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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

#271

Post by truekonrads »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #216
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.

These days, at work, I need to support applications build on Azure and Power Platform. Both are a hot mess. We get notifications that our APIM is down for at least 15min every weeks at random times. Power Platform is just a "preview" mess, things break and are not functional. I complained about it and basically was told to shut up, the industry is using them, so they must be right. No one is testing anything anymore.

What were the issues behind "APIM down"?

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

#272

Post by hrmtst93837 »

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…

[flagged]

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

#273

Post by petterroea »

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.

Most customers don't really have the knowledge needed to make choices based on technical merits, and that's why the market works as it does. I'm willing to say 95% of people on HN have this knowledge and are therefore biased to assume others are the same way. It's classic XKCD 2501.

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

#274

Post by rk06 »

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…

once you reach the stage, the only escape is to give up on it. and move on.

somethings are beyond your control and capabilities

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

#276

Post by slyall »

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…

Where I live (New Zealand) Microsoft is a much larger percentage of IT infrastructure than say Bay Areas startups.

Companies are already used to working with Microsoft. Building on Microsoft's cloud feels natural.

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

#277

Post by Hikikomori »

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…

Chugging along? Very clear you're not a customer using Azure.

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

#278

Post by hunterpayne »

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?

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 this slowly for a long time until they actually fix it. I seriously doubt they ever will but stranger things have happened.

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

#279

Post by Tarq0n »

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…

A lot of enterprise orgs are completely helpless without Microsofts' identity solutions. That's what makes it easy to just adopt more and more Microsoft products.

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

#280

Post by mememememememo »

Manouchehri wrote: post #96

I've seen Azure OpenAI leak other customer's prompt responses to us under heavy load. https://x.com/DaveManouchehri/status/2037001748489949388 Nobody seems to care.

Should be a high severity incident if data isoation has failed anywhere. And that is for SaaS let alone cloud provider.
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