Yet amazingly their interfaces and quality is incredibly horrible. Azure like most other things Microsoft makes feels like a half baked and over fitted platform with serious quality issues.
Years ago the Azure UI was a bit slow (but still beautiful to look at), but those issues were solved long ago.
AWS might look “dated”, but I can’t imagine the mindset that cares about that. If a console is how you’re evaluating your cloud provider you are several steps behind where you need to be. And, great news: in addition to having a really dire console, Azure’s APIs are just no good, particularly if you have to step into the shitshow that is Azure AD (and paying even more for Microsoft Graph, which should just be included) or IAM, and they don’t step to either AWS or GCP to a degree that I just won’t work for an Azure company again. Trying to get anything done in those environments makes me feel stupid and personally bad for having the temerity to try, between inscrutable errors where the Microsoft support is barely English-literate even when you’re paying for it and the aforementioned API barf, and that’s a bad way to live one’s life.
I haven't found functionality to be "splattered" at all. In general, you have a menu on the left for top-level functions, and a button-bar at the top for other things - the layout feels really consistent to me, with the only exception I've noticed being Function Apps.
> inexplicably horizontally-scrolling
At least from a culture with left-right written language, it makes perfect sense to me. Alternatives would be several layers of dialog boxes, or expanding vertically, but I like the Azure portal's way
> AWS might look “dated”, but I can’t imagine the mindset that cares about that
It just feels ugly to work with it. But the bigger issue is the inconsistency - some parts have small variations, others are completely different; it feels very fragmented.
> If a console is how you’re evaluating your cloud provider you are several steps behind where you need to be
Again I'm afraid I disagree. You can work with Azure from a console using cross-platform Powershell Core, or the cross-platform Azure CLI (my preference). There are a host of REST APIs too. I've worked with numerous different Azure services, and I really haven't had any issues here.
> Microsoft support is barely English-literate even when you’re paying for it
On the (free) Microsoft forums, yes, they are complete and utter shit, and I don't know why Microsoft even still hosts them. But I've found the paid-for support at Azure to be very good, and there certainly haven't been any English language issues.
The EC2 console is old and outdated, its been the same since I started with it like 7 years ago. They are rolling out a new dashboard right now, a complete overhaul.
The difference - I don't have to re-document the EC2 Console for internal training.
The AWS Cli is a simple tool that just keeps working and its documentation is pretty much all you need to look at.
The Powershell interface with AzureAD was absolutely opaque, no documentation, took hours to figure out how to configure claims and when I did, it didn't even work due to hidden limitations that the paid for support could not explain.
I think that your experiences have been quite different to others, certainly mine.
A lot of Azure fans like to play "hide the ball" on whether Azure AD "counts" in a lot of ways because it functionally requires Office/Graph and that's not "really" Azure. (Never mind that it doesn't play nice with any IdP, you have to basically pass an act of Congress to let it defer in any meaningful way to Okta...)
(And I have even less use for highly bloggable serverless stuff than I do baseline-working tools and systems. A "Dynamo tester" is less valuable in aggregate than, say, something that made Cloudmapper easier to deploy.)
I’m not sure why they are so much harder to use than the smaller services like heroku or digital ocean. You’d think the big guys would have the best and easiest services, but they sure don’t.