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Agree completely.

AWS portal is bizarre, it's like each portion is written by a different company. In ECR for example, clicking into a repo is fine, but then going back doesn't do anything. Why? Even simple favicons don't look like they're from the same company. When you've got 40 tabs open you want an idea that that particular tab is from AWS or not.

Azure is nicer, but it's not reliable (see my other post on this thread). It's almost like Azure have done too much lazy-loading which persists through login sessions, you can't rely on a refresh to give you the truth - for all the problems with AWS, you can.

And yes I know this isn't CLI stuff, but it's important. Even on fully automated / scripted deployments it's sometimes nice to go into the UI and see what's going on. If it doesn't represent reality, there is a problem.

FWIW GC doesn't have any of these problems, but it is slow.

You only mention Azure DevOps in your other comment - have you used Azure in a wider sense?

As another datapoint of one, I've been working with Azure for years, and have never found the UI to be unreliable.

I have occasionally but not in anger, and not for a while. It's a good point you make, but my experience recently with Azure DevOps is similar or worse to that I dealt with previously on Azure.

Worst thing about it is that I was originally impressed with Azure DevOps - the onboarding was awesome, almost combined the best bits of GitLab / GitHub with none of the crap of Jenkins. It was only after going back a couple of days later it let me down.

As a PM on Azure Pipelines, I'm really interested to learn how we let you down after a few days. If you're willing to share, I'm mattc at xbox.com. Or post here, whatever works.

Thanks! I'm going to play around with it a bit more and if I still have problems i'll hit you up. The GUI stuff was all a precursor to automating it with Ansible anyway so unless that's broken I think it'll be okay.

Azure Devops is awesome though. Told my wife i'd found a modern Microsoft product I really liked, she nearly fainted.

I've been working with it for months (still do), and have never found it to be good or reliable. The endless-horizontal-growth is maddening. Horizontal scroll-in-scroll is very hard to do for users, why they thought it'd be a good idea is beyond me; you can't easily select stuff (e.g. CosmosDb database names, that get truncated if they're long) - and can't right-click to "inspect element" either, you have explicitly open "developer tools". Occasionally Firefox will go mad when Azure is open and spin up my fans like crazy. There are errors that you can get that are completely cryptic (forgot to fill in the "subnet" in HDInsight? Well sorry, your cluster is stuck in "validating" forever). Storage options are confusing - in AWS you have S3, here you have ADLS Gen1, Gen2, Blob storage which is actually "binary blob/page blob/ append blob" but is presented as "tables/ queues/blobs" and oh BTW ADLS Gen2 is based on it but Gen1 is not (you provision a gen2 acount from "storage accounts" but Gen1 has its own UI section).

I could go on and on. It's not like Azure is completely bad, but I far prefer the developer experience of AWS. It's not perfect, but IMO it's much better.

Wow, seems like your experience is very different from mine or that of my co-workers!

Regarding copying stuff, if you hover over just about any text element, a little 'copy' icon will appear. I like this feature.

> if you hover over just about any text element, a little 'copy' icon will appear. I like this feature.

Think I didn't try that? Doesn't work on CosmosDB databases. Yes, for a lot of items it's true that "copy" is easy.... but when it's not easy, it's crazy hard.

I'm guessing that your company doesn't have hundreds of Azure subscriptions (and the proportional number of other resources to manage, in them). When there are a lot of elements that you need to manage/ browse through/ look for, you start to appreciate the simplicity of the AWS ui, and the fact that it prioritizes "snappy" over "fancy".

Azure might be great for an SMB, but I think for large enterprises, AWS is still unchallenged.

I work for a megacorp (250k+ employees). We have a lot of subscriptions, and a lot of resources :)

Just about everywhere I'd want to filter stuff in the Azure portal, there's a search box or/and filters. Honestly, I find it to be really snappy for me.

The term you're looking for with the AWS Portal is "they're shipping the org chart". Different teams build plugins for the portal, with a bunch of latitude to define the custom experience.

I only tried Azure for a few weeks, but I think it's underlying concepts and foundations are way too windows/.NET centric and still half baked in surprising areas when coming from a non Microsoft background. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case for the author.

I know a lot of things have changed at Microsoft, but and also the language I was using (ruby) was not the best match perhaps. But at a lot of steps:

- documentation was directed at VS ("you have this nice integration to do that in 30s. Other people go this way, poor some jugs of coffee you'll need it.")

- docs and tutorials are old and deprecated. Even articles written by staffers a few months ago were explaining stuff that disappeared from the portal interface, and no update was available. There seems to have been a huge system transition, and it was painful to be caught in the middle, especially when after that it means the new system has a risk of being beta quality for a while.

- anything remotely complex means moving to Kudu, when there's already another set of CLI tools to deal with.

Basically it felt like I needed to invest 6 months of my life to really get it, and then I'll be ready to use it professionally. AWS or even GKE don't have as much as a learning curve for people coming from the linux world in my opinion.

I'm surprised you think this, as I've been surprised in the other direction :)

I'm mostly from a Windows and .NET background, but I'm reasonably comfortable in Linux too, and I've been surprised at the breadth of support for Linux and traditionally non-Windows languages, such as Python and Node.js.

