We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it.
We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth?
We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.)
I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out.
These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-dat...
This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.
If I were the microslop god for 6 weeks, I would force everyone to go to a boot camp and use Windows 7 for 4 of those weeks so they could see what made it so good.
No invasiveness, an OS that felt like yours. Just enough eye candy to not be distracting but to also feel like a clean modern system. Low system usage at idle. Calm, clean, and ready to roll when you clicked a button.
Windows is NEVER going to be MacOS, but the dev teams seem obsessed with macifying windows while also wedging that AI abomination copilot into every line of code, so windows is getting a tag team of rapid enshittification on top of already having been massively enshittified, and at least some portion of it is due to the people being paid to make it not understanding what it is supposed to be, the niche it held, and the reason for windows existence.
With no soul, windows has to go.
All the corporate stuff is behind Okta, so that easy enough.
But all the dev/test systems are a mix of SSO, individual logins, etc. At least they're all behind the same VPN (except when they aren't, but that's less common).
And of course, if you're a cloud engineer (vs "normal" software engineer), you also have to deal with AWS access, which is a whole different can of worms.
That's total "normal" for Microsoft at least from 2018, the year I started working with some of their products (Power BI mostly). They adopted a development model that is early release, fast iteration, and users as testers. No wonder everything feels experimental until much later.
Back then I just couldn't use Power BI. But fast forward a few years, I think it got a lot better since maybe 2020. You just have to stick with it for a few years.
So, you have to be a paying tester? Incredible that MS can keep enough businesses as hostage to be able to operate like that.
People who take Azure up without previous MS product experience...not sure about those.
For everyone else, it's like you said. "Eh, we are already knee deep in the Microsoft stack, why would we pick anything else?"
Man, what a horrendous pile of crap Teams was back then. The Slack teams were griping that they should just buy Slack, but Teams was the "enterprise solution." The problems were amplified during remote COVID work. Teams is fine now, but how many corporations went through years of frustration just because some IT decision maker said "Teams. Because it's enterprise."
and indeed your entire workplace,
for as little as a steak dinner.
The UI is an overengineered mess and I'd rather use literally anything else, but to say it's still unusable is disingenuous.
When they started flying people in the beg that I buy 100 Surface Laptops, that was the confirmation of everything I had been thinking. All I could think of was IBM flying a dude from Italy in to talk for 15 minutes about their version of TeamViewer back in the day. We ended up talking about shoes.
They can afford people who would do better. Windows 11 is trash. Azure is trash. Onedrive is trash. Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before, but it's not quite trash yet. Word is trash. Excel is rapidly enshittifying. Copilot is hot flaming radioactive tar cancer.
Does microslop even have a single thing left that isn't either completely terrible or worse than it used to be a mere 5 years ago?
But yes, normal Office users, where the company pays the bills, pay the price.
Just to be clear, I'm responding to the parent comment not the article.
I'm convinced Amazon has many teams crapping out new features but they don't have the political clout (or manpower) to create a comprehensive product. They are mandated by management to use existing services, and thus we the users suffer because we have to manage all this extra crap and noise just to enable basic functionality.
It's maddening. And then also it's maddening to see another service from a different team that was able to throw off these shackles and actually make a product that is self contained. You get a taste of how good things could be, and then you're thrown right back into the IAM/SQS/Cloudwatch/Cloudformation/Policy/everything else under the sun soup.
Build the rest yourself. In many cases their higher level service is just the same open source package you would run, just managed worse.
This sounds like the crux of the issue. The combination of: "tool can be used during analysis" and "analysis takes long" shifts the barrier of rejection from "is this tool safe?" to "is this tool so unsafe that we're willing to start a fight with a lot of other government agencies to remove it, find an alternative, etc?".
Not criticizing FedRAMP. Proper security review takes time. And probably more when dealing with vendors.
They know that if they get entrenched first, it's impossible to migrate away. That's basically free money from a customer that has zero cost ceiling.
You can customize the way you want. After configuring it, my colleagues could not log in. Thats one way to secure your organization.
Youtube was always involved, somehow, for some reason, even when what I was doing wasn't connected to Youtube at all or the account I was using had never even been intentionally used with Youtube. It'd route me through a few Youtube domain names.
(Microsoft's is indeed even worse, on some of theirs [Azure Devops, looking at you] I can't use them in pinned tabs because somehow they manage to get into a totally broken state where the page won't load due to whatever's happening with their auth flow in the background, and no method of reloading the tab fixes it, and it does this every couple days—but copy-pasting the same URL to a new tab does work)
- FB's move fast and break things. Constantly launching new libs.
