Comment by FreezeInTheDark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreezeInTheDark | Hacker News Reader

FreezeInTheDark

One thing that strikes me about the author's experience is how unusable Azure appears to be in all this. Like, this hits somewhat close to me as I also run a couple web projects, also written in Rust, on a serverless architecture, and frankly couldn't imagine wanting to spend the time to run them any other way. AWS Lambda for compute, and Dynamo for DB, have a perpetual free tier and it's been running practically without me touching it for years.

The AWS Rust SDK also seemed very mature to me when I was using it ... compare to:

>the only option for a database instance with a free plan was [...] serverless Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

>the MSSQL connection required TLS and this hadn’t been implemented in the sqlx connector I chose to use for my Rust-based functions. I wasted two weeks implementing TLS support in sqlx

That is insane. Not to mention the later bit with sudden, unexplained availability and the only hint that it might to be related to a _future_ deprecation? Like, imagine if this were a critical service for you. Professional malpractice on Microsoft's part.

This isn't really the main point of the article, and I did find the stuff on self-hosting interesting, but it does seem like this could have been avoided if Azure had lived up to its peers.

At $DAYJOB, we used to have a few internal use Azure Functions (which we’ve migrated to AWS Lambda). My favourite Azure weirdness was a warning message that said some Blob Storage-related thing was about to expire. We hadn’t set up any Blob Storage, the Azure Functions .NET deployment thing we used did. And apparently, there was an encryption key or something with an expiry of 1 year. It seems that Microsoft did not expect code to just work and not need to be redeployed for that long.

Azure Functions use Azure Storage to store its metadata.

There's not enough information to come to a conclusion as to what the 503s originated from. There is enough information for manufactured outrage, of course.

I don't see why one would want to run in-the-clear over the Azure network for SQL connections.

The author was doing hobby projects. Granted, hobby projects should run on any platform, but Azure seems to have less of that free tier you can get elsewhere.

Oh for sure you want to use TLS, what's insane is the developer experience of needing to implement it yourself.

The author chose a library that didn't support TLS, written by a company that isn't Microsoft. Terrible devex indeed but hard to see why that's the fault of the platform that required TLS.

> There's not enough information to come to a conclusion as to what the 503s originated from.

It's the MS way. I remember writing some code for MS graph and wondering why the hell it isn't working, I'm doing near same thing that doc example did. Nonsense generic error message. Left for the day, ran code next morning, everything works fine.

No message saying "hey the thing behind it is down", just error that was generic enough that it could be my inputs being wrong.

The author did not make any statements that would lead to the conclusion the issue is lack of information provided by the platform, simply they do not state any troubleshooting steps taken.

I've seen these mysterious and unexplained 503s occur

Solution:

1. Delete Function App

2. Deploy again

3. Profit?

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