Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah...that jumped out at me. We're not a huge Azure spender--somewhere around $20K/month, though it's hard to tell--and it is a frustrating place to be coming from both AWS and Google.

I probably would have a much better time of it if I even had a TAM to talk to instead of a CSP (and that's a baked-in problem on our end, but Azure looks and feels worse every day when you have to go through a CSP--Microsoft would do well to jettison the whole thing, it makes their product worse) and I'd have a great time of it if I had an Azure product team invested in fixing the problems I have. Which are legion. Mostly around the bad APIs and stuff like "oh yeah, the AD connector for Ruby is broken and has been for a year, just monkey-patch it like so"...but, funnily enough, also around security, which the blog post kind of just waves off as "oh but you can encrypt". Yeah, sure, they have a KMS, but IAM is a constant and complete tire fire, so even though you can encrypt your data, who knows if it's correctly protected?

MS doesn't really have a role that focuses on the things you're talking about (though I'd really hoped the big DevAdvocate push would include "advocating on behlaf of devs" but doesn't seem that way) and they pretty much implicitly don't care about rewarding or even thanking the people that go out of their way to try to address those things or bring attention to them.

I'll just say it hurts, personally hurts, to be in Azure, bring up feedback, passionately advcate for it for the users sake, be ignored, and watch as the product is shipped ("we have as schedule!"). In at least one instance, they went so far as to basically discourage public use of the feature until theyd redone it exactly the way I'd suggested 18 months earlier. So much of it was just a result of having no idea what users wanted, where cloud computing was headed in terms of containerization and automation, and fundamental open ignorance of how and why GCE/AWS had designed similar features.

Sounds about right; your description matches what I've heard from other people and it's one of the reasons why, last time I was contacted by a recruiter for an Azure team I said no. The products are unfocused and it really feels like there's simultaneously a lack of vision and a feeling of undeserved excellence. (One of my coworkers came to us from Microsoft, and he mentioned that the Ibiza team thinks that they made a good product...)

The inability for the various services to actually work together is befuddling too. We had a meeting the other day to sketch out some stuff about our environment and, being way more familiar with AWS and GCP, I started by sketching out a network only to have it pointed out to me that app services aren't even in private virtual networks in the year of our lord 2018. And I thought AWS was dysfunctional!

Maybe if they actually wanted product vision I'd listen to a job there, but that seems at odds with what Azure is: "we have a cloud too, don't you want more Windows in yours?". OTOH, I want a cloud offering that works like AWS and GCP because that's minimally surprising.

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