How Microsoft emerged from the darkness to embrace the cloud | Hacker News Reader

How Microsoft emerged from the darkness to embrace the cloud

seattletimes.com

77 pointsandytolt18 comments

Azure is actually a pretty good product.

Recently I was working on a side project and decided to use Azure for a change and I loved it's offerings.

That said, a few criticisms:

it's pretty buggy and it shows.

Furthermore, it's documentation at times is contradictory. (and it's sdks are all over the place - especially for nodeJS)

And all in all, it does not look like a mature product (many a times, I was working on fixing / catching issues with Azure rather than my project itself - something I'd not expect to have to do)

All that said, it's still a great product and in time, I hope they fix their stuff and work towards stability.

Yeah the SDKs outside of C# are supported by the services team. They are created by a separate team so you will run into issues where the node SDK won't have the latest features

> it's pretty buggy and it shows.

and the dashboard is sloooooow.

They used to have a pretty good dashboard, and then they figured out that they messed it up with the current one. It is so damn slow. Many times I wonder if the request went through or not.

There's a funny story about the dashboard when I worked at MS.

My team complained about the dashboard having issues and we were told that a new one was in works and to hold on tight. A year later, we see the new dashboard - everything go 2x complicated, 3x buggy and 2x slower.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've noticed the SDK and sample code problem as well. Things are moving so fast on the product teams that docs suffer.

EDIT: That being said, I work with Azure pretty extensively and it's great.

I find it pretty amazing how a huge, publicly traded company that was in the beginnings of a cultural death spiral (circa 2010) managed to pull itself together. I can't think of many examples of leadership abandoning the philosophy that led them to dominate the market (embrace, extend, and extinguish) in favor of something else (innovation, community engagement, participating in open-source movements).

The anthropology behind it could be valuable to many other companies, I think.

Indeed, they somehow managed to resolve the Innovator's Dilemma. As such, they really are worth studying. No doubt there are MBA programs with Microsoft case studies.

...and I get the feeling that they have just turned the corner and are now pickup up speed in the innovate-release-feedback loop.

IBM has been 'pulling itself together' for a long, long time.

It seems like a relatively rare thing.

I think Microsoft is marketing Azure hard and companies are buying.

I landed a gig related to Azure training and it's keeping me almost full-time busy right now. Considering this is the holidays there is a good chance we will be even busier next year.

Could somebody give some insight about switching from AWS to Azure? I have been contemplating it over the past couple of months but have not yet pulled the trigger

Why would you want to switch? Just curious.

I used Azure for one of my side projects. It was coded using golang and run on Ubuntu. It was pretty stable.

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