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

Post by andyg_blog » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 10:48 AM UTC

chris_money202 wrote: post #362

bumblehean wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience? IME, yes. I'm currently working as an SRE supporting a large environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP. In terms of issues or incidents we deal with that are directly caused by cloud provider problems, I'd estimate that 80-90% come from Azure. And we're _really_ not doing anything t…

But doesn’t this experience contradict what OP is saying in a way. If azure is always breaking wouldn’t that imply that changes like “adding smart pointers” are being introduced into the codebase?

Post by hypeatei » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

kbrkbr wrote: post #365

yoyohello13 wrote: post #27

I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every day this would explain so much. The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held together. The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is constantly out of date or wrong. They offer such a huge volume of services it's nearly impossible to figure out what service you actually want/need without consultants, and when you finally get t…

Oh my goodness, yes. And how often their role assumption does not work! I need privileges to do thing A, so I assume the role, and even though the role is shown as active, the buttons are still greyed out. Sometimes it works after 10 minutes and 7x F5, most often however I do a complete relogin with MFA in an incognito window. Not distracting at all, and even that does not work sometimes.

Post by flohofwoe » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

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.

Post by axelriet » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 10:58 AM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #25

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

Scary is the understatement of the day. I can't imagine the environment where someone think that architecture is a good idea.

Post by tgv » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

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…