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>We brag to our customers about the fact that our only major technology vendor is Microsoft.

If anyone bragged to me about this I would laugh in their face. You're putting your entire company at major risk.

Sometimes it has benefits, and sometimes its necessary, to use something like Azure. But I would never actively seek tying your existence solely to a single company, nor would I be happy about it. And I would certainly never _brag_ about it. That's insane.

Oh for crying out loud, I’m so over this holier than thou attitude.

Every company and every vendor has strengths and weaknesses. Laughing in someone’s face for choosing to use one platform is ridiculous at best.

My entire almost 30 year career has been Microsoft centered, except for brief stints with Novell, mainframes, and OS/2.

And based on my anecdotal evidence over many companies and many years, Microsoft has been pretty solid.

Very bad rebuttal. You effectively just demonstrated you got stuck with MS for 30 years. You have not seen any others other than MS. You likely downplay the bad and overtly having good image of MS. My experience with multiple cloud systems CANNOT conclude Azure in the top 5. At best maybe 6th with occasionally hitting 5th or 4th depending on some specific tech metrics.

AWS, Azure, GCP followed by everyone else.

I assume the poster to whom you're responding just hasn't been in the industry long enough to understand that the entire point of gigantic platforms like Microsoft or AWS is specifically to create ecosystems of vendors that provide service around that platform.

You can tell by who is fighting the current. Some get paid in ideology, some in fiat. Which are they here for? That's the question. I'm just here to get paid, and enjoy working with others desiring the same outcome (strong opinions weakly held while bank acct goes brrr). We can chat war stories at the hotel bar with a comfortably large investment account from the work.

I guess that's why technology abuses the user so much these days.

Unethical implementations are distinct from agnostic technology implementation choices. I don’t care about the underlying tech (Windows, Linux, Mainframe), but I’m certainly never working at Meta, for example. New FedNow instant payments runs on a mainframe. New hotness? No! Built to run for decades? Yes.

@danseop08 Stuck? What a weird and interesting thing to say since I deliberately chose and applied for jobs I was not only good at, but had the most experience in. And to then add in that I haven't seen anything other than Microsoft to boot?

Don't you think that over a 30 year tech career that I've touched and used many different products and technologies?

meta note: if you can't see the reply link, click on the comment timestamp "X minutes ago" and then you should see the reply box.

All vendors have weaknesses, but few have Microsoft's cavalier attitude towards security. Case in point: https://www.wiz.io/blog/storm-0558-compromised-microsoft-key...

If you bragged to me about being locked into Azure I would be very puzzled.

Meh. That whole issue is way overblown by the twitter researcher types trying to build buzz and make a name. It's a serious issue don't get me wrong but security incidents are a question of when not if and the dialog surrounding the issue doesn't come across as charitably capturing the scope and impact. Microsoft's response, which has been to handle the issue responsibly is far from the "radio silence coverup" and "the attackers are still in the network" and "you can't trust anything Microsoft signs anymore" reality you'd be inclined to believe if you only read the hype angle and believe the alarmist comments from other "any chance to bash on M$ is a heyday" types.

I hadn't seen the article you linked though and will say it seems to be in good taste.

They were able to spoof tokens for a long time, access mailboxes, etc.

If this isn't enough for you, there's also ChaosDB, the cross-account vulnerability Palo Alto found (https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/azure-container-instance...), among many others.

This isn't an isolated instance, that's a pattern.

more power to you if you made a career on MS technologies, for a long time they were the big dog on the corporate world but to be fair there are better options there and actually bragging about vendor lock-in is ridiculous, if you're full in and it works for you good! But its not something to brag about, specially since MS refuses to fix their certificates after they got hacked by China

>Every company and every vendor has strengths and weaknesses.

Yes, every company and every vendor does have strengths and weaknesses. That's why it's foolish to lock yourself in to only one vendor.

If you locked yourself in to AWS, for example, you'd benefit from some great AWS services, but be stuck using the awfulness that is Workmail/Workdocs. Or you could lock yourself into MS and get Outlook/Office, but then be stuck using subpar offerings like Azure Functions or be a victim to their lackadaisical attitude towards security. Why would you ever choose to do either of those? Instead, you can choose both Microsoft for Outlook/Office, and AWS for other offerings that they are stronger at. Now you benefit from the strengths of both, while avoiding their weaknesses.

