Discussion

How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

brcmthrowaway: What an epic takedown.Microsoft should have promoted this guy instead of laying him off.Did Microsoft really lose OpenAI as a customer?

axelriet: A former Azure Core engineer’s 6-part account of the technical and leadership decisions that eroded trust in Azure.

AceJohnny2: I downvoted this comment for sounding like a summarizing LLM, not adding anything substantial beyond the title of the post, before realizing you were the poster and author.

andrewstuart: Any complex system - and these cloud systems must be immensely complex - accumulate cruft and bloat and bugs until the entire thing starts to look like an old hotel that hasn’t been renovated in 30 years.

vintagedave: What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a whistleblower or an ex employee with a grudge? The appearance is the first. Is it? They’ve put their name to some clear and worrying statements.> On January 7, 2025… I sent a more concise executive summary to the CEO. … When those communications produced no acknowledgment, I took the customary step of writing to the Board through the corporate secretary.Why is that customary? I have not come across it, and though I have seen situations of some concern in the past, I previously had little experience with US corporate norms. What is normal here for such a level of concern?More, why is this public not a court case for wrongful termination?Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience?

bigbuppo: The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in their obligations to the company, that's where you need to raise a stink so they can fix it.

pRusya: Azure is when you have a different version of the same product/api in each region.

lokar: He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference?

ludwigvan: I had the misfortune of having to use Azure back in 2018 and was appalled at the lack of quality, slowness. I was in GitHub forums, helping other customers suffering from lack of basic functionality, incredible prices with abysmal performance. This article explains a lot honestly.Google’s Cloud feels like the best engineered one, though lack of proper human support is worrying there compared to AWS.

ninininino: What's your assessment of AWS and GCP? Do you think it's likely they suffer from some of the same issues (eg the manual access of what should be highly secure, private systems, the instability, the lack of security)?

Anon1096: The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with a grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is trying to be made, if there is any.From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly Sev2 is hardly notable for anyone actually working on the foundational infra. There are certainly problems in Azure, but it's huge and rough edges are to be expected. It mostly marches on. IMO maturity is realizing this and working within the system to improve it rather than trying to lay out all the dirty laundry to an Internet audience that will undoubtedly lap it up and happily cry Microslop.Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks to national security and sending letters to the board, really? Azure is still chugging along apparently despite everything being mentioned. People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true.

jiggawatts: > People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true.Or… you’ve just normalised the deviation.One of the few reliable barometers of an organisation (or their products) is the wtf/day exclaimed by new hires.After about three or four weeks everyone adapts, learns what they can and can’t criticise without fallout, and settles into the mud to wallow with everyone else that has become accustomed to the filth.As an Azure user I can tell you that it’s blindingly obvious even from the outside that the engineering quality is rock bottom. Throwing features over the fence as fast as possible to catch up to AWS was clearly the only priority for over a decade and has resulted in a giant ball of mud that now they can’t change because published APIs and offered products must continue to have support for years. Those rushed decisions have painted Azure into a corner.You may puff your chest out, and even take legitimate pride in building the second largest public cloud in the world, but please don’t fool yourself that the quality of this edifice is anything other than rickety and falling apart at the seams.Remind me: can I use IPv6 safely yet? Does it still break Postgres in other networks? Can azcopy actually move files yet, like every other bulk copy tool ever made by man? Can I upgrade a VM in-place to a new SKU without deleting and recreating it to work around your internal Hyper-V cluster API limitations? Premium SSDv2 disks for boot disks… when? Etc…You may list excuses for these quality gaps, but these kinds of things just weren’t an issue anywhere else I’ve worked as far back as twenty years ago! Heck, I built a natively “all IPv6” VMware ESXi cluster over a decade ago!

kraemahz: AWS and Google Cloud are both huge and are significantly better in UX/DX. My only experience with Azure was that it barely worked, provided very little in the way of information about why it didn't. I only have negative impressions of Azure whereas at least GC and AWS I can say my experiences are mixed.

sabedevops: He might sound like he has a grudge but you sound like you’re personally invested. Shill?