Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbillenstein | Hacker News Reader

How do all of you people get on this broken stuff on Azure with GCP and AWS (I think) being so good? Is it like free credits?

View on HN

I can’t even fathom it myself. I begrudgingly spent a month on azure as I worked for an MSFT partner. This was to establish if it was the way to go. It wasn’t. It was a friction filled mess.

AWS slowly crept in because there was no entry barrier, no magic Harry Potter spells to get anything working and it actually worked and stayed working.

Now I went back to azure to see what has changed Q3 last year and it was the same “eating sawdust” experience. Literally everything is clunky.

When it comes to these providers, time is money, possibly more so than worrying about the instances. Azure costs a lot more in human attention.

AWS is not perfect though. CloudFormation quite frankly sucks balls but there’s enough interest and so little friction that there are lots of third party things that work well with it.

Azure, not so much. It’s a leper colony.

I don’t see the relation between Azure DevOps (an issue management and build system competing with Jira, Gitlab and others) and GCP/AWS?

Even if I run on some other cloud than Azure, I still need the software. I could even run Azure DevOps on Amazon’s cloud I guess (If I choose the self hosted option) but the UX complaints would apply there as well...

I can only assume windows people are used to pain

pretty much it, also azure is slightly better at pricing in asia

This mimics the mac vs windows argument I had with my brother-in-law where it boiled down to the fact that you could run windows on something cheaper than a macbook. Even though in order to remap caps lock to something reasonable you have to edit the registry. In 2019. The best answer I think involves windows server 2003 resource kit and its UI, which is so old it could get a driver's license.

You save money but what kind of life is that?

It's not even about the price. I have no problem tweaking my Linux desktop to use an international Dvorak layout (useful for those European languages with ä's and é's) and switching the caps and ctrl keys. Say what you want about Gnome 3, but this works just fine.

On Windows.. I get a US only bare bone Dvorak layout and few ways to remap the caps/ctrl keys. Messing with the registry is at best annoying on my gaming (only) PC but impossible on a corporate locked down desktop. Then I'm lucky if the corporate package repo comes with AutoHotkey that can remap keys in a very hacky way.

A lot of Windows 98 still shines through in the basic usability suite even on the newest versions of Windows. Even the on-screen keyboard on a (Android) phone is more fun than the HID mess in Windows.

> useful for those European languages with ä's and é's

As I'm not typing them frequently I'm happy with a Compose key binded to Scroll Lock.

I would love to find an .xinitrc in some dark corner of windows 10 where there are a bunch of options commented out and you have to pick the right ones or else your monitor explodes.

This would be an upgrade as at least I would kinda trust that a file I found on my own system from the vendor can probably be trusted. I trust the options would be at least mostly self documenting (more self documenting than a random list of hex digits). And, if I'm going to use software written in the 90s, I'm going to go with good old vim.

I love vim, but that .xinitrc stuff is really out of date by now. Gnome 3 now uses Wayland fairly well and the setup is done with the GUI app Tweaks and the system settings.

https://www.autohotkey.com/

I'm only one person, and my team is only one team, but we have been completely satisfied with Azure and DevOps so far. But then again, we are a small team and tend towards many smaller projects rather than fewer large projects, so some of the issues mentioned here w/ caching and missing stats, for instance, may just not apply for us. We don't really need to see stats of how many pull requests each dev has made when there's only 4 of us doing backend work.

Additionally, we are a non-profit, and MS works with us in a moderately generous way with pricing, whereas AWS wouldn't.

I can only second that. Team of 10 with about 30 projects and Azure DevOps was the best that could happen to us. The only problem I saw in here is that the build ui does not automatically update sometimes. Another thing that annoyes me is that the tasks and stories do not update in realtime when you work on them from multiple machines.

All of them have problems. The other 2 have nothing close to a devops product suite like this at all.

1. I don't use Google products if there is any other choice.

2. I think Azure is better overall than AWS. It's way easier to grasp the different features, while I haven't used Azure Devops, I've had little issues with the rest.

What is your scale and how do you implement automation ?

My current job has various .NET/Windows-based software products that can run as PaaS projects in Azure - from what I've seen it wouldn't be practical to run them on AWS/GCP without managing VMs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com