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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

#261

Post by lmm »

dbdr wrote: post #248
petterroea wrote: post #238

A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day: Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at compani…

But that also means that if you as a user/customer can make choices based on technical merits, you'll have a significant advantage.

An advantage how? Maybe you'll have one or two more 9s of uptime than your competitors; does that actually move the needle on your business?

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

#262

Post by h6d_100c »

dh2022 wrote: post #119
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

This is well documented: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/ins... Why would an Azure customer need to query this service at all? I was not aware this service even exists- because I never needed anything like it. AFAI can tell, this service tells services running on the VM what SKU the VM is. But how is this useful to the service? Any Azure users could tell how they use IMDS? Thanks!

What happens when someone asks an AI model to fuzz test that...

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

#263

Post by delusional »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #237
praptak wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't incentivized in corporate environment. Noticed how "the talent left after the launch" is mentioned in the article? Same problem. You don't get rewarded for cleaning up mess (despite lip service from management) nor for maintaining the product after the launch. Only big launches matter. The other corporate problem is that it takes time before the cleanup produces measurable benefits and you may as well get…

This is the root of the issue. For something like Azure, people are nor fungible. You need to retain them for decades, and carefully grow the team, training new members over a long period until they can take on serious responsibilities. But employees are rewarded for showing quick wins and changing jobs rapidly, and employers are rewarded for getting rid of high earners (i.e. senior, long-term employees).

> For something like Azure, people are nor fungible

What I've learned from a decade in the industry is that talent is never fungible in low-demand areas. It's surprisingly hard to find people that "get it" and produce something worthwhile together.

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

#264

Post by ozim »

locusofself wrote: post #211
pjc50 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to. And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be acce…

I would definitely fight against calling anything I work on „digital escort”.

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

#265

Post by momo_dev »

i run fastapi APIs on linode with cloudflare in front and honestly the simplicity is underrated. predictable billing, docs that match reality, no surprise platform regressions. for a straightforward API workload the hyperscaler tax doesn't make sense unless you genuinely need their scale

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

#266

Post by h6d_100c »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #121
chillfox wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being impressed with the Azure docs... until I spend a week implementing something, only to have it completely fail when deployed to the test environment because GraphAPI did not work as documented. The beautiful docs were a complete lie. These days I don't even bother looking at the docs when doing stuff with Azure.

I can’t count the number of times the docs have been totally wrong.

And they were actually like that pre-LLM, in 2019, when I was implementing stuff for a car company on azure. They spent _hundreds of thousands_ on cosmosDB, for less performance than a raspberry pi running Postgres.

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

#267

Post by tinco »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #133
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…

As a former MSFTy it does sound weird to me too. I didn’t see what Axels level was but a lot of people work for Microsoft and not many of them can expect to email the CEO and get a response. It seems a bit like a crash out, not the first I’ve seen levied at Azure, won’t be the last. They probably think it’s a mental health episode, if you’re an important CEO crazy people will email you all the time and the staff prob…

Never worked at a FAANG, but from what I read from their cultures I don't think a letter to the CEO from a senior engineer would go entirely unnoticed there. CEO's might receive crazy letters, but hopefully not regularly from their senior engineering staff..

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

#268

Post by rawgabbit »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #247
branko_d wrote: post #205

I think this is especially problematic (from Part 4 at https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... ): "The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something." Once you reach this stage, the only escape is to first…

if the service is so shitty, why are people paying so much fucking money for it? is microsoft committing an accounting fraud?

The US government’s experts called Azure “a pile of shit”; they got overruled.

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

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

#269

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]

Windows is ~500 times bigger than Azure, give or take, by machine count, and still many times larger by loc, modules, users, whatever else you want to measure. The heavy lifting (VM/containers, I/O, the things that cannot not be done just like that) is handled by the Windows folks anyway. The only hard part is the VM placement, everything else is mostly regular software engineering, some of medium-hard complexity but nothing that can excuse the need for constant human intervention.

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

#270

Post by axelriet »

0______0 wrote: post #253
beoberha wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Redacted to avoid getting doxxed (my original reply showed disdain for the parent comment and agreed with Axel's writing).

Former 1010 Overlake RnD here too :)
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