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Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

Do others have similar experience? I'm not a fan of Microsoft products however I sometimes have to use them or want to give a try to something like Azure, and so far my experience has been pretty bad. I had to contact their customer service in 2 cases and in both cases they couldn't help me and told me to create a new account (one case was me asking to change billing country in Azure so that I could provide credit card from another country). Also in both cases I had to go through a few emails and a few phone calls and even after they told me they can't do anything, they kept calling me just to check whether I'm satisfied with their solution (!) so that they could close the ticket in their system.

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I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places.

Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.)

Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.

My experience with Azure was awful. I moved a desktop app with 5000 paying customers to SAAS and wanted to not have to worry about the database management side and wanted to use azure. So not a huge business by any means, but growth potential is good.

I signed up, started to look around, maybe a test table and that was it. It was end of the day. Next day, account deleted for breaking the TOS.

Tried to contact support, few days later, got a reply saying I had broken the TOS. Yes I know. But how? What did I do? You broke the rules. No I didn't. I am from the EU (personal details / bank etc) but live abroad, this sometimes causes issues when I say I am from a country that doesn't match my IP so I ask if this was the issue ? No reply, I was just blanked after that.

I agree, though I wouldn't say my experience with Azure has been "profoundly awful". Not all that great is more like it. I'm commenting because you mentioned the horizontal blade scrolling thing. For me, that has to be some of the worst UI/UX. Drives me absolutely nuts.

GCP is quickly becoming my favorite. The UI/UX of the web console is light years ahead of either AWS or Azure. The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I'm stuck with AWS as my primary provider for now, but for new projects the bias is GCP. Most of the services I have used on GCP are well documented and easy to get around. Compare this to the AWS experience where documentation is often non-existent or out of date or the product itself just feels incomplete and broken.

>The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air.

I've found that some areas of the GCP docs are fantastic and some are appallingly bad. Two examples I dealt with last week that I particularly hated were trying to find a good resource on unit testing parts of a Cloud Dataflow and how examply to access the private key for a service account on Appengine Standard. (The switch from Java 7 to 8 really fucked this up).

There seem to be two versions of a LOT of Google's APIs and it's often not clear which one is the correct one to use.

Another annoying issue is that I'll be looking at the Java documentation on something and will suddenly be told to run some Python commands (which mean installing python and PIP and a bunch of other stuff) just to get some Java thing working.

But, all this aside, I agree it's miles better than the last time I looked at Azure.

I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package.

But all of my experiences (up through "startup" size), and virtually all the stories I hear from below "major corporation", are terrible. Endless compatibility issues, awful interfaces, flatly inaccurate documentation, and support which is more time-consuming than GCP's approach of "buzz off" but equally unhelpful.

> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant.

I do not. I imagine that there is a point at which the decision-makers and the Azure sales team can have many lunches and have many Serious Conversations.

The further away purchase power is from implementation responsibility, the more likely one is to wind up hands-on with something as immediately-obviously deficient as Azure.

> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package.

I work at what has been all-in Windows-.Net-Office enterprise, and despite an existing investment in Azure AD that we’re staying with for now, the experience with trying to work with Azure has been such that our comprehensive cloud transition effort is centered around AWS (which seems like it is going to have a side effect of making us less of a Windows and .NET shop, as well.)

My experience falls in line with yours.

I had an MVP in azure web services. I had 20 users in my "beta" phase that were using the product and giving me feedback.

One day, I got a message that I need to update my billing method. Strange, I was using mostly free tier with one paid component and the card on file was good til 2022, but ok. I put in another card because maybe there's something wrong with the system.

The next day I get a call that the site isn't working from one of my beta users. I log in and all of my azure resources are gone.

I immediately try to reach out to azure support via various mechanisms (their support chat, email, twitter, etc). Funny enough, twitter is always the fastest way to get support. Just write that something bad happened and tag their product, and you get someone who can communicate. However, they just redirected me to their support channel.

Two days go by and I get a template email response. I have an email chain going back and forth over the week to try and get the resources restored.

In the end, they tell me that not only will they be unable to restore my resources (a production database. the backups were all "gone" because the resource didn't exist anymore), but that I had to create a new azure account to use any services because of how screwed up my account got.

I tried escalating, but received the same response.

Now I just go with AWS. I'd even go with google as long as they don't delete my production database.