As an example, take the docs for what must be one of their most used services, App Services: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/app-service/

Right on the front page there are quickstarts for .NET, sure - but also Node.js, PHP, Python, Java...

Some of their newer services are even Linux first, such as AKS!

I havn't used the Azure portal for a few months now, but every time I have used it, it's driven me up the wall.

AWS's UI might be inconsistent, even old fashioned - but it's extremely quick to navigate around and find things.

With Azure I'm either having to spend 10 minutes hovering over an array of icons trying to figure out which one will take me to the service I want, or I'm fighting with their panels which hide information I actually wanted.

When it comes to other basic functionality like updating billing details - Azure only lets that be done by the root account, which I really don't want to hand over to our accounts department, and they don't want me to know the card details they use for it. So we're at this stale-mate where I have to log in as root, navigate to the right area, then let them enter the card details.

try again, there has been an update a few weeks ago :-)

I've been in the process of migrating from AWS to Azure to take advantage of start-up credits. Previous to this I was working at a large company on AWS-only infrastructure. I feel like I've got enough experience with both at all levels. In Azure we've been using Kubernetes for a number of months now.

I, too, think the Azure portal is amazing to work with. It feels much more coherent than the AWS portal. I like the Azure command line package as well, in preference to the AWS CLI. I've never touched the Azure PowerShell tools and have never felt like I had to.

Creating resources via the portal or command line is something I only do as a last resort anyways; we use Terraform for all of our cloud resource creation purposes.

We are trying to be all Terraform but its not moving fast enough. We still need the the Azure/AWS consul/cli to do much of the work. I switched from an AWS shop to a "migrating to Azure from AWS" shop. The new job is all Kubernetes work so I love it but I cannot get comfortable with Azure. I was so much more productive and confident with AWS its crazy. I miss S3, EBS, Snapshots, Route53, IAM and even fucking AWS role policy. I understand MS realizes this which is why they change there API every 4 months but its getting ridiculous we can't even use AKS (instead of ACS) because for some reason they don't role out services to the US North Central Region. WTF?

Yeah, there's a definite hurdle to get over when moving to Azure. I've been finding analogs to most of the services I need, like Blob storage instead of S3, managed disks instead of EBS.

There are some things I definitely prefer in Azure to AWS too; I find the AD-based authentication to be much easier to understand and implement compared to IAM. The SMB shares (File storage) are great, integrate well with Kubernetes, and are a lot faster than EFS.

Non-premium VM IO performance is abysmal though, and I really wish I could store SSH public keys in Azure AD.

Give GKE a whirl.

This is the same advice I gave to the AKS product manager.

AKS is good until your custom resources are slow to react, and there is no ETA when the issue will be fixed. Check the following issues: https://github.com/Azure/AKS/issues/522, https://github.com/Azure/AKS/issues/676

I've only used Azure for a little while, but it just seems way to slow compared to AWS. It takes forever to spin up and shut down a server, or reconfigure something, and the website in general just feels slow. The AWS portal is less pretty, but feels fairly quick.

> It takes forever to spin up and shut down a server, or reconfigure something, and the website in general just feels slow

I don't find the website to be slow - they seem to have updated it ~6 months ago, and it seems to be really responsive since then.

I'm with you on time to create some resources though - starting up a new VM takes anywhere between 5 minutes and (on occasion) an hour. I'm working a bit with Azure Batch these days too, and it generally takes 15-25 minutes to start a small pool, which is really irritating. I wish they'd introduce a containerised version of batch, with jobs starting in seconds.

I had some problems with Azure (and every other cloud provider,) but by far and above the Azure portal is vastly less confusing than AWS or GCS. Using the GUI on those two can quickly becoming a dizzying mess.

I don't think I have logged into the Azure web UI in like... 3 years or so. However I have used AWS and GCP pretty extensively. I have always found the GCP web UI to be light years ahead of the AWS one. Curious for why you think the Azure one is ahead of GCP and AWS.

I've worked pretty decently with azure, but VSTS (now azure DevOps, oh boy) is horrible for hosted solutions... It's just so dang slow. Slow to start, slow to run anything that touches disk, etc

Also, the storage with azure is very, VERY slow. Spin up a VM and give it a go. ultra ssds might change things, depending on pricing.

We only use Azure for AD and still we get the leaky cloud everything is on fire screen once a week at least.

It sounds, in fact, like he had the story he wanted to tell, and then came up with the story to tell it.

One thing I couldn’t do through the UI is change the expiration of JWT tokens as issued from ActiveDirectory, I needed to do some Powershell for that. Things in preview often times end up Powershell only first, which I’m OK with.

> I've been using Azure for years, and I'm not aware of anything that ... only works with Powershell

AAD password policy can only be set with powershell

I don't know, right in the second sentence he said it's the most honest comparison.

Ditto. Hell Google just dropped out of the JEDI pitch mumbling something about their tech not being up to the requirements. Azure and AWS are so clearly in the lead. Google’s offering is, well, a bit better than Oracle’s, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Wasn't JEDI ghostwritten by Amazon lobbyists/engineers? No surprise there.

From Google, "we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications."

So it's a certification issue, not a technology one as the OP said? I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with e.g. security clearances of employees.

The Jedi dropout was iiuc, because Google doesn't have a data center fully staffed by people with security clearance, more or less.