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Comment by Syntaf | Hacker News Reader

There was a great article awhile back that shed some light on just how dysfunctional azure is as a platform: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

If I had to guess it's because Github is sitting on top on infrastructure held up by toothpicks and duct tape

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Which is somewhat humorous because it was arguably more stable when they ran on their own hosted colo infra before moving to Azure. This was a choice versus keeping the infra compartmentalized and using Azure for elastic overflow compute needs. I'm sure marketing and bonuses rest on throwing it all on the Azure quicksand though.

GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173 - October 2025 (63 comments)

It pleases shareholders more to hear about exponential Cloud offering adoption than SLA availability for a developer platform.

Except, lots of devs use github, and see what using Azure means. Management is seeing that downtime too. So what insane person will ever touch Azure willingly?

Hotmail used to run on bsd, and they tried to move it to WinNT, back in the day. Same thing. Disaster. And it was held up as a reason to never use winnt for serious work, for years.

Microsoft just always shoots themselves in the foot.

> So what insane person will ever touch Azure willingly?

The nobody-got-fired-for-choosing-Microsoft crowd. And they don’t look few and far between.

And also the most important few thousand accounts will get custom support and all sorts of patchwork and MS will put the effort to solve all their problems. So the customers that matter to MS are likely having a great time on azure. And for every ten thousand of us chums that leave azure, there's probably one sweetheart deal won through wine and dine that more than compensates.

I think my age group (~40) is the tail end of widespread dogmatic trust in Microsoft. Once we retire I think they are going to be in serious trouble.

They don't need dogmatic trust, just oligopolies and monopolies.

Dunno that's my experience with most businesses. I doubt AWS is that much better under the hood.

Haven't worked in AWS but as a customer of AWS, GCP, and Azure there is a quite a difference between running workloads that are doing long-running computations on AWS (on demand is so rock solid that loosing a box is a rarity, I run on spot and still complete almost all of my runs) and running on Azure's "on-demand" style offering feels like spot (or worse) on AWS.

> on demand is so rock solid that loosing a box is a rarit

Maybe this really depends on region, but I can't say this is true. I've experienced tons of hardware failures that have caused instances to throw weird errors, instances to randomly stop, instances to randomly disappear (along with their corresponding EBS volume).

Standard EBS volumes are only 99.8% durable. If you run a lot of instances on EBS, some of them will disappear.

GCP meanwhile has balanced zonal PDs (not even regional, zonal) at >99.999% durability.

I've never lost a disk on GCP, I've never even had an instance stop once without me telling it to stop.

Azure is absolutely a hot mess though. Had a VM a client was paying for backups on. Couldn't restore the backup because they changed generations of VM platforms too many times, literally no way to restore it. Had to get their support to eventually give me a .vhd that magically appeared in a OneDrive share a few days after asking about it.

If that is truth its scary of how many projects use that cause it's supposed to be reliable.

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