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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

#511

Post by markus_zhang »

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…

I’d say, they are very good at making platforms and grab everyone lock-in. But they need a good platform first. Azure seems like the first platform that is kinda shitty from the beginning and did not improve much.

MBASIC was good and filled a void so it got used widely from the beginning. The language is their first platform. Later the developer tools like the IDE, compilers, still pretty solid if you ask me.

MS-DOS and Windows are their next platform. It started OK with DOS — because CP/M was not great either. But the stability of Windows sucked so they brought in David Cutler’s team to make NT. It definitely grabbed the home/office market but didn’t do well for the server market.

X-BOX is their third platform, which started very well but we all know the story now.

Azure is their fourth platform, started shitty and still not good. The other platforms have high vintage points but Azure may not have one.

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

#512

Post by pjmlp »

markus_zhang wrote: post #503
bayindirh wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However the big issue with opt-in tooling is exactly it being optional, That's true, and that's a problem. > and apparently Microsoft doesn't enforce it internally as much as we thought . but this, in my eyes, is a much bigger problem. It's baffling considering what Microsoft does as their core business. Operating systems high impact software. > Visual Studio has had quite some tooling similar to it, and you can ha…

I think the core business of MSFT has always been — building a platform, grab everyone in and seek rent. Bill figured out from 1975 so it has been super successful. OS was that platform but in Azure it is just the lowest layer, so maybe management just doesn’t see it, as long as the platform works and government contracts keep coming in. Then you have a bunch of yes-man engineers (I’m so surprised that any principle…

One reason why Windows is a mess, is that Satya sees Azure as actually Azure OS, Windows version of OS/360.

Ideally everyone would be using it via services hosted there, with the browser or mobile devices as thin clients.

Just two months ago,

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2026/02/26/annou...

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

#513

Post by staticassertion »

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?

Depending on the space you work in, you have almost no choice at all. If you're building for government then you're going to use Microsoft, almost "end of story".

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

#514

Post by staticassertion »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #324
doctorpangloss wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the service is so shitty, why are people paying so much fucking money for it? is microsoft committing an accounting fraud?

Because the alternatives are also in similar state. AWS or GCP are all pretty crap. You use any of them, any you'll hit just enough rough edges. The whole industry is just grinding out slop, quality is not important anywhere. I work with AWS on a daily basis, and I'm not really impressed. (Also nor did GCP impress me on the short encounter I had with it)

This isn't it at all. AWS does not have the same sorts of insane cross-tenancy exploits that Azure has had, for example.

The reason that Azure has so many customers is very simply because Azure is borderline mandated by the US government.

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

#515

Post by coredog64 »

hikarudo wrote: post #306
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 this stage, the only escape is to first cover everything with tests and then meticulously fix bugs The exact same approach is recommended in the book "Working effectively with legacy code" by Michael Feathers, with several techniques on how to do it. He describes legacy code as 'code with no tests'.

"Show me the incentives, and I will show you the outcomes" - Charlie Munger

I once worked in a shop where we had high and inflexible test coverage requirements. Developers eventually figured out that you could run a bunch of random scenarios and then `assert true` in the finally clause of the exception handler. Eventually you'd be guaranteed to cover enough to get by that gate.

Pushing back on that practice led to a management fight about feature velocity and externally publicized deadlines.

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

#516

Post by functional_dev »

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?

this made me look into how cloud hypervisors actually work on HW level.. they all offload it to custom HW (smart nic, fpga, dpu, etc..). cpu does almost nothing except for tenant work. AWS -> Nitro, Azure -> FPGA, NVIDIA sells DPUs.

Here is interactive visual guide if anyone wants to explore - https://vectree.io/c/cloud-virtualization-hardware-nitro-cat...

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

#517

Post by coredog64 »

doubled112 wrote: post #158
macNchz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve created a bunch of fresh Azure accounts over the past few years and each time I’ve found myself sitting there dumbfounded anew at how garbage the experience is. There has been weird broken jank at just about every step of the process at one point or another. Like, I’m a serious person trying to set something up for a production workload, and multiple times along the way to just having a working account that I ca…

I've joked that on some services, when you're clicking buttons, you're actually opening tickets that a human needs to action. That scenario is an example. You complete an action on a web page and nothing works. You make no further changes and hours later it works perfectly. Your human wasn't fast enough that day.

Infrastructure-as-a-ServiceNow Ticket

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

#518

Post by haddr »

zjaffee wrote: post #394
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 o…

About a year ago the whole situation changed and Microsoft started to push everyone to their own Data Engineering solution (Fabric) that back then was really half-baked.

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

#519

Post by luke5441 »

axelriet wrote: post #356
luke5441 wrote: post #338

On a leadership level it seems problematic that they ghosted the feedback. Direcly this leads to people like Axel who feel ownership of the problem to break NDAs and create company harming posts. In my experience they at least respond with corp speak platitudes meaning that they got the feedback and don't understand it or ignore it, but have been taught to always ask for feedback and answer it (but incentives are to…

To be honest, I don’t think this is “company harming”—what would be harming is Azure being pwned if they didn’t know and did nothing, or failing SLA at the wrong time. Now they know.

The ultimate goal is to make customers spend money on Azure. Of course the information you published may make customers less likely to choose Azure, harming Microsoft.

Being pwned can be explained away as an attacker having spent a lot of ressources to do so. Failing SLAs can be a calculated gamble.

I myself am grateful you published this! It gives a great inside view on what is going on in big tech in general and Microsoft specifically.

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

#520

Post by markus_zhang »

com2kid wrote: post #190
vintagedave wrote: post #9

What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a whistleblower or an ex employee with a grudge? The appearance is the first. Is it? They’ve put their name to some clear and worrying statements. > On January 7, 2025… I sent a more concise executive summary to the CEO. … When those communications produced no acknowledgment, I took the customa…

> What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. I left Microsoft in 2014. Already back then I could see this sort of stuff starting to happen. The Office Org was mostly immune from it because they had a lot of lifers, people who had been working on the same code for decades and who thought through changes slowly. But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers wh…

“One team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.”

Jesus, you have tons of people who are willing to do that, even now. Microsoft just don’t care to hire from non-target schools, or ordinary professionals and train them —- sure the reason is, people believe that you cannot improve mediocrity, which I don’t believe so.

On a completely different page, most of the generals and advisors and high level bureaucrats of the first Emperor of the Han dynasty came from exactly one county — the county of Pei. But in peaceful time they are just “ordinary people”.

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