On-premise and being miserable having to wait months to get a new server with poor automation, observability and worse outages? To another major cloud provider with similar pricing and outages?
Cloud helped mostly with automation and scaling but if your system is that critical, you should consider a good CDN as load balancer and multi-cloud (or at least multi-region) for actual robustness.
And now layoffs so everyone is super unmotivated! Excellent stuff going on right now from Microsoft senior leadership.
After an AWS outage it would also look non favourably on AWS right?
GCP had a similar thing once, where a BGP update knocked out their Asian regions.
AWS have never had a global outage. (And no, that time S3 in us-east-1 was down wasn't a global outage, the only customer code/workloads that were impacted was code interacting with S3 that didn't specify the region and had to rely on us-east-1 to determine it, and it didn't work anymore)
Maybe the book is just "AD brings in the money" but wow, they sure bring it down as well. Global outages like that always stink of AD.
I don't know if it's the right interpretation to have, but I kind of agreed with it, considering huge issues I had with teams (curiously some of them are only there for linux users, weird when considering the fact that I only use teams' web page) - not saying I could do better though!
This made me laugh out loud. I'm working in a multi-tenant, multi-subscription environment with Azure AD just now. MS force you to use 2FA and I picked the wrong 2FA app.
Now it's completely and utterly comical trying to work out which generated 2FA auth code I need to key in when auth'ing in Visual Studio because there are absolutely no visual cues as to which subscription it's trying to authenticate to. You can't tell VS that "I'm only interested in auth'ing to this particular subscription". Now it prompts me for almost every subscription we use and it's a whack-a-mole experience. They really need to fix the UI/UX in VS for this.
Of course when it comes to mandatory password change time I have to go through this pain all over again.
I don’t yet have enough context to fully evaluate against cognito. It may end up being nice to have B2C as a first class AAD tenant, but until I get far enough along to realize those benefits, there will be a lot more cursing under my breath about the need for another layer of identity and the lack of control plane access through azure resource manager APIs/tooling.
You'd really have to try to make it so screwy.
It kind of a shame. Like most things, Azure was better when it was smaller. I loved the first version of functions.
What a PITA.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastruct...
Location: Chennai, India
I'm making the effort to learn it in increasing detail as it's the company-wide chosen system. I'm interested to know what made / makes it a nightmare for anyone else.
(And I'm no fan of Microsoft as a whole)
Because I think it's clear that their status page is useless and "manual".
Microsoft has some great domain planning.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/u...
Also a personal favorite of mine: http://microsft.com (not entirely sure if its just to prevent typosquatting or if this is actually used in some products)
I know this because I was one of those admins trying to plug the leaks.
Windows 10 + Office uses 200+ domains just for Microsoft stuff, of which something like 120 are for telemetry.
Including O365, Azure, Azure Devops.
Does anyone have any general ideas on what kind of outage manifests itself like this? Devices retrying to authenticate every 30 minutes and finding the service is down perhaps?
Oh please. Azure is plenty capable of taking themselves offline on their own.
Azure, Teams, Outlook are almost down from Greece and Germany, and their status page shows that everything is fine :-)
It's about contractual obligations and SLAs. Things are not officially down in most agreements until MSFT acknowledges they're down. Refunds issued because your blob storage failed to meet 99.9999 uptime to your largest customers are directly tied to these statuses.
If it's a false positive they just resolve it without it affecting SLA and if it's a real problem then us customers wouldn't have to debug our own stack for 2 hours before Microsoft informs us that they are the problem.
EDIT: Wonder how many man-years of extra debugging work their non-working status page have caused the customers.
Works equally well. See the point?
(1) The monitoring system would be altered to ignore tests that return false positives (at the expense of missing the alert when it represents an outage).
(2) Fixing the monitoring. It wasn't working for the sysadmins/operators, anyway, since it had so many false positives that their "mental model" was essentially based on (1), anyway.
At least, where I've forced the issue of doing just this, that's exactly what happened. At the end of the day, especially since SLAs took a hit and that affected bonus payouts, monitoring got a lot better -- as did overall team function when we truly realized how bad things were -- we stopped doing workarounds and started fixing problems at a more fundamental level which led to SLAs that were both accurate and excellent.
It helped bring attention to a hidden problem which resulted in time being allocated to fix tests that dropped constant false-positives and to evaluate each for whether or not it should exist in the first place.
And so updates to the status page become political and locked behind senior management approvals.. like AWS.
Thats not the goal.
> It's hard to see how the goal here could be anything other than trying to add plausible deniability for what would otherwise be obvious deception
Thats the goal. The "status page" is considered the source of truth for most of the big contracts. If status-page=OK then your contract with them isn't violated. So changing the status page is a big deal, with real financial implications. The status page isn't a view into the SRE's tickets, its a declaration that the service isn't being provided.
I disagree. What if you're having issues and the status page is incorrectly reporting an incident? It would be easy to waste a load of time waiting for the status page to sort itself out, only to find out you've still got an issue.
