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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

#391

Post by breppp »

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…

That's true for Azure, where contracts are signed due to free credits given over Office and Windows usage.

However, there is a reason why everyone uses Office and Windows. Office is the only suite that has the complete feature set (Ask any accountant to move to Google Sheets). Windows is the only system that can effectively run on any hardware (PnP) and have been that way for decades.

This is due to superior software on the aspects that matter to customers

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

#392

Post by p_ing »

plantain wrote: post #76

I just do not understand how Azure has the scale it does. You only need to login and click around for a bit to see this is not a coherent system designed by competent people. Let alone try and actually build something on it. Who are the customers? Who is buying this shit?

If you put me in front of AWS I'd have the same reaction. Or GCP for that matter, where I did have your reaction.

It's familiarity and knowing how the beast operates. I know how to read the docs and understand the licensing.

Any one piece of software could be a pile of shit with a terrible UX, but you're going to find those who are so familiar with it that everything else looks alien.

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

#393

Post by [deleted] »

maxwg wrote: post #108
pRusya wrote: post #3

It's a nice read. Thank you for sharing this. > Microsoft, meanwhile, conducted major layoffs—approximately 15,000 roles across waves in May and July 2025 —most likely to compensate for the immediate losses to CoreWeave ahead of the next earnings calls. This is what people should know when seeing massive layoffs due to AI.

I honestly thought this was one of the weaker points of the article. The OpenAI deal almost certainly related purely to GPU capacity, which had little to do with the article. The layoffs would have happened regardless. IMO - churn, and generalization is the root cause. Engineers are thrown on projects for a year with little prior experience, leave others to pickup the pieces, etc. There's no longer a sense of ownersh…

[deleted]

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

#394

Post by zjaffee »

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…

This is in many ways a smart way to understand the problem, but it doesn't mean that microsoft contracts mean you're stuck with bad software. There are several verticals where Microsoft and Azure actually were smart and chose a better software product to sell on their platform than what they had in house.

One example is when they stopped trying to develop a inferior product to EMR and Dataproc, and essentially just outsourced the whole effort to a deal made between them and Databricks. Because of this I assume many enterprise azure customers have better running data solutions in that space than they wouldve had they gone with just AWS or GCP.

On the other hand, having worked for Microsoft on an Azure team, there are plenty of areas that critically need a rewrite (for dozens of different reasons), and such a solution is never found (or they just release some different product and tell those with different needs to migrate to that), where they keep on building what can only really be described as hot-fixes to meet urgent customer demands that make it harder to eventually do said critical rewrite.

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

#395

Post by Terretta »

momo_dev wrote: post #265

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

Hate to break it to ya, you picked an emerging hyperscaler:

https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/cloudflare-has-the-edge-in-h...

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

#396

Post by Joel_Mckay »

delusional wrote: post #263
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are often retention problems with lean budgets, and after training staff they often do just leave for a more lucrative position.

Loyalty will often not be rewarded, as most have seen companies purge decade long senior staff a year before going public.

It is very easy to become cynical about the mythology of silicon valley. =3

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

#397

Post by mif »

I’m not an expert and surprised by the extent of Azure’s technical debt and its consequences. What would be a “minimal” reproducible configuration or setup of services that shows those technical deficiencies in the clearest way? A “benchmark for cloud computing services”, for a lack of a better description.

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

#398

Post by snarfy »

throwawayslop12 wrote: post #105

Power Platform is of the same quality, I’d avoid it if possible. I was a principal engineer in the Power Platform org and it always felt like a disorganized mess. Multiple reorganizations per year, changing priorities and service ownership.

Nothing has changed.

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

#399

Post by Balinares »

pjmlp wrote: post #349
hunterpayne wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Azure customers are companies that still, in 2026 only use Windows. Anyone else uses something else. Turns out, companies like that don't tend to have the best engineering teams. So moving an entire cloud infrastructure from Azure to say AWS, probably is either really expensive, really risky or too disruptive to do for the type of engineering team that Azure customers have. I would expect MS to bleed from thi…

Turns out outside companies shipping software products aspiring to be the next Google or Apple, most companies that work outside software industry also need software to run their business and they couldn't care less about HN technology cool factor. They use whatever they can to ship their products into trucks, outsourcing their IT and development costs , and that is about it.

Agreed, though only up to a point. Companies that need software to run their business, need that software to run.

When your operations are constantly hampered by Azure outages, and your competitors' are not, you're not going to last if your market is at all competitive. Thankfully for many companies, a lot of markets aren't, I suppose, at least for the actors who have established a successful rent and no longer need to care how their business operations are going.

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

#400

Post by torginus »

Personally, when asking others about their opinions on various cloud providers, AWS tends to emerge head and shoulders above the rest for one simple reason - AWS works.

And the reason AWS works is that AWS runs on AWS (in stark contrast to Azure and GCP which afaik is not what MS and Google use internally). And when AWS doesn't work, support is there to help you.

To add nuance to this statement, the other providers have their own strengths and standout features, but if you have to approach every single one of their features with suspicion that means you wont build stuff on top of them.

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