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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

#601

Post by jrl »

mike_hearn wrote: post #354
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?

I worked at a startup that was using Azure. The reason was simple enough - it had been founded by finance people who were used to Excel, so Windows+Office was the non-negotiable first bit of IT they purchased. That created a sales channel Microsoft used to offer generous startup credits. The free money created a structural lack of discipline around spending. Once the startup credits ran out, the company became faced…

"Basic things like TCP connections between VMs would mysteriously hang"

This is like a car that can't even get you two blocks from home. Amazing.

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

#602

Post by philipallstar »

praptak wrote: post #228
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…

This isn't incentivized in corporate environment. Noticed how "the talent left after the launch" is mentioned in the article? Same problem. You don't get rewarded for cleaning up mess (despite lip service from management) nor for maintaining the product after the launch. Only big launches matter. The other corporate problem is that it takes time before the cleanup produces measurable benefits and you may as well get…

> This isn't incentivized in corporate environment.

Course it is. But only by the winners who reward the employees who do the valuable work. Microsoft has all sorts of stupid reasons why they have lots of customers - all basically proxies for their customers' IT staff being used to administrating Microsoft-based systems - but if they mess up the core reasons to use a cloud enough they will fail.

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

#603

Post by markus_zhang »

axelriet wrote: post #570
pjmlp wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was quite interesting and now I will take another point of view of the stuff I shared previously. However given how Windows team has been anti anything not C++, it is not surprising that it actually happened like that.

It came from the top of Azure and for Azure only. Specifically the mandate was for all new code that cannot use a GC i.e. no more new C or C++ specifically. I think the CTO was very public about that at RustCon and other places where he spoke. The examples he gave were contrived, though, mostly tiny bits of old GDI code rewritten in Rust as success stories to justify his mandate. Not convincing at all. Azure node sof…

May I ask, what kind of training does the new joins of the kernel team (or any team that effectively writes kernel level code) get? Especially if they haven't written kernel code professionally -- or do they ONLY hire people who has written non-trivial amount of kernel code?

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

#604

Post by nrds »

dh2022 wrote: post #152
nrds wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at both Microsoft and Google in the past 6 years and the notion that msft "Principal" is equivalent to goog L5 is crazy.

Meaning Msft Principal is below L5? I got the same feedback from one of my friends who works at Google. She said quality of former MSFT engineers now working at Google was noticeably lower.

I mean imputed prestige within the organization. Being an L5 is nothing; it's the promote-or-fire cutoff at Google AFAIK. But being a Principal is slightly more than nothing; it's two levels above the promote-or-fire cutoff.

I mean, _now_, sure, I'd assume Microsoft Principals should be hired around L4 at Google. But that's just due to a temporary inbalance in the decline of legacy organizations. Give it a few years and it will even back out and msft 64 will be in the middle of L5 range like levels.fyi claims.

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

#605

Post by markus_zhang »

axelriet wrote: post #384
egorfine wrote: post #321

> Cutler’s intent was to produce a system with the same level of quality, unshakable reliability, and attention to detail he was famous for in his work on VMS and NT. I'm not sure whether this is serious or irony.

Search VMS stability, I think the consensus is clear. Then Google VMS longest uptime, and the record is 28 years. VMS often achieved five nines over 10 years (99.999%) so no irony. He took a bunch of folks with him from DEC to Microsoft to make NT, and of course his principles. Nowadays NT is bomb-proof believe it or not. Most of the crashes are in device drivers and some rare times in the UI code (Win32k) that shoul…

I remember reading "Showstoppers" and David was quoted to say "If you break the build I'm the lawn mower and your ass is grass". Do you think such attitude is mandatory for good kernel level code?

(I actually think it does and argued with people on HN, although I never wrote any professional kernel code myself)

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

#606

Post by momo_dev »

Terretta wrote: post #395
momo_dev wrote: post #265

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...

i guess the difference is i chose my hyperscalers à la carte instead of getting the all-in-one bundle. at least when cloudflare breaks something i can still ssh into my linode and debug it directly

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

#607

Post by nimonian »

vintagedave wrote: post #327
axelriet wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I meant is that it’s customary to write to the Board through the Secretary as opposed to write directly or through some other channel.

Thanks for the direct reply! I wasn’t aware it was ever customary to write to a board. But I do see you have very clear concerns. One thing I don’t fully follow is: how did it get from such a nicely designed system, built by Dave Cutler, to this — simply moving fast and building tech debt?

Writing to the board is not customary. When you do so, it is customary to do it through the secretary.

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

#608

Post by carols10cents »

bob1029 wrote: post #385
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…

> first cover everything with tests Beware this goal. I'm dealing with the consequences of TDD taken way too far right now. Someone apparently had this same idea. > management who do not fully understand the problem nor are incentivized to understand it They are definitely incentivized to understand the problem. However the developers often take it upon themselves to deceive management. This happens to be their incen…

If you're writing the tests after writing the code, you're not doing TDD though.

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

#609

Post by grvdrm »

chasd00 wrote: post #550
grvdrm wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of this not as geographic but in terms of what’s sexy vs not. Low Demand = not

Right, like running a sanitation department for a city. Who wants to do that? No one, but it's pretty important and everyone will raise hell and almost riot when it's not working.

Totally. I’m in insurance. So much is unsexy but critical. And that’s where you see a lot of folks churning on core systems, process, etc that makes insurance actually work vs any headline tech/investment/AI stuff. Don’t get me wrong - wins there too. But 22 year old Harvard grads aren’t going for underwriting assistant jobs (to use an example)

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

#610

Post by gtowey »

phillipcarter wrote: post #546
gtowey wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. Every time I have failed to get the desired result, I have gone back to the drawing board to understand how I can change how I'm communicating to better convey meaning, urgency, and all that. After all that I've finally had an epiphany. They simply don't care. They don't care about quality, about efficiency, about security. They…

Yeah, uhh: > I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. That's because the skills weren't good enough.

So the takeaway isn't how good or bad I may be at communicating, it's that I was fundamentally speaking a language that was wholly orthogonal to the interests of leadership. No matter how good I became at making persuasive arguments about fixing technical debt and preventing outages, the management simply didn't care about those things. They say they they do, because it would sound insane to say otherwise, but they largely keep their goals and motivations clandestine.

Which for many engineers who got into this industry because they loved solving problems, it can be quite a shocking realization.

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