It's weird how slow they are with manual sign-off though.
I'm joking, but...
I guess many developers do not use Azure voluntarily but are forced to by their companies (or customers).
It's utter shit of a service. Even worse if you need to write integrations for it
Lots of MSSQL and PowerBI licenses, lots of other Windows env features. Great deals to bundle those in w/ Azure deployments.
Great pricing too -- for the first 3 years. But at 4 years...
I tried it a couple of years ago. After finishing the trial, I removed all instances and disks, supposedly completely blanking the account. And also supposedly deleted the account.
To this day, I still keep receiving some kind of invoice for about $2 USD that they say I owe. And when I login into the "oracle cloud account" nothing works because my account seems to be half-deleted. (like I get error screens when accessing several of their piece of shit panels).
To make things worse, suddenly I started receiving emails from some of their sales team in Portuguese, I guess that my last name sounds kind of Portuguese so someone say, yeah, you write to him.
And while using their system I was not really impressed. Their cost structure was weirder than AWS (and that's saying something) and to mount a volume in an instance you had to do some funky commands.
I would NEVER trust business technology to that sort of system.
Shit is expensive as hell
For the same money I could rent some weak linux box for a year
Or something decent for a month
Edit 10ms
You do realize what you setup in that tutorial right? A kubernetes cluster with 11 full scale microservices that are dimensioned so they can serve the average medium size business. For only a hobby this is huuuuuuugely overdimensioned.
If you were to do the same on azure, it would cost more. If you are comparing it to a cheap linux box, what the hell are you using kubernetes clusters for then?
Ive ran it for 4 times miltiplied by 5minutes + time needed for it to wake up
All im saying is that it is expensive for such a small usage
Sure, buyer beware but is it reasonable that a clearly marked demo project is set up with services to that level of resourcing?
Nobody is going to take a demo like that and start running a business off it tomorrow.
If somebody gives you keys to a Ferrari, don't blame the manufacturer when you drive it off a cliff at 120 miles/hour...
Ferrari analogy would be something like being billed 100usd for 1min ride
The monthly $60-$100 developer credit was fantastic as well. It avoided the usual fighting for approval/budget to test things out.
Add to that that AWS dont really engage in the normal business to business sales process but simple gives you a price list and tells you "thats what it costs" pretty much straight up and it's no surprise a lot of traditional enterprises with huge existing Microsoft bills end up with the vendor they know, understand and think they can control.
It's not that there is anything really wrong with AWS their support is good their products work but it's a messy platform where you really need to pay attention and might even engage with consultant to fully understand what your paying for and how optimization decisions is affecting your ROI as everything is priced individually in AWS where as Azure does a bit more bundling into packages.
Since many companies rely on it, especially for role base access to internal resources, you can't avoid it as a developer/employee.
Microsoft just has found how to sell Azure: scare compliance teams that AWS and GCP are horrible, especially in EU and banking. Use their office monopoly to give huge discounts if you buy as a bundle, and be awesome on comparison charts. They check all the boxes of services they offer. For an exec, it doesn't count how well those services are executed, thats a developer problem that a system integrator will solve.
And yet it continues to rake in billions + grow 20-40% month over month (even if it is slowing)
In 7 years we had one AWS AZ outage and we didn't even notice because our monitoring platform in there couldn't reach the network (learned something!). But nothing broke. Even the us-east-1 outages didn't affect us.
So many half baked features and legitimate bugs in their platform that they either don’t fix or take years to fix.
While Google, Amazon and others were busy complaining about GDPR, Microsoft was busy working on being compliant, with the result that today they're pretty much the only legal/compliant solution in most of the EU.
The more regulated the industry (health, finance, etc), the more you can be certain that it's running on Azure if it's EU based and running in the cloud.
All to say, I agree wholeheartedly with every word.
Did Windows ME and Windows Vista also work really great for you?
Windows Vista was honestly worse for me, not due to bugs but for being two years ahead the curve of hardware, and GPU vendors seemingly rolling their thumbs during betas and once WDDM¹ went live, they panicked and rolled out alpha quality work. So many driver crashes compounded with the heavy RAM requirements... Other than that, and with less of an UAC nazi, I could see an OS that was similar to what Windows 7 became if I squinted. Hardware had caught up, drivers were mature, and on top Microsoft optimized its performance.
In hindsight, WDDM should've been an update to Windows XP that could be rolled out well in advance and let developers focus on a single thing rather than new OS compatibility on top, and deep changes like UAC.
¹ It was necessary work though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model
As for Vista, while I did not use it in its day I can tell its problems were far more to do with crapass hardware manufacturers and their crapass drivers. Vista with access to 7's drivers and hardware runs just fine.
We have actively pushed for AWS or even GCP but it's futile when it doesn't align with business. I'd imagine a lot of developers are facing the same company issues.
Azure is a chore compared to AWS.