- Linus's we do not break user space. Great commitment to backwards compatibility.
- Never deprecating dead products until they've been de facto abandoned for like decades.
This combination means every MS product is a labyrinth of overlapping APIs with no guidance as to which one is actually the good one. Some are abandoned garbage, some are brand new and incomplete, and some are both, and there's no way of knowing which are which even experts can mislead you.
Microsoft, you are a behemoth. There are few domains where you actually compete. Give your products a minute to breath before you cast them in stone.
To some extent, you’re/we’re the ones deciding that,
because there’s entirely different teams heading the separate offerings,
and none of them are going to offer a potential footgun like:
“hey, we’re not the best modern path into xyz type projects, check with our colleagues on the Blazor team”,
unless someone makes them.
I don’t understand how they have non-zero market share.
Then you've got the hell of overlapping permissions systems on the console and the Microsoft account, to get any amount of online play working on a console if you also get Bedrock. On the Playstation, especially, the error messages also love to not tell you which of the two systems is blocking you, so you get to guess. And Microsoft's site for managing those permissions is so confusingly-laid-out that even after doing it three times in a row I still felt lost on it.
I never did solve the problem of getting Minecraft Java Edition to run on a kid's MacBook with allowlist-only Web access. It wants to contact ten or so apparently-randomly-selected-from-an-enormous-pool IP addresses on every launch. I never did find documentation of which IP blocks I needed to allow, and couldn't guess at it from the IPs themselves. If they'd just used domain names... I must have manually hit "allow" a bunch of times during twenty separate launches, and it was still presenting me the same number of prompts every time, because there was no overlap in the IPs contacted (adding insult to injury is that I'm sure all but at-most two of these were spyware horse-shit that had no actual generously-necessary role in running the software, but it'd fail if it couldn't reach them)
I'm reminded of Storm-0558 [1] where a stolen signing key was able to forge authentication tokens for any MSA / Azure AD / Government AD user. They downplayed the severity. Just imagine if that level of access was used to pull a Stryker on a nation-wide scale. That is an economic disaster waiting to happen.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/14/ana...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-ent...
Microsoft goes beyond that: they've managed to have a critical vulnerability in almost every authentication product they have ever created. It's exceptional.
(That seems to be the main complaint, that Microsoft never provided the clear information required to conduct the assessment properly).
Yes, it seems pretty clear from that quote that the reviewer said the security package was a `pile of shit`, and propublica went on to extend that to the cloud itself. Not that I want to comment on the merits of Azure's security, but that sounds pretty clickbaity from propublica to me. A more appropriate title would have been
> Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Security documentation Was “a Pile of Shit.”
For example, our state government says "We will do X Y and Z which all require data science expertise, but we did not approve the $60k a year Data Science position, so instead we are forced to hire a Data Science contractor for $120k a year, and they can't really be fired, and they are terrible at their job"
And then people wonder why things suck all the time.
A lot of state's buy their Obamacare marketplace service from a company I am familiar with. That company is entirely incompetent. They cannot follow basic instructions. They cannot triage a bug at all. They do not read freaking tickets. They take weeks to respond to an issue. They cause bugs regularly in ways that imply they don't have functional source control. They continually fuck up basic feature requests. They change the service in ways that contravene the literal law. The law that was comprehensively explained to them by people I know.
But they can't be fired, because the state is legally compelled to provide this service, and is not really allowed to hire a few engineers to build it in house. They could go to a different software contractor, but all the options are just as bad because it's an entirely captured market.
Obama started a "Digital Services" group in the federal government to actually build systems internally and develop expertise to mitigate some of this, and they built stuff like tax filing solutions for free for Americans. So Trump killed it and hollowed out it's corpse for DOGE.
Thats why you have Windows in the Pentagon instead of something secure.
You're just forced to use vendors and if you actually care about the mission, it's just a different team on the same mission.
Of course you know you're being taken advantage of, and long-term maybe you should have gone to the non-technical side to fight it, but at the end of the day you just want to keep the young boys being shipped off to war safe, and you're much better suited to achieve that by remaining on the technical side.
...or so I've heard.
> Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services.
Ref: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-esco...
when someone says they work at microsoft, they get weird looks, and people assume they're incompetent
Hah. First time looking at FedRAMP?
