I love me some AWS, but my god every time I have to dive into an unfamiliar environment and try and reverse engineer how everything connects - I need a drink afterwards.
AWS UIs are generally snappy and smartly designed individually, but they are horrendously organized at the general level. AWS is built as if you are exploring a relational DB containing your resources, instead of a deployment tree.
Your VM doesn't have a NIC in AWS, it has a foreign key to your entire VPC's NIC table, which lives in the VPC service, not the EC2 service. And then your NIC doesn't have an associated subnet, it has a foreign key to the subnet. And then when you get to the subnet table, you look up the routing tables table, and finally in the routing tables table, you'll find the settings for the routing table. This all works through following links, but the constant context switching and tabs upon tabs that AWS UI requires are extremely unpleasant for me at least to use. I'll take Azure's sluggish UI that organizes all of this in one-two pages instead of four any day.
In all seriousness, even in the face of IAC, the one thing Azure can do that AWS can't [at the time this happened to me], is have a global view of everything that's running right now and costing me money. It was years back, it was a $5 bill, but the principle of it had me livid. I did my best to tear down everything after my evaluation, yet something was squirreled away costing money.
So yeah, absolutely, sluggish UI all the way (I also find the Amazon storefront profoundly ugly and disorganized).
If you click an instance and go to its networking tab you get a list of ENI IDs that are clickable links to the resource, same for vpc and subnet. If you click subnet you can just click the route table tab, so if you're on an instances networking tab the route table is 2 clicks away.
But rather than doing this you could use reachability analyzer that allows you to check routing tables and security groups for a source and destination IP/resource and port on same or different VPCs connected with peering or TGW and it will tell you if you're missing routes or SG rules in either direction. I created a slackbot that allowed our devs to input src/dst IP/domain and port an that used this API to do the check for them, saved a lot of time troubleshooting.
I had an absolutely horrendous time working in Azure a few years ago (as a network engineer), we did have quite a complex setup with custom route tables and Azure Firewall though and VPN connectivity between Azure and AWS, but stuff like their VPN gateway taking 40+ minutes to change instance size on, wtf? I've filed 2-3 bugs to AWS in the almost 10 years I've worked with it, all for newly created APIs/services, they were all fixed within a week or two. I filed 8+ bugs to Azure in the first month using them, none of them were fixed as they had workarounds instead. And their documentation is absolutely useless, I could never trust that I understood what I read correctly, I always had to verify that it worked that way by testing it.
Azure's APIs are atrociously slow. Azure's UI design is pretty nice. There's not much the UI designers can do about their API colleagues.
I don't understand how dumb you must be to design a web site that way. It's like a brewery that sells their beer in plastic shopping bags and thinks that's good.
and
> The one time I tried out azure for a few days the portal was absolutely painful.
conflict with each other. Here's what you sound like:
"I don't believe you because I have very little experience in something and it doesn't comport with that."
* WHEN the resource was created * nor WHO created the resource
IMHO this is unforgiveable, but on second though, it is probably intentional rather than any sort of oversight.
A great thing about mice is that they are fungible and don't change without the user's consent, unlike software, so you can keep buying and using the same mouse forever.
The average mouse of the time was blocky and uncomfortable.
"Here...don't miss this settings page! Seriously! Look!"
In practise, even the good ideas are implemented poorly.
I wouldn't have believed it, but while testing out a server for a business, they deleted my account, and didn't reply when I emailed support about it.
I am quite surprised to hear someone say this. MS documentation has a horrible reputation that is well-deserved and and in my direct experience the docs for Azure are much like any other MS docs (incomplete, out-of-date and poorly organized -- usually all three at once)