If you _can't_ do that, there might be good reasons and that's fine. But to _intentionally_ not do that, and especially to _brag_ about not doing that is laughable, no "holier than thou" attitude required.

Larger enterprise customers have problems with vendor finger pointing. Let's say you have a database transaction that intermittently fails and you decide to (pay) ask your vendors to help. The DB vendor says it must be the network or application, the network vendor doesn't seen any problems, the application platform vendor or consultant says it must be the network or database. Even getting all these people on one call takes a lot of time and isn't helpful.

Honestly Microsoft isn't any better, but if buy Premier Support (expensive), you can eventually talk to the actual development teams. You also get a person in a suit who will talk to your execute team and take the blame, which is an important feature for managers.

> You're putting your entire company at major risk.

We use AWS but, the same argument applies here. It's far, far, far more likely that the developer who implemented the solution leaves than AWS or MS pull the rug from under us.

Given the choice between setting up an ad-hoc solution with one developer, or using an existing managed offering, putting all your eggs in an employee when they have an average tenure of 2 years is _way_ more risky.

My expectation would be that anything other than Microsoft offers higher risk. They will most likely be around for a long time, and they keep their products around for a long time, with proof of focussing on backwards compatibility. Is it without risk? Probably not, but i doubt you can show me a IT company with lower risk.

If you work in a regulated environment it's so much easier to explain to a regulator that you work with a single SOC 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified cloud provider rather than a mishmash of services.

I think that aligning the company with MS vision has some strong advantages, if they cover your needs.

But being locked in itself is certainly a very weird objective.

My experience was that salespeople bugged managers who bugged me to use cosmos because or course I want to use Microsoft's take on Mongo.

It wasnt just that. They also advised managers to enforce the use of teams for security reasons - which is a bit like advising that you install windows for open source reasons.

And while SQL server worked fine, postgres and mariadb were initially "unapproved" for security reasons and dog slow once they were (& support couldnt help for some reason).

In business terms Microsoft seems to be basically be a rebranded Oracle - playing an elaborate game of vendor lock in using every trick available while trying to maintain a thin veneer of deniability, circumventing the need to compete on the quality of their software.

Now if youll excuse me I have an unwieldy YAML github actions mess to unwind so we can move to a different CI platform. I wonder why they let it get so bad.

> I can find someone on LinkedIn who can manage my Azure logging infrastructure are infinitely greater than finding someone who has experience with my custom logger's private repository

Why not do something standard with no platform lock-in?

We do structured logging and push them to an Elastic stack with fluentd. For now we use an Elastic we deployed on a Linux VM but 1) we can move at any time, either from cloud provider, or stop using Elastic if we want to, and 2) we can probably find more people who can manage that than whatever Azure solution you’re using

I see no reason for getting locked in for something like logs. We actually did that with AWS Cloudwatch at some point and it was a horrible experience

I can't speak for the whole platform but when we were having problems with S3 uploads, I evaluated both GCP and Azure. Both were better and Azure seemed best possibly because they didn't have different tiered services (only the good one). We ended up going with GCP at the time because of specifics of resumable uploads IIRC.

Azure has multiple tiers of almost everything.

A couple of examples:

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-sku-ti...

- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-servic...

Curious to hear more of your thoughts on Application Insights.

I've always been fond of it due to how much it gives you straight out of the box.

I'm on AWS now and sadly it doesn't seem to compare whatsoever. A custom solution seems like it would take a fair bit of effort just to reach basic parity.

I haven’t done much with Azure. Out of curiosity, do they offer any AWS API compatible service, in the same way that Backblaze B2 has an S3 compatible API?

Azure Blob Storage is S3 compatible I think

Imagine bragging about full vendor lock-In

> Imagine bragging about full vendor lock-In

As a dev I agree with you entirely.

However for a business this is very definitely a valid stance to take (as covered by some sibling posts). To dismiss it out of hand is a failure to accept that business priorities and concerns can, and often do, differ from technical ones.

> Because it is a legitimately good platform

Are you a business consultant for MS

I had to check your post history to confirm you’re the same person who was preaching Microsoft in the thread yesterday. You’ve got a major case of Stockholm syndrome bröther.

Please don't cross into personal attack.

We've had to warn you about that before, and also about other guideline violations recently. Could you please review the rules and stick to them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html