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  yoyohello13
  I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every day this would explain so much.The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held together. The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is constantly out of date or wrong. They offer such a huge volume of services it's nearly impossible to figure out what service you actually want/need without consultants, and when you finally get the services up who knows if they actually work as advertised.I'm honestly shocked anything manages to stay working at all.
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  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?
• Manouchehri
  I've seen Azure OpenAI leak other customer's prompt responses to us under heavy load.https://x.com/DaveManouchehri/status/2037001748489949388Nobody seems to care.
• OldOneEye
  Some previous colleague of mine has to work with Azure on their day to day, and everything explained in this article makes a lot of sense when I get to hear about their massive rantings of the platform.12 years ago I had to choose whether to specialize myself in AWS, GCP or Azure, and from my very brief foray with Azure I could see it was an absolute mess of broken, slow and click-ops methodology. This article confirms my suspicions at that time, and my colleague experience.
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  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.
• pRusya
  It's a nice read. Thank you for sharing this.> Microsoft, meanwhile, conducted major layoffs—approximately 15,000 roles across waves in May and July 2025 —most likely to compensate for the immediate losses to CoreWeave ahead of the next earnings calls.This is what people should know when seeing massive layoffs due to AI.
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  nope1000
  > The direct corollary is that any successful compromise of the host can give an attacker access to the complete memory of every VM running on that node. Keeping the host secure is therefore critical.> In that context, hosting a web service that is directly reachable from any guest VM and running it on the secure host side created a significantly larger attack surface than I expected.That is quite scary
• lokar
  This reads pretty bad, and I believe it was. I worked on (and was at least partly responsible for) systems that do the same thing he described. It took constant force of will, fighting, escalation, etc to hold the line and maintain some basic level of stability and engineering practice.And I've worked other places that had problems similar to the core problems described, not quite as severe, and not at the same scale, but bad enough to doom them (IMO) to a death loop they won't recover from.
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  schlauerfox
  "For fiscal 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned total pay of $96.5 million, up 22% from a year earlier." -CNBC.comand"I also see I have 2 instances of Outlook, and neither of those are working." -Artemis II astronaut
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  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.
• thelastgallon
  > That entire 122-strong org was knee-deep in impossible ruminations involving porting Windows to Linux to support their existing VM management agents.> My day-one problem was therefore not to ramp up on new technology, but rather to convince an entire org, up to my skip-skip-level, that they were on a death march.> I later researched this further and found that no one at Microsoft, not a single soul, could articulate why up to 173 agents were needed to manage an Azure nodeThis is most corporates. I'm sure this was celebrated as as a successful project and congratulations to everyone, along with big bonuses, RSU, raises, and promotions, mostly to other orgs to bring this kind of 'success' to other projects (or other companies). These people mostly are gone in less than 2 years. They continue to take 'wins'.The VPs are dumb as shit, but they need 'successful' projects that have fancy names that they can present to their exec team.The 173 agents are to give wins to a large number of people and teams, all these people contributed to this successful project.If it continues, there will be a lessons learned powerpoint, followed by 10x growth in headcount, promotions to everyone and double down. 270 people can deliver a baby in 1 day and all that.
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  _pdp_
  The personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator.The second thing is that this series of blog posts (whether true or not, but still believable) provides a good introduction to vibe coders. These are people who have not written a single line of code themselves and have not worked on any system at scale, yet believe that coding is somehow magically "solved" due to LLMs.Writing the actual code itself (fully or partially) maybe yes. But understanding the complexity of the system and working with organisational structures that support it is a completely different ball game.
• outworlder
  Well, part 3 at least explains something I've observed; the platform is incredibly unstable. The same calls, with the same parameters, will often randomly fail with HTTP 400 errors, only to succeed later(hopefully without involving support). That made provisioning with terraform a nightmare.I won't even dive too much into all the braindead decisions. Mixing SKUs often isn't allowed if some components are 'premium' and others are not, and not everything is compatible with all instances. In AWS, if I have any EBS volume I can attach it to any instance, even if it is not optimal. There's no faffing about "premium SKUs". You won't lose internet connectivity because you attached a private load balancer to an instance. Etc...At my company, I've told folks that are trying to estimate projects on Azure to take whatever time they spent on AWS or GCP and multiply by 5, and that's the Azure estimate. A POC may take a similar amount of time as any other cloud, but not all of the Azure footguns will show themselves until you scale up.
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  Frannky
  I was always very curious why people are using azure. Clunky difficult to setup and crazy prices. I know a person being very happy with them because of the credits they gave it to him. I felt I probably don't have a model that explains what is going on there and that would be cool to know why people pay them vs the competion
• anon
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• throwawayslop12
  Power Platform is of the same quality, I’d avoid it if possible.I was a principal engineer in the Power Platform org and it always felt like a disorganized mess. Multiple reorganizations per year, changing priorities and service ownership.
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  arccy
  from part 2:> Worse, early prototypes already pulled in nearly a thousand third-party Rust crates, many of which were transitive dependencies and largely unvetted, posing potential supply-chain risks.Rust really going for the node ecosystem's crown in package number bloat
• abtinf
  So this is why GitHub is having so many problem…
• anon
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• gnabgib
  Title: How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars
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  plantain
  I just do not understand how Azure has the scale it does. You only need to login and click around for a bit to see this is not a coherent system designed by competent people. Let alone try and actually build something on it.Who are the customers? Who is buying this shit?
• Bjartr
  What a fascinating view into how the sausage is made
• anon
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• anon
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• acedTrex
  This is an insanely blunt look into some serious issues with microsoft.
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  vsgherzi
  I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'm glad rust has good package management I really am. However given that aspect, it ends up forming a dependency heavy culture. In situations like this it's hard to use dependencies due to the amount of transitive dependencies some items pull in. I really which this would change. Of course this is a social problem so I don't expect a good answer to come of this....
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  pavlov
  The first couple of paragraphs felt like a parody of a guy who goes to a diner and gets upset the waitress doesn’t address him as Dr.It didn’t get any better.
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  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.
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  axelriet
  A former Azure Core engineer’s 6-part account of the technical and leadership decisions that eroded trust in Azure.
• patrickRyu
  [dead]
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  gamblor956
  TLDR: It turns out that Nadella despite being an engineer is actually quite bad at managing engineering. Who would have thought?
• anon
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• brcmthrowaway
  What an epic takedown.Microsoft should have promoted this guy instead of laying him off.Did Microsoft really lose OpenAI as a customer?
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  shmoil
  Do not forget all that femboy stuff.
• ok123456
  New trollaxor dropped.