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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

#441

Post by nijave »

torginus wrote: post #400

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 h…

I've also noticed AWS tends to have less "magic" global services and tends to favor cell architecture with partitions and isolation.

These super duper magic global services seem to be the cause of most outages since the blast radius is so huge.

On the other hand, the proposition of a magic, infinitely scaleable service endpoint is nice from a developer perspective.

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

#442

Post by Anon1096 »

com2kid wrote: post #192
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…

> 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 is hardly notable for anyone actually working on the foundational infra. Before the days of title inflation across the industry, a a Principal at Microsoft wa…

One of Microsoft's problems is their pay is significantly lower than FAANG and so you very very rarely see people with expertise in the same verticals jump to Azure. I get that "the deal" at Microsoft is lower pressure for lower pay but it really hinders the talent pipeline. There are some good home grown principals and seniors, but even then I think the people I worked with would have done well to jump around and get a stint at another cloud provider to see what it's like. Many of them started as new grads and their whole career was just at Azure.

Meanwhile when I was at another company we would get a weekly new hire post with very high pedigree from other FAANGs. And with that we got a lot of industry leading ideas by osmosis that you don't see Azure getting.

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

#443

Post by nijave »

mrsmrtss wrote: post #389

I see that it's fashionable to bash everything MS related in HN, but let's not pretend that the other major cloud providers don't have their own problems (e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f77... or https://blog.barrack.ai/google-gemini-api-key-vulnerability/ ). We have had a couple of critical services hosted on Azure over ten years already, call me lucky, but we haven't had any major inc…

Their VMs and load balancers mostly work. Their managed services are a crapshoot. We routinely "self hosted" at the company that used Azure to ensure some semblance of stability.

For instance, our Patroni clusters were much more performant and stable than Azure Single Server Postgres (what a terrible product...).

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

#444

Post by zdragnar »

jiggawatts wrote: post #440
zdragnar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the few reliable barometers of an organisation (or their products) is the wtf/day exclaimed by new hires. Eh, I don't think this is exactly as reliable as you'd expect. My previous job had a fairly straight forward code base but had fairly poor reliability for the few customers we had, and the WTF portions usually weren't the ones that caused downtime. On the other hand, I'm currently working on a legacy sys…

The rapid decay of WTF/day over time applies to both new employees and new customers. > currently working on a legacy system "Legacy" is the magic word here! Those customers are pissed , trust me, but they've long ago given up trying to do anything about it. That's why you don't hear about it. Not because there are no bugs, but because nobody can be bothered to submit bug reports after learning long ago that doing so…

The customers aren't pissed, we're doing demos to new departments and lining up customizations and expansion as quickly as we can. We're growing faster than ever within our largest customer.

I also didn't say there are no bugs or complaints, I said the system is more stable. But yes, there are fewer bugs and complaints, especially on the critical features.

I didn't use the word legacy to mean abandoned, just that it's been around a long time, we're maintaining it while also building newer features in newer tech, as opposed to my previous company which was a green field startup.

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

#445

Post by gilrain »

steve1977 wrote: post #433
breppp wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The selling point of Excel is not the feature set, it's that people know Excel and are usually very resistant to learning something new.

As someone who’s compared spreadsheet feature sets, though: it’s also very much the feature set.

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

#446

Post by nijave »

jamwhite wrote: post #139

This read was a blast from the past. I'm not going to comment on much from OP and instead give a little of my experience there. Straight out of college in 2017 I joined the Compute Fabric Controller (FC) org as a SWE on an absolutely wonderful team that dealt with mostly container management, VM and Host fault handling & repair policies, and Fabric to Host communication with most of our code in the FC. I drove our te…

>There was high turnover

This is a huge knowledge drain. You're constantly spending time getting new engineers up to speed and it takes years to relearn all the nuances the last person knew.

You're in a constant cycle of re-learning the hard way instead of proactively applying experience.

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

#447

Post by kangraemin »

"Risk aversion preventing fixes" is the most accurate part. I've seen this at other large companies too. You have a known bug, you know exactly how to fix it, but nobody will approve the change because "what if it breaks something else." So the bug stays forever and everyone just works around it. The irony is that the workarounds eventually cause more breakage than the fix ever would have.

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

#448

Post by nijave »

thelastgallon wrote: post #106

> That entire 122-strong org was knee-deep in impossible ruminations involving porting Windows to Linux to support their existing VM management agents. > My day-one problem was therefore not to ramp up on new technology, but rather to convince an entire org, up to my skip-skip-level, that they were on a death march. > I later researched this further and found that no one at Microsoft, not a single soul, could articul…

Can almost guarantee there were 173 agents because there were 173 silo'd teams with competing goals and priorities working on their own codebases in isolation.

And no, a 174th team doesn't solve it. Communication and collaboration across teams is key

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

#449

Post by nijave »

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?

Google and especially Amazon/AWS compete with a lot of large companies which drive them towards Oracle, IBM and Microsoft as escape hatches.

For instance, Walmart doesn't want to pay their largest competitor.

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

#450

Post by stego-tech »

pjc50 wrote: post #428
stego-tech wrote: post #423

I knew Microsoft was incredibly dysfunctional (you have to understand this if you're supporting their suite and want to succeed), but damn , I'm floored by the incompetence reported on from juniors to the Board and seemingly every step of leadership in between. Yet I'm also not surprised, because I keep encountering it in non-Microsoft orgs. The current crop of leadership in general seems to be so myopically focused…

> Maybe what's needed is for Microsoft (or any of the legion of similarly dysfunctional enterprises out there) to genuinely fail in a non-recoverable way so as to shock the wider industry/economy into taking serious action on corporate misgovernance. The naive model of capitalism says that the benefit of market competition is that it's possible for failing companies to get out-competed by non-failing ones. In practic…

That's what I've been trying to impart on folks for a decade, now. The lack of regulations has let apex predators capture the environment, and short of an environmental collapse (as in, the sudden and permanent destruction of compute in general that makes their business unrecoverable), the only solution is hunting the hunters - i.e., government regulations, monopoly breakups, market penalties, etc.

There is no feasible way for someone to out-compete Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Oracle. None. They have to fail in some capacity to a significant, global-economy-harming degree to even provide an opening to competition in the marketplace. Even if AI turned out to be a huge nothingburger tomorrow, they'd still be unassailable.

That is the problem.

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