I can’t imagine choosing Azure and the Microsoft stack for building systems. It’s incomprehensible to me.
Honest question, why was the decision wrong? It does not matter to me eather way, I’m just an engineer that was brought in to consult on some aspects of the contract.
There’s an entire subculture of the IT world that spells it “Micro$oft” and refuses to acknowledge its very existence, or a valid option.
I once saw a post about how some Linux tool had support for “every major LDAP directory system” and did not list Active Directory! It’s like… dude… something like 99% of deployed LDAP systems is AD. The rest is a rounding error.
(I think it is directly related to the lack of stranglehold which MS had over much of daily computing in 1990s. Apple, Linux, and mobile platforms forced it to compete and innovate more seriously, winning back quite some respect.)
The only Windows systems I've seen in over 15 years were to run Active Directory over 10 year ago (and not since), my personal gaming desktop (which no longer runs Windows) and GitHub runners for cross compilation.
There's plenty of Microsoft out there, but there's an entire, thriving universe where Microsoft is completely irrelevant.
Imagine if someone listed "modern UNIX-like operating systems" and the list went something like: NetBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, OpenSolaris, and then went through dozens like that into ever more obscure things nobody has ever heard of, but skipped Linux like it didn't even exist. Just some Finnish guy's hobby project, not really worth discussing, right?
It gets to the point where it's absurd.
As a real example, someone made a printable SVG/PDF poster of "big data" and "data science" companies and technologies. They were listing dinky little startups that had a total value smaller than the annual cost of an individual Azure storage blob container that I deleted to save money. That was an "oops" by someone that the customer didn't even notice.
> It gets to the point where it's absurd.
All of the examples you provide don't paint some cohesive picture, they come across as random, haphazard strokes with no form or meaning. Your original comment attempted to answer a question by ridiculing an entire demographic of people who care much more about human rights than you realize.
That doesn't mean I'll just ignore their existence or forget to list them as places in the world.
It's a uniquely Linux-fanboy thing to just pretend Microsoft doesn't exist, or that it's not even worth including in a list.
"Superpowers: Russia, China, and India."
"Hello!? United States!"
"The united what?"
Overall, this take feels immature and insensitive to the ideals that drive Linux users.
I can't comment on the LDAP thing on a technical level, but if the focus is on libre software, why is it apropos to list proprietary things that it's compatible with? Software that boasts this compatibility doesn't always keep it, or sometimes loses it due to deliberate action from the proprietary party. I don't think I'd list Active Directory either. It's not something one can vouch for unless they're literally Microsoft.
> Leaning on a proprietary solution also means you're downstream of any decision the makers of the tool make, including choosing to nuke your (and/or your business's) use case.
My understanding is that OP is advocating free/libre software protects a business from changes in software that could affect the business' use case.
This risk is present in both proprietary and free/libre software. Maintainers may remove features that some users find critical. If a feature is removed and your business requires the feature, you now need to maintain a fork of the software or contribute development time upstream.
Depending on the project, it may move slow enough for the dependency to be slow to update and it be fine. Depends on what you're doing.
At least in the case you mentioned, I can revert to an older version and freeze it there until my business can sort out the way forward.
Ideally, one chooses dependencies that are easy to replace and reasonable to maintain for a bit, if needed. Or if you're lucky, no dependencies at all!
How is that possible? I'm guessing you mean the best terms for Windows machines and Windows-based services. As soon as you exit the Microsoft realm, the prices plummet...
As someone who has used Azure, AWS, and GCP since their inception but mainly Azure for very unfortunate career choices -- I can assure you Azure has the most problems of any sort you can imagine.
Your MS rep (if you're big enough to have contact with one) will most assuredly be using their checkbook for you guys or your client. I'm not being melodramatic. This isn't even an original opinion or experience (go ahead, look around HN). And it certainly isn't some cultural "M$" backlash as another poster put it.
If this post seems editorial it's because after nearly a decade of this nonsense I'm just simply exasperated, and it greatly confuses me when people who are within the MS ecosystem don't know how bad they have it with Azure. It's basically unacceptable that MS gets away with it.
From AKS to WAF to Cosmos DB take your pick. You will run into issues and you will run into them continually.
Personally with my experience, Azure is not something I could ethically ever recommend to anyone.
One of fun things we had with our MS experience was writing code that should work according to docs, returned nonsensical errors (not documented, generic kind of error) from their API, only for that to magically start working next day...
Even the basic stuff appears to be shoddy in places, for example I received notification about meeting that I was added to 5 days ago about 3h before the meeting.... when the meeting author edited the meeting to add next person.
Also trying to find what made e-mail land into spam in cloud exchange is near-impossibility... and whitelisting them in global rules just doesn't fucking work for no good reason. It's utter mess.
Just off the top of my head, we had a ms forms, a couple actually, that as soon as they hit 50k entries, broke in weird ways. Not accepting new entrys, dropping entries, etc..
That's just one example I immediately recall where I could code up a better solution in a short amount of time, that just shouldn't be a thing with a large cloud/service provider like Ms.
A common bureaucratic failure mode when evaluating competitors is to make a bunch of categories:
Performance: 4/5 Ease of use: 4/5 Cost: 3/5 Security: 0/5
and then average them. When for these categories, you probably should compare the minimum rather than average.
We've tried the latter, twice, they got bought and support quality tanked both times. We don't want to manage hardware yet, so...
Also, customers want MSSQL, and managed MSSQL is nice since it's trivial to scale up and down with the needs of the customer.
Started using their other services like Service Bus, Blob Storage and Application Insights. We're using .Net so integration is quite simple.
It wasn't my call, but there weren't that many great alternatives from what I can see.
In the case of GCP this is untrue.
> We're using .Net so integration is quite simple.
This is the reason for most deployments. They are MS shops so the go with the MS Cloud.
You're probably right, but anything that isn't core to their ad business seems highly risky to rely on long-term.
I certainly wouldn't risk recommending them.
Why would they want that when PostgreSQL exists? That's like saying customers "want" Oracle databases despite the existence of this post:
Postgres has its strengths, but so does MSSQL.
They already run it due to other software than ours, so their IT is already familiar and has permissions, auditing etc in place.
I can't remember any outages in the few years I worked there though.
Elon Musk was one of them (at what became Paypal)
1. Its cheaper
2. They're already a C# shop so it just "feels right"
Thats about it, really. That appears to be the sum of the thought that went into it. And that also explains why they had to bring myself (and others) in as very expensive consultants to un-fuck various systems...