Errors from Microsoft's Cloud

I know multiple customers with significant free Azure credit that prefer to pay for Google Cloud or AWS over using Azure for anything critical.<p>The management system is a mess - the new portal is nutty and slow. The old one lacks key features and operations are still slow. I can&#x27;t understate how frustrating and time consuming this is. Maybe I&#x27;m using it wrong, but whatever. Using GCP is a blast of fresh air - light, fast, straightforward.<p>VMs are way overpriced and have poor performance. Windows boxes not-so-infrequently get stuck during reboot, and we were told to resize them to get them going again. &quot;Premium&quot; storage aka SSDs have a terrible design. The temp disk system is nonsensical. It just goes on and on.<p>It&#x27;s obvious Azure is a great play for MS. They need to convert their enterprise customers that were spending tons on MS before to spending tons on MS online. And I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll do fine there (recent earnings confirm?).

There <i>are</i> a few issues, but to be fair I&#x27;ve encountered similar things in all the cloud and VPS hosting services I&#x27;ve used. However, I do remember that I was once trying to push Azure as a solution and they promptly had an outage. We went with AWS instead. It&#x27;s not that AWS don&#x27;t have outages, they do, just that the timing was really bad.<p>Also, don&#x27;t use the preview services in Azure apart from to try them out. They really are previews.<p>I&#x27;ve recently written a three part series of blog posts on AWS vs Azure. The third part, on pricing, is out today.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unop.uk&#x2F;on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-confusion-part-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unop.uk&#x2F;on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...</a><p>Edit: One plus of Azure (at least for me) is that it runs on renewable energy. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;csr&#x2F;environment&#x2F;renewable_energy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;csr&#x2F;environment&#x2F;renewable_en...</a>

In the month we trailed it we found there were so many internal networking and performance problems. I went with with a suspiciously optimistic attitude as I am experienced systems delivery engineer and I don&#x27;t find windows especially in the server special at all reverent these years, but I tried to objectify Jude it as a platform. Ill tell you what - it&#x27;s built to make money for the backers - it&#x27;s not built out of passion for quality or creativity. The amount of unexplained outages they deny or avoid with low even phone support desks. I would estimate that approximately 90% of the outages we noticed (all platform &#x2F; service related in the Asia&#x2F;Pac regions) would never appear on their service status pages. We also have been trialling office365 which runs on the platform. We measured from 2015-2016 we only had 94% availability of service with about a 1-3%&#x2F;100% margin of error due to monitoring resolution etc.... data corruption, internal CA and NTP problems clearly show from the underlying PaaS, you see things bouncing around a bunch of badly related windows servers barely grasping the idea of modern virtualisation and application abstraction and purely built to make the fat fatter and as I said not out of passion.

Some of these seem a bit unfair to Azure, but this one was pretty amusing:<p><pre><code> User Impact: Users may be unable to activate or use SharePoint Online Sandbox Solutions. This may include event receivers, workflows, web parts, feature receivers, and InfoPath forms. Scope of Impact: While we&#x27;re not aware of any customer reports of impact, our monitoring indicates that any user attempting to activate or use this feature will be affected. </code></pre> Doh!

I agree (with Azure not being ready for primetime).<p>Their subscription page is incredibly slow: I timed it taking 17 seconds to load! <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forwardscattering.org&#x2F;post&#x2F;41" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forwardscattering.org&#x2F;post&#x2F;41</a><p>After using some Azure VMs, I found there was still some storage devices or something on my account, several hundred of them. I tried to delete them through the Azure website, but you can only do it one at a time, and each deletion requires several clicks!<p>So I gave up and tried to use their powershell interface to delete them, but kept getting complicated errors. Eventually I decided f*ck this, and just deleted my Azure account. They&#x27;re still sending me emails.

The localization one, with all of the languages, is that really a bad thing to do on an error page?<p>Apple does the same thing in some of their UIs.<p>If it&#x27;s a brand new experience (like a user manual, or first logon), or you&#x27;re in an error state - might you not know the locale of the user, or have failed to load the correct es-MX.json strings file or whatever it&#x27;s called?

Some of those are scary. Our team runs everything on Azure, for over 2 years now, and I&#x27;ve only seen one outage that lasted maybe 30 minutes. Maybe we&#x27;re lucky to be running in a good region, or not at some massive scale. Our biggest issues come from figuring out edge cases with new features that aren&#x27;t well documented yet. That and the cost of using some features like Machine Learning makes it unfeasible for a team company our size. Azure Functions and API Management is sweet though.

I haven&#x27;t tried many of Azure&#x27;s more advanced features, but I&#x27;ve found the admin interface to be a pain. The series of UWP&#x2F;Metro style panels and flat design has been a bit clunky and non-intuitive when I&#x27;ve had to use it.<p>I don&#x27;t intend that as a slight against anyone who works on the Azure admin UI. I realize that trying to create an interface to a complex set of services is no easy task.