The real reason for this, of course, is accounting, it moves it off of the government's books.
It's unfortunate that people have to claim the authenticity, rather than the users of AI having to disclose use of AI/LLM. I wish it was the other way around.
Steve Jobs was the last tech CEO who didn't care about wall street and only care about quality products and consumers saying that if customers are happy, then the share price will take care of itself. But most companies are share price first, customer later.
Decades ago, Lotus 1-2-3 on top of MSDOS was the lever; today it’s GCC High.
Building in house.
Outsourcing to consultants.
The alternative was AWS, which has been operating at every classification level for over a decade at this point. It's now split between Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google, which is especially amusing because Google withdrew from the original bid process when they were still pretending to give a shit that their employees don't like working for the military.
> Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.
Azure's success as a cloud provider is mostly a result of their sales team and having an existing relationship with non-technical leadership. "We already pay them for Office and Exchange, let's just buy this new 'cloud' thing from them too".
Azure is barely considered an option at all within tech companies, yet is surprisingly widely adopted by non-technical companies that don't know any better (ie, that don't have a technical / engineering voice or representation within leadership).
AWS = Likely technically the best, for now. Mostly unreasonable pricing, and less motivation to seriously negotiate given they are the 'default' cloud provider for most of the industry. Kind of feels like they have peaked though, and are slipping more recently. Inevitable, or bad leadership changes?
OCI = New-comer, attractive pricing and hungry for business. Might be able to avoid mistakes other providers have made? Reliability struggles though. Parent company has a bad reputation in some circles - but probably not with decision makers. Making huge (unwise?) investments - that will either come crashing down in 5 years, or seriously pay off. Layoffs, but going for massive growth...huh?
GCP = Notably different underlying technical choices than other providers. Folks are maybe a bit less pragmatic, and more academic. This helps them in unique services (Spanner?) but hurts in most other areas. They've matured, and are btwn AWS and OCI in reliability. They are probably not as hungry for business as they should be given how far behind they are.
The article talks a lot about conflicts of interest, but this is the line I went looking for. A bureaucracy fighting itself over goal prioritization, and what's a necessary roadblock vs red tape is the less sexy but more meaningful problem at the core of this.
Once the government decided they wanted the product, they were going to find a patsy.
I on the other hand have no expectation, and so it's not clear whether the "bureaucracy fighting itself" is a cause or a symptom. You're implying it's a cause and the solution is "less red tape". But it could be just a symptom of conflicts of interest, and less red tape just leads to more efficient corruption.
Again, you're just reading into it what you already believe in.
I would warn anyone far and wide to avoid Azure at all costs, especially if you are a startup. And especially if you are doing any kind of AI because the only GPUs they have available are ancient and also crazy over-priced.
If I cared more, I'd try to migrate away from Azure. But I don't, and that's probably Azure's business model at this point.
Maybe the critical question, are they making continuing improvements? Especially to merge conflicting functions.
Like when they bought Minecraft, or Skype. Each already had user management. Xbox was a mess. Merging them all took a lot of years.
Microsoft can be abhorrent. They will always get the contracts. Why? Corporate welfare.
Microsoft will drive the rules. Why? Too big to fail.
Microsoft will push their slop. Why? Cause they have contractors after contractors in the federal government pushing MS solutions. Doesnt matter if they're bad.
And, who'd pay for a 3PAO audit of a Linux distro? Ubuntu and Redhat have. Its a $120k moat.
Right.
You bet.
Absolutely.
The government has historically, routinely, consistently, solved problems more complex than cloud computing.
The only way you'd think otherwise is if you had some other motivation to pretend otherwise... some sort of ideology.
That's a common line by conservatives who are actively sabotaging government with policies and laws which they then point to as evidence of such inefficiencies.
it isn't the best but it's really great at a lot of things feature-wise. top-notch documentation as well (despite what these "experts" said).
Most companies literally run on Azure these days. Persistent hackers will get into any network, that's a guarantee, that's APT 101. It's law of averages. If it truly is "a pile of shit" given how it is probably the most used cloud platform by the most customers, including governments, and endless plethora of features and services it offers, shouldn't there be more compromises? 2-3 in a decade is hardly above what you expect for law of averages right?
Screw ups happen, but if it is systemic, you can't use one instance as evidence, you must establish a pattern of mishaps.
Azure was hands down, obvious to everyone involved the worst technically. In capabilities, bugs/correctness, availability and support.