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Comment by MrDresden | Hacker News Reader

After spending 5 years of corporate work having to wrestle with Azure (in a ci/cd capacity) I would never recommend Microsoft's cloud offerings to anyone.

Problem is that there is no other provider I would rather recommend. They are all bad in one way or another.

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As a counterpoint:

I've worked with both Azure cloud and Azure DevOps (or whatever the feck they call it now) for a long time (maybe 10 years?), a lot in a corporate setting, but also for my startup.

Apart from the same price issues that exist across all the big 3 cloud providers, I actually really like Azure.

I love the conceptual framework and high level architecture of Azure: Resource Manager, sane naming compared to AWS, etc…

What I hate is the unfathomably sloppy implementation that their developers refuse to fix unless held at gun point.

You literally have to have an MS account manager about to miss out on millions of dollars to force a trivial fix through their pipeline.

They have zero “customer obsession.”

Actually I'd say they have customer obsession but that it's for a small minority of what We consider thier customers (to them the small fry including smbs are not thiet customers, they're just the chaff they have to deal with and control in order to properly get the wheat out of the whole).

BIG businesses and governmenta are thier customers, demanding maintenance of terrible legacy issues because they literally use bugs as features in thier even more poorly made and maintained custom systems built by some fly by night dev shop 2+ decades ago....

MS doesn't care about individuals, individuals are just eyeballs to them.

That's a myth. I've worked at those big government departments, and Microsoft ignores their requirements too!

Also, Azure is "all new", so legacy compatibility shouldn't be a big concern.

Except... it is, because a bunch of half-baked MVPs were thrown over the fence and now have to be supported while they work on the "proper" solution. We're up to the 3rd iteration of VM monitoring, the 3rd iteration of AAD client libraries, etc...

The big red issue with MS is they elaborately make it very difficult to integrate outside their ecosystem and they love holding customers hostage to ridiculous restrictions, but also Azure is very difficult to centrally manage things for all subscriptions. Others are as well but not as much. I actually like the azure UI and CLI as well as many if their offerings, but it's so difficult to piece together a bigger picture or make small changes without doing a ton of work and more MS products being involved.

Also,unrelated: Azure AD is now "Entra ID" (????) now lol.

Yeah, that Entra ID was the biggest "why?" moment I had in years. Seeing the new name no better or even worse than the old one I can already imagine the pain of renaming packages, namespaces, fixing documentation etc. Probably the most expensive marketing campaign with 0 gain I am aware of.

That’s easy and makes sense.

Azure AD was initially a shim to enable O365. Now it’s evolved into a pretty awesome identity platform for Enterprise and B2C.

The problem is M365 adoption (ie O365 + the other crap) is high. So they are out of stuff to sell. Entra will add the governance and compliance bullshit and increase revenue.

End of the day, Microsoft chisels $38-55/head for every corporate worker. Services are all about cash flow, so they are looking to grow that up to $100 user/month. Every $1 of subscription spend is like $400 on the scorecard for the bonuses of SVP staff.

Because of anti-trust, they can’t just do what Adobe does and raise the price every few months. They just keep adding services and move stuff around in the bundles. M365 Plus+ E9 with Entra technology will give you $350 in value for only $103/month!

Entra ID. As someone trying to get up to speed on Azure AD, suddenly all the recent tutorials I've watched are out of date. Very frustrating.

Same story when they moved to MSAL a few years ago.

AWS is pretty decent in my experience, and when managed with Terraform (which is all but a requirement if you don't want to go completely b0nkers) it's a breeze to manage.

And this is one place where I think Azure does better... I mean, the UI/UX sucks, but at least you can do everything in the UI without loosing too many brain cells. Google and AWS seem to require automation tooling to make sense, which IMO makes all of it harder to learn in practice. I tend to like learning some of those things visually first, then automate out of necessity as opposed to the other way around.

Not that I'm tethered to Azure... I've used a combination of dedicated server, DigitalOcean and Cloudflare for my personal stuff... though just started delving into the Cloudflare (edge compute) stuff.

There are definitely ups and downs to them all.

I'm not sure I agree completely. When I was learning Terraform, trying to figure out what the options a resource had and some of the possible values, I'd make the change in the AWS UI, then re-run Terraform to see what it wanted to change back. There weren't a whole lot of things in aWS that didn't have a UI to configure somewhere.

Yeah the AWS console UI is far from incomprehensible. Though I think what trips a lot of people up is how the resources are often something you use to compose other higher level resources.

You can also configure a resource in AWS, configure the bare minimum in Terraform (i.e. required attributes only), then run a `terraform import` and then `terraform apply`.

(Terraform does suck in that its import functionality can't spit out the HCL representation)

"Problem is that there is no other provider I would rather recommend. They are all bad in one way or another."

Could you explain a little further what you don't like about Azure and why you would still recommend it over the competitors?

Not the OP, but: it’s just sloppy. There is zero QA other than end-users bitching.

I recently collected some notes of bugs and errors for an MS rep. I was setting up just a .NET web app with a SQL back end, as simple and vanilla as it gets.

I found 60 bugs.

SIXTY!!!

I like the Azure bash cli... That's about the only thing I like from Azure.

I moved from Azure to AWS.

App Insights, DevOps pipelines, and WebApp slots look like future tech when compared to codepipelines and x-ray.

DevOps in particular feels so close to being a really great tool. Not having to jump between 8 different UIs to deploy something is magical. If only they'd polish the rough bits and invest a bit more into it.

We use DevOps for pipelines, but AWS for our prod cloud environment.

I'm hoping to push us that way, some hurdles with getting buy in from the whole team though.

That's why I wish DevOps made it a really clear cut choice. There's some really low hanging fruit and silly decisions that spoil the initial impression:

YAML pipelines have been the "official" option for at least 4 years now but when I create a new project, every issue has a "deployments" section that tells me it only supports classic releases. Classic pipelines/releases can now be disabled at the project level at least.

They're introducing a new widget that shows open pull requests across repositories but for an absolutely insane reason it's limited to 10 repositories, just why...

Environments still have no support for resources other than VMs and AKS.

The mandatory "sprints" backlog is just stupid as well. It's a clear artificial limitation rather than one necessitated by the platform.

Another issue is that Microsoft have done a poor job at communicating the potential longevity of the platform. The Github acquisition is the first thing that gets mentioned when DevOps is brought up as an option, which is a shame because DevOps feels much more capable/cohesive/advanced than GitHub.

Despite these problems it's still been the tool with the absolute least friction and most potential when it comes to organised development work. The alternatives I've used come nowhere close.

You mean the python-based `az` command?

running `az` without parameters takes 10 seconds on my machine. `az version` and `az --version` return differnt outputs and are also very very slow.

When I run `az account subscription enable` it tells me "Command group 'account subscription' is experimental and under development.".

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