incremental improvement... This strategy goes a long way toward modernizing a running system with minimal disruption and offers gradual, consistent improvements. It uses small, reliable components that can be easily tested separately and solidified b…

> The current plans are likely to fail — history has proven that hunch correct — so I began creating new ones to rebuild the Azure node stack from first principles.

> A simple cross-platform component model to create portable modules that could be built for both Windows and Linux, and a new message bus communication system spanning the entire node, where agents could freely communicate across guest, host, and SoC boundaries, were the foundational elements of a new node platform

Yes, I read that part as well and found it a bit confusing to reconcile with this one.

The vibe from my quotes is very much "I had a simple from-scratch solution". They mention then slowly adopting it, but it's very hard to really assess this based on just the perspective of the author.

He also was making suggestions about significantly slowing down development and not pursuing major deals, which I think again is not necessarily wrong but was likely to fall on deaf ears.

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

#70

Post by vsgherzi »

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'm glad rust has good package management I really am. However given that aspect, it ends up forming a dependency heavy culture. In situations like this it's hard to use dependencies due to the amount of transitive dependencies some items pull in. I really which this would change. Of course this is a social problem so I don't expect a good answer to come of this....
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