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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

if the service is so shitty, why are people paying so much fucking money for it?

is microsoft committing an accounting fraud?

I worked at a startup that was using Azure. The reason was simple enough - it had been founded by finance people who were used to Excel, so Windows+Office was the non-negotiable first bit of IT they purchased. That created a sales channel Microsoft used to offer generous startup credits. The free money created a structural lack of discipline around spending. Once the startup credits ran out, the company became faced with a huge bill and difficulty motivating people to conserve funds.

At the start I didn't have any strong opinion on what cloud provider to use. I did want to do IT the "old fashioned way" - rent a big ass bare metal or cloud VM, issue UNIX user accounts on it and let people do dev/test/ad hoc servers on that. Very easy to control spending that way, very easy to quickly see what's using the resources and impose limits, link programs to people, etc. I was overruled as obviously old fashioned and not getting with the cloud programme. They ended up bleeding a million dollars a month and the company wasn't even running a SaaS!

I ended up with a very low opinion of Azure. Basic things like TCP connections between VMs would mysteriously hang. We got MS to investigate, they made a token effort and basically just admitted defeat. I raged that this was absurd as working TCP is table stakes for literally any datacenter since the 1980s, but - sad to say - at this time Azure's bad behavior was enabled by a widespread culture of CV farming in which "enterprise" devs were all obsessed with getting cloud tech onto their LinkedIn. Any time we hit bugs or stupidities in the way Azure worked I was told the problem was clearly with the software I'd written, which couldn't be "cloud native", as if it was it'd obviously work fine in Azure!

With attitudes like that completely endemic outside of the tech sector, of course Microsoft learned not to prioritize quality.

We did eventually diversify a bit. We needed to benchmark our server software reliably and that was impossible in Azure because it was so overloaded and full of noisy neighbours, so we rented bare metal servers in OVH to do that. It worked OK.

I have had bad experiences across all major vendors.

The main reason I used to push for Azure instead during the last years was the friendliness of their Web UIs, and having the VS Code integration (it started as an Azure product after all).

Friendliness?

VSCode integration out of the box, that I can understand. But I have a really hard time calling Azure UI "friendly". Everything is behind layers of nested pointy-clicky chains with opaque or flat out misleading names.

To make things worse, their APIs also follow the same design. Everything you actually would want to do is behind a long sequence of pointer-chasing across objects and service/resource managers. Almost as if their APIs were built to directly reflect their planned UI action sequences.

Yes, some of us grew out of the 1970's approach to command line, unless there is no other way.

GCP is the worse some options are only available on the CLI, without any visual feedback on the dashboard.

"Basic things like TCP connections between VMs would mysteriously hang"

This is like a car that can't even get you two blocks from home. Amazing.

Corporate inertia. Sibling comment uses the term "hostage situation" which I admit is pretty apt.

Microsoft is an approved vendor in every large enterprise. That they have been approved for desktop productivity, Sharepoint, email and on-prem systems does not enter the picture. That would be too nuanced.

Dealing with a Large Enterprise[tm] is an exercise in frustration. A particular client had to be deployed to Azure because their estimate was that getting a new cloud vendor approved for production deployments would be a gargantuan 18-to-24 month org-wide and politically fraught process.

If you are a large corp and have to move workloads to the cloud (because let's be honest: maintaining your own data centres and hardware procurement pipelines is a serious drag) then you go with whatever vendor your organisation has approved. And if the only pre-approved vendor with a cloud offering is Microsoft, you use Azure.

The US government’s experts called Azure “a pile of shit”; they got overruled.

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

Because Azure customers are companies that still, in 2026 only use Windows. Anyone else uses something else. Turns out, companies like that don't tend to have the best engineering teams. So moving an entire cloud infrastructure from Azure to say AWS, probably is either really expensive, really risky or too disruptive to do for the type of engineering team that Azure customers have. I would expect MS to bleed from this slowly for a long time until they actually fix it. I seriously doubt they ever will but stranger things have happened.

Turns out outside companies shipping software products aspiring to be the next Google or Apple, most companies that work outside software industry also need software to run their business and they couldn't care less about HN technology cool factor.

They use whatever they can to ship their products into trucks, outsourcing their IT and development costs , and that is about it.

Agreed, though only up to a point. Companies that need software to run their business, need that software to run.

When your operations are constantly hampered by Azure outages, and your competitors' are not, you're not going to last if your market is at all competitive. Thankfully for many companies, a lot of markets aren't, I suppose, at least for the actors who have established a successful rent and no longer need to care how their business operations are going.

I have worked at two retail companies where AWS was a no no. They didn't want to have anything depending on a competitor(Amazon). So they went the Azure route.

CFOs love it because Microsoft does bundle pricing with office. Plus they love to give large credits to bootstrap lock-in.

You’re assuming the alternatives don’t have just as many issues. There’s been exactly one “whistleblower” who is probably tiptoeing the line of a lawsuit. I wouldn’t assume just because there isn’t a similar disgruntled gcp or aws engineer doesn't mean they don't have similar ways.

this made me look into how cloud hypervisors actually work on HW level.. they all offload it to custom HW (smart nic, fpga, dpu, etc..). cpu does almost nothing except for tenant work. AWS -> Nitro, Azure -> FPGA, NVIDIA sells DPUs.

Here is interactive visual guide if anyone wants to explore - https://vectree.io/c/cloud-virtualization-hardware-nitro-cat...

VM management does not run on the FPGA; it’s regular Win32 software on Windows, with aspirations to run some equivalent, someday, on the SoC next to the FPGA on the NIC. The programmable hardware is used for network paths and PCIe functions, where it can project NICs and NVMe devices to VMs to bypass software-based, VMBus-backed virtual devices, all of which end up being serviced on the host who controls the real hardware. Lookup SR-IOV for the bypass. So yes, that’s I/O bypass/offload, but the VM management stack offload is a distinct thing that does not require an FPGA, just a SoC.

most the upper management of companies who use them have dont have the technical competence to see it. (eg: banks, supermarket chains, manufacturing companies)

once they are in, no one likes to admit they made a mistake.

Depending on the space you work in, you have almost no choice at all. If you're building for government then you're going to use Microsoft, almost "end of story".

It’s more of a hostage situation.

Yeah it’s entirely business people and executives who make these decisions in most companies. Not the ones who use it or implement on it.

Because the alternatives are also in similar state.

AWS or GCP are all pretty crap. You use any of them, any you'll hit just enough rough edges. The whole industry is just grinding out slop, quality is not important anywhere.

I work with AWS on a daily basis, and I'm not really impressed. (Also nor did GCP impress me on the short encounter I had with it)

I don't know about AWS or the rest of GCP, but in terms of engineering, my experience of GCE was at least an entire order of magnitude better than what the article alleges about Azure. Security and reliability were taken extremely seriously, and the quality of the engineering was world-class. I hope it has stayed like this since then. It was a worthwhile thing to experience.

This isn't it at all. AWS does not have the same sorts of insane cross-tenancy exploits that Azure has had, for example.

The reason that Azure has so many customers is very simply because Azure is borderline mandated by the US government.

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