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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

#161

Post by outworlder »

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…

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

I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it.

Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all. They have the necessary contacts and consultants to make it happen.

> Thinking that the solution is a full reset is not necessarily wrong but it's a bit of a red flag.

The author does mention rewriting subsystem by subsystem while keeping the functionality intact, adding a proper messaging layer, until the remaining systems are just a shell of what they once were. That sounds reasonable.

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

#162

Post by esafak »

cebert wrote: post #80
cyanydeez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That outlook was part of the ablative outlook armor thats suppose to burn off on reentry

Do you have a source for that? I don’t see what impact consumer email software would have with the composition of the heat shield.

He's saying it's bulky junk that's best torched.

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

#163

Post by RajT88 »

beoberha wrote: post #131
bawolff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks to national security and sending letters to the board, really? That struck me too. Maybe i've never worked high enough in an org (im unclear how highly ranked the author of the piece is) but i've never been in an org where going over your boss's boss's boss's boss's head and writing a letter to the board was likely to go well. That said, i could easil…

[flagged]

It reminded me of this one:

https://wtfmitchel.medium.com/how-to-get-fired-from-microsof...

A lot of similarities, except the medium author was not part of PG but support. He also had recently suffered a brain injury.

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

#164

Post by axelriet »

beoberha wrote: post #131
bawolff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks to national security and sending letters to the board, really? That struck me too. Maybe i've never worked high enough in an org (im unclear how highly ranked the author of the piece is) but i've never been in an org where going over your boss's boss's boss's boss's head and writing a letter to the board was likely to go well. That said, i could easil…

[flagged]

Thanks for the free psychology assessment, I appreciate it, but I believe I’m fine. The series omits lots of details.

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

#165

Post by pjc50 »

doubled112 wrote: post #158
macNchz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve created a bunch of fresh Azure accounts over the past few years and each time I’ve found myself sitting there dumbfounded anew at how garbage the experience is. There has been weird broken jank at just about every step of the process at one point or another. Like, I’m a serious person trying to set something up for a production workload, and multiple times along the way to just having a working account that I ca…

I've joked that on some services, when you're clicking buttons, you're actually opening tickets that a human needs to action. That scenario is an example. You complete an action on a web page and nothing works. You make no further changes and hours later it works perfectly. Your human wasn't fast enough that day.

That's the "digital escort" process mentioned in the very long OP. Understandably, the US government got mad when they found out that cheap Chinese tech support staff were being used for direct intervention on "secure" VMs.

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

#166

Post by axelriet »

RajT88 wrote: post #163
beoberha wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It reminded me of this one: https://wtfmitchel.medium.com/how-to-get-fired-from-microsof... A lot of similarities, except the medium author was not part of PG but support. He also had recently suffered a brain injury.

Before or after publishing his article?

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

#167

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

FedRAMP means nothing. It’s a checkbox. National security stuff has a different standard.

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

#168

Post by jmogly »

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

It is kind of a fundamental risk of IMDS, the guest vms often need some metadata about themselves, the host has it. A hardened, network gapped service running host side is acceptable, possibly the best solution. I think the issue is if your IMDS is fat and vulnerable, which this article kind of alludes to.

There’s also the fact that azure’s implementation doesn’t require auth so it’s very vulnerable to SSRF

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

#169

Post by gtowey »

_pdp_ wrote: post #58

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 v…

I disagree.

I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. Every time I have failed to get the desired result, I have gone back to the drawing board to understand how I can change how I'm communicating to better convey meaning, urgency, and all that.

After all that I've finally had an epiphany. They simply don't care. They don't care about quality, about efficiency, about security. They don't care about their users, their employees, they don't care about the long term health of the company. None of it. Engineers who do care will burn out trying to "do their job" in the face of management that doesn't care.

It's getting worse in the tech industry. We've reached the stage where leaders are in it only for themselves. The company is just the vehicle. Calls for quality fall on deaf ears these days.

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

#170

Post by axelriet »

staticassertion wrote: post #69
kklisura wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bou…

Interesting point. The two stances are not contradictory. The end result is a new stack, so you are right saying that was the intent. However how you get there on a running system is through stepwise improvements based on componentization and gradual replacement until everything is new. Each new component clears more ground. I never imagined an A/B switch to a brand new system rewritten from scratch.
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