Comment by anonymsft318 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymsft318 | Hacker News Reader

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As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this.

We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it.

We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth?

We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.)

I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out.

These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-dat...

> I probably have five different systems

This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.

And now slap widespread vibe coding and PRs that reviewed by LLMs without anyone giving it a proper look.

We are now definitely doing a lot of that. My manager has been saying things like, "I don't even know how it works, but I used AI to build [thing], and I just sent it to a PR." He's very strong technically, but the mindset has absolutely shifted to, "move fast and break things, yoloooooo". It's frustrating to say the least.

And most of that is done on Macbooks by people that either can not or will not use Windows OS.

I don't mean this as a jab, but would you use Windows to develop software? Especially Windows that has AD teeth sunk into it where everything is "managed by your organization." It's just a thousand small cuts for seemingly no good reason.

>>but would you use Windows to develop software?

I'm a c++ developer and I wouldn't use anything other than Windows to develop software, for one reason alone - Visual Studio is a fantastic tool that is better than any IDE I have ever tried it and imho it's the best product Microsoft makes. It just works and works well. And most console toolchains are only on Windows, so outside of iOS development I don't really have a choice.

No, but I also wouldn't let people who do not understand the soul of the OS to rewrite it.

If I were the microslop god for 6 weeks, I would force everyone to go to a boot camp and use Windows 7 for 4 of those weeks so they could see what made it so good.

No invasiveness, an OS that felt like yours. Just enough eye candy to not be distracting but to also feel like a clean modern system. Low system usage at idle. Calm, clean, and ready to roll when you clicked a button.

Windows is NEVER going to be MacOS, but the dev teams seem obsessed with macifying windows while also wedging that AI abomination copilot into every line of code, so windows is getting a tag team of rapid enshittification on top of already having been massively enshittified, and at least some portion of it is due to the people being paid to make it not understanding what it is supposed to be, the niche it held, and the reason for windows existence.

With no soul, windows has to go.

Wait, is this true? I would have imagined unless it’s about porting software or testing it, everyone would be forced to use Windows.

If it is true, wonder what the proportion is then: 25%, 50%?

It's not true. Source - me, MSFT for 25 years.

Yes, because you know what all of the 200,000+ employees are doing in every wing and branch of the entire company.

Then again, Microsoft themselves directly dispute your statement:

Across the landscape of more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft, we support Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices. Windows devices account for approximately 60 percent of the total employee-device population, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Our employees are empowered to access Microsoft data and tools using managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.

https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/evolving-the-devi...

Not to mention that most app designers use OSX for the design tools, which means that there is going to be by default some bleed between the two systems on design choices alone.

> while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are

Pretty much everyone has an android or iOS device in their pocket. A lot of those devices are enrolled into Microsoft MDM in order to access email/teams/etc. These phones are part of the stats. Dev work in general is done on Windows boxes, unless you are in specific teams that have other requirements. Default is Windows, specifically Windows laptop.

200,000+ windows devices issued by the company.

200,000+ phones.

Worst case somewhere around 50,000-150,000 tablets.

That leaves ~200,000 unaccounted for devices with only macOS on the table. I think the saturation is higher than you have experienced, although I'll give that it's entirely possible that the areas you worked in were not one of them.

Have you worked in those areas with high saturation ?

I’ve seen Microsoft employees run public presentations from MacBooks on multiple occasions.

> I’ve seen Microsoft employees run public presentations from MacBooks on multiple occasions.

This is specifically done to show that Microsoft tech eg .net is not tied to Windows.

Ugh this sounds like when I worked at Oracle/OCI. Some environments required a VPN, some a jumpbox, and some required logging into a virtual desktop, and then logging into a jumpbox. Just thinking about it gives me PTSD

any sufficiently large organization that is around for a decade or two trends towards spaghetti-access

Yup, same boat here (mid-size company).

All the corporate stuff is behind Okta, so that easy enough.

But all the dev/test systems are a mix of SSO, individual logins, etc. At least they're all behind the same VPN (except when they aren't, but that's less common).

And of course, if you're a cloud engineer (vs "normal" software engineer), you also have to deal with AWS access, which is a whole different can of worms.

And yet, somehow AWS managed to get this right-ish. They evolved, learned by making mistakes, and created de-facto standards (like object storage protocol) on the way, while at the same time supporting decades-old services. And I'm sure they'll withstand the current AI craze.

AWS had the benefit of not trying to retrofit IaaS on top of a (already bad) PaaS.

Does Google have good SSO internally? Or Facebook?

(excluding things like administration of organization-wide infrastructure key material)

So the problem is the team size, not culture?

Their support team likes to sit on things for a while too. I'm on day 4 of waiting for Azure to approve my support request to increase Azure Batch vCPUs from default of 4 to 20 for ESv3 series. I signed up last week and converted to a paid account. I'm going to use Google Cloud Batch today instead.

You’ve made a fundamental mistake and you’ll have the same result from every cloud provider.

You’re using a legacy v3 series that is being removed from the data centres in an era where you could be using v6 or newer instances that are being freshly deployed and are readily available.

If you can’t be bothered to keep an eye on these absolute basics, you’re going to have a rough time with any public cloud, no matter their logo design.

Right now you're paying more for less compute and having to deal with low availability too! Go read the docs and catch up to the last decade of virtual hardware changes.

Or, just run this and pick a size:

    Get-AzBatchSupportedVMSku -Location 'centralus' | `
    ? Name -like 'Standard_E*v[67]'

Thanks I will try that!

So the internal Cosmos DB has nothing to do with Cosmos DB the Azure product, which was an unwieldy assemblage of a graph DB, a NoSQL DB, a time series DB and an RDBMS last time I looked at it, but seems to have morphed into a "vector DB for AI" according to today's marketing?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cosmos-db

Ah, I remember Cosmos and SCOPE from my time at MS ~15 years ago! It was actually pretty cool technology. So is it still around?

Make it 7, there's also the Sentinel datalake or whatever now!

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