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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

#351

Post by mike_hearn »

dbdr wrote: post #242
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…

> I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something. And that, my friends, is why you want a memory safe language with as many static guarantees as possible checked automatically by the compiler.

Hence the rewrite-it-in-Rust initiative, presumably. Management were aware of this problem at some level but chose a questionable solution. I don't think rewriting everything in Rust is at all compatible with their feature timelines or severe shortages of systems programming talent.

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

#352

Post by irusensei »

CalRobert wrote: post #200

What makes anyone start a new project and think “I know, I’ll use Azure!”? I really don’t get it. Do they have a great sales org? Is it because a phb thinks “well they made Office so it must be good”? I interviewed with a Dutch energy company migrating infra from AWS -to- Azure and I have no idea what would make them do that (aside from inertia, but then why use Azure in the first place?) And for some reason Azure us…

Companies coming from Active Directory and Office.

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

#353

Post by Aissen »

lmm wrote: post #261
dbdr wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why wouldn't it move the needle? Less time spent, less frustration, more performance, more resources focused on the business?

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

#354

Post by mike_hearn »

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?

I worked at a startup that was using Azure. The reason was simple enough - it had been founded by finance people who were used to Excel, so Windows+Office was the non-negotiable first bit of IT they purchased. That created a sales channel Microsoft used to offer generous startup credits. The free money created a structural lack of discipline around spending. Once the startup credits ran out, the company became faced with a huge bill and difficulty motivating people to conserve funds.

At the start I didn't have any strong opinion on what cloud provider to use. I did want to do IT the "old fashioned way" - rent a big ass bare metal or cloud VM, issue UNIX user accounts on it and let people do dev/test/ad hoc servers on that. Very easy to control spending that way, very easy to quickly see what's using the resources and impose limits, link programs to people, etc. I was overruled as obviously old fashioned and not getting with the cloud programme. They ended up bleeding a million dollars a month and the company wasn't even running a SaaS!

I ended up with a very low opinion of Azure. Basic things like TCP connections between VMs would mysteriously hang. We got MS to investigate, they made a token effort and basically just admitted defeat. I raged that this was absurd as working TCP is table stakes for literally any datacenter since the 1980s, but - sad to say - at this time Azure's bad behavior was enabled by a widespread culture of CV farming in which "enterprise" devs were all obsessed with getting cloud tech onto their LinkedIn. Any time we hit bugs or stupidities in the way Azure worked I was told the problem was clearly with the software I'd written, which couldn't be "cloud native", as if it was it'd obviously work fine in Azure!

With attitudes like that completely endemic outside of the tech sector, of course Microsoft learned not to prioritize quality.

We did eventually diversify a bit. We needed to benchmark our server software reliably and that was impossible in Azure because it was so overloaded and full of noisy neighbours, so we rented bare metal servers in OVH to do that. It worked OK.

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

#355

Post by pas »

schlauerfox wrote: post #6

"For fiscal 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned total pay of $96.5 million, up 22% from a year earlier." -CNBC.com and "I also see I have 2 instances of Outlook, and neither of those are working." -Artemis II astronaut

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jzhiqz7fb5dj6h7cydluryvn/po...

for anyone else who hasn't seen it

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

#356

Post by axelriet »

luke5441 wrote: post #338

On a leadership level it seems problematic that they ghosted the feedback. Direcly this leads to people like Axel who feel ownership of the problem to break NDAs and create company harming posts. In my experience they at least respond with corp speak platitudes meaning that they got the feedback and don't understand it or ignore it, but have been taught to always ask for feedback and answer it (but incentives are to…

To be honest, I don’t think this is “company harming”—what would be harming is Azure being pwned if they didn’t know and did nothing, or failing SLA at the wrong time. Now they know.

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

#357

Post by pjmlp »

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…

My lesson was when European companies followed US tech into offshoring, and how quality doesn't play any role as long as the software delivers, from business point of view.

Especially relevant when shipping software isn't the product the company sells.

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

#360

Post by p_l »

tux3 wrote: post #298
axelriet wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was waiting for that comment :) Remember that everybody, eventually, calls into code written in C.

If you're sufficiently stubborn, it's certainly possible to call directly into code written in Verilog, held together with inscrutable Perl incantations. High-level languages like C certainly have their place, but the space seems competitive these days. Who knows where the future will lead.

If you want something extra spicy, there are devices out there that implement CORBA in silicon (or at least FPGA), exposing a remote object accessible using CORBA
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