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Comment by asylteltine | Hacker News Reader

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having used azure after long stints with AWS and GCP. I found Resource Groups a much more logical bucket, moreso than anything on AWS/GCP

Have you ever set up a AzureAD Tenant that can be used with Auth0 to validate any Office365 user (without setting up a specific connection to their own AD/Tenant)? I'm having trouble doing this and so any time I'm on a forum where someone seems to exhibit some experience with Azure, I ask for help. Can pay. DM me if interested, pls.

> pls

Lmao, almost spit out my coffee. Sorry, hope you find help.

Aws doesn't have resource groups because AWS regions are purly independant and tries to maintain that as a tenet.

Since azure resource groups has resources that spans regions, azure violates this tenet or maybe it's just not a tenet for them.

Unfortunately, resource groups seems to be the only thing going for it (imo of course). AWS does have resource groups but have not used them

In Aws, you can pay for "premium support" and get help from them for issues like this. Can even pay, get help and then cancel the sub, it's like $50 for the month.

Maybe azure has an equivalent.

Resource groups are fine, but it is quite unclear why a group has a region when resources with in may be in other regions.

The object has to be in a database in one of the regions I guess.

That is correct. Though all that metadata is replicated

Is there a case where it matters to the user which region their group is in if all of the resources live in a different group of regions?

For public regions, I don’t think so. At worst, there might be a tiny bit of extra latency as the orchestrator works across datacenters. But region is also used by Azure Stack and the rules might be different then. I worked on this a number of years ago and if you are really concerned, you should ask support.

I liked Resource Groups too, but not so much that it changed my (extremely negative, painful) experience using Azure over AWS and GCP.

And yet it's the biggest department with most revenue for Microsoft.

Yes, a product can be bad and a commercial success.

And that's because MS sets up the reporting for it to look that way. You can thank O365.

It's been a while I tried it but I really like that the UI doesn't "cheat" with internal apis.

Sure the UI is horrendous, I'm not going to defend it but you can open the web inspector, see what it's doing and use the exact same apis in your code. I can't say that for AWS.

Isn't that the norm nowadays? I know some early AWS products had logic just for the console, but I also know that that was seen as a huge mistake. I assumed that was industry wide.

Seems like it’s still a bit of an issue. This [1] is rather a long read, but definitely worth it if you are interested in platforms.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

That is a pretty old rant, at this point. Amusingly, google+ doesn't event exist anymore. :D

Maybe I'm odd, but even having more experience with AWS, and even with the UI on AWS being superior, Azure's jargon and organization seems easier to learn than AWS.

Me: I don't get how the GUI is confusing.

Seriously: don't use the GUI. Do you use the GUI for anything else?

Use Az pwsh or Az Cli.

GUIs are nice to set up experiments, knowing what you can set up and changing stuff quickly. For example, setting up a network and a subnet from scratch, creating a VM, connecting to it from the browser and setting up stuff. Could you do that with PowerShell, the CLI, ARM templates or Terraform?

Yes, but it'd be slower since you'd have to go through the docs to find the name of what you're looking for and typing it. Then type another command to see if the changes were applied. Another one to test the result... A huge PITA for experimenting.

Of course, for actual production use, you should definitely have some sort of IaC set up and use that. But for testing or home use (see the tech guy that uses a storage container and Front Door for a static website) the GUI is good enough.

It may surprise you to discover that yes – people use GUIs for things.

Or annoyingly, the GUI is the only way.

Case in point, if you are using Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online, you can do a lot of administrative tasks via PowerShell modules. But if you want to run a report on how many emails a set of mailboxes have received in the past 30 days, the message trace PowerShell command can only do up to the past 10 days. Anything beyond 10 days requires going into the Exchange Online admin portal and requesting a report that Microsoft will generate for you several hours later.

Could you script and schedule say a daily 1 day report, store the result, and have a script to get the last 30 (or whatever you want) days?

That is possible. Annoying that you can get the last 10 days in a second but need to duct tape together something if you never want to interface with the gui and then instead of a few hours you have to collect the data over the entire 30 days (but only after you start doing this).

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