451–460 of 697 posts
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...
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…
It's CYA. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, the old saying went. And it was true. Perhaps they should have, but they weren't. Nowadays, Oracle and MS have taken that position. They have the "share of mind," a PR concept that unfortunately succinctly expresses the problem. Someone proposes MS or Oracle, and everybody nods because they've heard about it. If that causes problems, other people will have to solve them…
I confess, I'm a little salty. It's just insane how widespread Azure is when there's no obvious reason to prefer it. Of course, having the whole market be dominated by 3 giant American companies (even in Europe) is annoying in its own right.
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.
The "no one at Microsoft, not a single soul, could articulate why up to 173 agents were needed to manage an Azure node" really stuck with me. You have to wonder how many other parts of the code lack ownership and are in there just because no one knows what will happen if you take them out.
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.
An example - if you scale things manually by provisioning and starting EC2 instances via API - it will be more performant and cheaper than either Lambda or ECS Fargate (or Batch...). But those things at least work reliably.
With the other two cloud providers, you'll likely run into a bug you cannot fix yourself, and you will have no support to help you.
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…
Windows is the only system that can effectively run on any hardware ...as long as that hardware is Intel-based (and a select few ARM-based boards nowaways). And the reason that it runs on all that hardware is because of Microsoft's business contracts with hardware vendors, not because of their software quality -- that's immaterial, as Microsoft generally does not write the drivers.
A lot of it is the fact that the OS has created a very complex yet consistent system of device compatibility that was completely absent from all competitors who are still behind on that aspect or alternatively the choice of kernel design architecture
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Language choices won't save you here. The problem is organizational paralysis. Someone sees that the platform is unstable. They demand something be done to improve stability. The next management layer above them demands they reduce the number of changes made to improve stability.
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…
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 hardware: it's because Windows has a stable kernel ABI and makes it very simple for hardware vendors to write proprietary drivers. Linux kind of forces everybody to upstream their device drivers, which is good and bad at the same time - DKMS is something relatively new.
But yeah, the NT kernel is very nice, the problem with Windows is the userland.
What Axel does by coming public with his named attached is remarkable. He gains a lot of respect in my book. Even if it is one sided and details are missing