Makes you wonder if this is anecdotal or rather the common experience for most of the users with a pretty big stack on there? I&#x27;ve used Azure solely for running like the cheapest plan for an Ubuntu VM and it has been flawless for that.

I tried to use Azure and found it to be a complete non-starter.<p>Stay away from this mess if you value both your sanity and productivity. Microsoft is still raking in the money from big companies who have people working for them who LOVE to work on these kinds of things. It distracts them from actually getting any real work done.<p>You know, the kinds of people who love to say &quot;I&#x27;m blocked&quot; at their standups.

Azure isn&#x27;t ready because it throws errors sometimes? Welcome to the cloud. I only have limited experience with Google Cloud, but AWS has its share of issues like any other piece of software.<p>With Azure at least MS appears to be attempting some useful error messaging.

Azure has some pretty neat tech but their UI and CLI tools are the worst of all cloud platforms (and I&#x27;ve used everything from AWS, GCP to DO and Softlayer). They&#x27;re always slow, confusing and hard to use.<p>Considering this is how you interact with the platform, I&#x27;m always surprised why they don&#x27;t devote more of their considerable resources to just fixing this. It can&#x27;t take more than a few weeks to revamp the whole thing. Seems more like political and management problems on their end than any tech issues.

If you tried using Azure you were met with two different web interfaces who are <i>mutually exclusive</i> (by this I mean you can&#x27;t manage resources created in one via the other) plus MANY CLI tools with overlapping capabilities.. Finding the relevant documentation can be a pain at the least.. We were trialling it as we got it for free, and got off of it as soon as we got the AWS free start-up package.

The 404 error page that was actually localized to several languages looked pretty useful. I don&#x27;t understand the problem with that page.

These are mostly issues with the two web portals. The portal is awkward and slow, and doesn&#x27;t have a table view of my stuff. Azure has been fine for us for provisioning vms via pythons scripting. Of course, the API suffers the same problems as the portals, there are two, and it&#x27;s kind of awkward and slow. Neither is it well documented. (I <i>had</i> to use an undocumented feature for months for something basic... Might have been auth with the certificate. I&#x27;d also say azure is the slowest out of it, gce, and aws for provisioning a VM and installing a bunch of crap. I don&#x27;t have real data, just been my impression comparing similar cost plans. That said, it does run Linux VMs.<p>The main shocking thing for me was learning that for all of these cloud APIs the calls fail with regularity, and you can waste a lot of time retrying shrugging &quot;we dunno what happened&quot; server side API problems.

I used to use Azure as Digital Ocean++ (As a student and a MSP , I got around ~$200&#x2F;m credits to play around with on it) and it worked great.<p>However, after their facelift (the new portal), they are trying to be more like AWS and I found it significantly more complicated to do simple stuff (like adding ports, or load balancing) that was much easier before. Furthermore, I find AWS easier to use (maybe because of it being more popular and having more people blogging about it) compared to Azure.<p>The point of this comment is...Azure is an awesome platform if used as a Digital Ocean++ for now (and if you can afford it), otherwise I have personally found AWS and GC much easier to use (and cheaper in some cases).<p>Disclosure: I used to work as an MS Evangelist &amp; was an MSP.

Most annoying thing - is that Azure unable to transfer account subscriptions region.<p>I&#x27;ve relocated from one country to another, and only option I have - is to create new Microsoft account with different not seen by MS credit card.

With apologies to the anonymous wag(s) who long ago composed Windows desktop error messages in haiku format [1]:<p><pre><code> Windows Azure crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams. </code></pre> In fairness, I should note that I&#x27;ve personally had no problems with Microsoft cloud services.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;soler7.com&#x2F;IFAQ&#x2F;WindowsErrorHaiku.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;soler7.com&#x2F;IFAQ&#x2F;WindowsErrorHaiku.html</a>

We&#x27;re looking into making a migration to Azure.<p>I was hoping to get insights from HN on the following:<p>- Using Azure CLI instead of Portal UI for standing up infrastructure.<p>- General DevOps tooling support on Azure (Terraform, SaltStack etc...)<p>- Reliability of Azure in general.<p>Azure seems to be moving fast to catch up to GCP and AWS so we&#x27;re optimistic about it in the upcoming years.

Must say I disagree with most of the comments here. I use both Azure and AWS and would choose Azure every day of the week. The Azure portal UX does look like it was designed by designers, but the AWS portal feels like it was designed by developers, totally unintuitive. Something in the middle would be better, like the old Azure Management.

My favorite is if I try to login to my Office 365 account from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;products.office.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;products.office.com</a> and &quot;sucessfully&quot; login then every page on that subdomain starts giving Runtime Error.

Yes. This. My own horror story: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rollc.at&#x2F;tech&#x2F;azure-no.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rollc.at&#x2F;tech&#x2F;azure-no.html</a>

I tried to sign my son up for Xbox Live from several devices over several days, and all I ever got was a generic error page.

Can&#x27;t zoom in on the images on iPhone for some reason.