For a client we added support for some synonymous Azure services to the AWS ones we use and I’ll be honest, the amount of garbage the Azure SDK created in our JVM codebase was quite annoying.

Now, I fully understand a Java SDK isn’t going to get quite the same love as their bread and butter, but everything about their Java SDK feels like, just copy the .NET SDK and make it work in Java.

I assumed the telemetry traces (or attempted traces) I was seeing, even with every configurable telemetry config flag EXPLICITLY set to disabled was just more of their bad choices of log levels, leaky internal log messages, and just generally not doing things “the Java way”.

Now I’m starting to wonder if there’s just flat out no way to turn all the telemetry off. Originally we built with the AWS and Azure SDKs and the cloud providers were configurable at run time. I was getting so annoyed with the garbage that MSFT was leaving in our logs even when disabled and running in AWS that we eventually bifurcated our build and re-organized the project.

We spent about a week adding abstractions we previously didn’t need, and another week testing, for what we were assuming was just an annoyance. Turns out maybe we were doing our other clients a solid and didn’t even know it.