I've previous experience as a Devops engineer for a Large company which at the time was one of the larger customers of Azure (as in they'd put our company on the marketing materials). Support was obviously better when we could get a turn around time of <1 day to talk to an engineer that worked on a piece of infrastructure. Still wasn't a pleasant experience.

It's really unfortunate, all of this. I know that there are so many teams that are putting out great products, but their cloud approach is awful. _Some_ of the offerings are actually pretty nice, but combined with UI churn, the worst support (I'd rather take googles non-existent support as long as my data doesn't get deleted) of all cloud providers (IME) and empty apologies on the internet (you can say you're sorry, but I don't believe you unless you act on the mistake), I don't see myself going back anytime soon.

Typically in the free tiers there is a caveat in the service agreement that it is not meant for production services and your resources can be shut down at any time. It's important to read the fine print.

This is good to know. I'll definitely have to check more fine print when deciding to have certain services on lower tier.

In my case, I was paying for the database and the object storage, both of which had their contents (db data and backups) lost.

All just personal opinions, but Microsoft products and services are generally good, from my experience. Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). Office works well. OneDrive used to work well, now it's just "okay", but still fine. My Surface Go is a champ and feels great, despite being silly cheap. My Microsoft Ergonomics keyboard + mouse are still going strong, and is still my all-time favourite Ergo keyboard. Xbox One X is a nice piece of kit. Azure can be kind of overwhelming, but it works well enough and is far less overwhelming than AWS, despite offering mostly similar services.

Microsoft still has legacy weirdness all over the place. It's 2019 and it still feels like nobody from Windows talks to anyone in Office, and no one in software talks to anyone doing hardware. And Microsoft botches acquisitions (Skype is still a tire fire, similar for LinkedIn). But generally, the quality of Microsoft products is good, despite their failings.

Microsoft consumer support is pretty poor. But I basically never need to use it, and some of competition is so much worse, that Microsoft look good in comparison. (Have a problem with anything Google, for example, and Microsoft Support suddenly looks like mana from heaven).

> Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy).

I had an annoying problem last weekend trying to get ray tracing enabled in a video game. After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update and the "windows is up to date" message is a lie. Turns out I was on win10-1803 instead of 1809 and had to download a separate *.exe to upgrade. These types of problems don't happen with a modern (sane) package manager.

There's also a few other problems with windows that stop me from thinking it's great: no pseudoterminal, rigid window manager, registry nightmares, possibly more.

> After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update

It does, graphics drivers do auto-update (unless you've manually disabled it on your system).

They just update slowly, you'll get the latest long-term driver from your device manufacturer / OEM, -- you won't instantly get things like "nVidia Game Ready Drivers, now with experimental ray-tracing" that come out every two weeks or so.

Windows has a Pseudoterminal. It's a relatively recent addition.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...

Woohoo! Finally...

And Microsoft botches acquisitions

Not all of them. They've done well with Mojang.

They have, but they've also been helped by the former center of Mojang's fanbase's cult-of-personality going completely off the deep end. If Notch was still "that quirky dude making little games here and there" instead of a chud screaming on Twitter all the time, I tend to think there would be more (unreasonable, but extant) dissatisfaction with Microsoft's handling of Minecraft.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot. Their handling of Minecraft has been mostly great, from both a product and software quality perspective. (except for the modding stuff)

Adding my own anedocte, I tried to read some of their training material, the processes of creating an account was incredibly annoying and un-intuitive. Something that even "Web 1.0" companies back in 1997 had already figured out.

Then I tried following the examples of the training, start a small, free VM and do some stuff, but it won't let me, because the web interface was completely broken, no matter which browser I used. I even tried using that damn Edge on a W10 VM.

Yeah, MS might not have been the target of a lot of backlash recently, but their products are still as awful as ever.

>Do others have similar experience?

As a habitual Microsoft hater who spent most of the 90s and early 2000s being constitutionally incapable of writing the company name without a $, yes I have.

They still suffer from an appalling lack of taste and poor design sensibilities, but their enterprise level products and services are top notch. And I'm developing a new appreciation for a business model that involves transparently charging me a known price in exchange for a known service. They could still get better at that though. They still have too many enterprise clients over a barrel.

I had a small app that pulled my agenda (calendar events) from an Exchange server. But my company switched to office 365. I spent a few days trying to figure out where I need to register and what API to use, etc so I can rewrite my app to work with Office 365. Now I don't have an app showing my agenda.

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