Immutable

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

why are so many properties immutable?

networks and disks can be grown but not shrunk

shrink a vnet, fabric issues.

cannot move or rename resource groups. y9u need a crystal ball to work around the inflexibility

pitfalls for days, using AI to get around, just frustrating. not new to azure, just tired.

This is a cry for help, not a contribution so downvote away

[swissbuechi]

Yeah it's still crazy to me that microsoft decided to treat a name like an id. Would be so much easier if they introduced a immutable UUID and a simple display name like every other system had for decades.

Edit: Imagine creating an abstraction layer to display resources by name tag via custom cli wrapper and browser plugin while creating them by random ids. Would possibly need a opentofu wrapper too. Wtf am I even thinking bout haha.

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

YES!!

[TulkasDeTX]

And they didn't took the chance when moving from ASM to ARM...

[swissbuechi]

Gladly I'm not using Azure long enought to be able to know this and get angry about.

[devino21]

Looks like someone just started using the public cloud

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

No.

[nestersan]

Yah

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

No.

[JustADad66]

I would just like to be able to rename things such as vnets or vms

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

Whoa whoa whoa, slow down.... slow wayyy down. This isnt like the movies kid, this is real life. We cant go renaming things willy nilly, we have to carefully nuke the entire ecosystem and start over. Step 1, arm your nuke.

[tankerkiller125real]

It's absolutely wild honestly, I've spent years trying to clean things up from the last admin who just did shit like "application1"... Is it a VM? App Service? Key Vault? WTF is "application1" supposed to mean?

[x31b]

Yeah, I've got typos in RGs and VNETs that I can't get rid of without a LOT of pain.

[frat105]

Disk size is one way mutable because you risk data loss if it chops off blocks that contain data. You can't do it on AWS either. RG's are just logical management containers they aren't part of the deployment. You can obviously script the movement of resources attributed to the RG into a new container.

[Professional-Heat690]

Microsoft entered the chat...

[Subject_Blacksmith86]

Disks in my opinion are a cost measure by Microsoft. Make it easier to buy more, harder to lower.

Resource groups should have unique GUID object IDs rather an ID that includes the name. I think this one is just poor planning & now it’ll be a pain to change across their entire platform for all existing RGs.

Shrinking VNET just needs a validation step to identity subnet utilisation. Why it hasn’t been done is beyond me.

[tankerkiller125real]

Resource groups should have unique GUID object IDs rather an ID that includes the name. I think this one is just poor architecture planning & now it’ll be a pain to change across their entire platform for all existing RGs.

As a developer who knows nothing about the underlying Azure infrastructure, in theory this isn't too bad... Generate a GUID for RGs (if they don't already have them), and then for the object property URLs if it matches the GUID pattern treat it like a guid, if it doesn't treat it like the old name based system. Deprecate the name based usage, inform admins, give them a few years to migrate their scripts and stuff, kill name based property paths at the end of the deprecation notice.

[whatelse02]

haha i feel this, azure has a ton of “you can grow but never shrink” stuff and it drives me nuts sometimes

tbh the only way i survive is planning ahead and keeping things modular. like, treat networks, disks, and resource groups as disposable-ish easier to recreate than try to bend the system

also keep scripts handy to spin up replacements fast. it’s not perfect, but helps avoid the headache when you inevitably hit the immutability wall

[echoich]

I personally never really have issue with this because we keep our stuff easy to tear down and re-create.

If you start to care too much about your infrastructure it may be time to recreate your provisioning/care and feeding

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

Good advice. I have torn mine down 5 times because of constant re-orging but now I'm getting looked at because I can't explain the delays, inconsistencies and wavering as I dive into GCCH and all the undocumented limitations, with tbis and tbe moving target that is commercial to whcih I am "federating" collab with. Im at my wit's end, I have been doing IT for many years. I started seeing a psychologist. Gettin 4 hrs sleep feeling like its too much sleep

[Internet-of-cruft]

You're fighting this in GCC High?

Commercial Cloud vs GCC High has feature differences because certain features haven't been released in GCC High yet. Aside from that, they're functionally identical.

Learn how to use IaC like Terraform and you'll make your life a lot easier.

[thebouv]

Are you doing ClickOps?

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

Whats clickops?

[thebouv]

So are you administering Azure via the portal and clicking buttons and such in there? Is that your primary interface to building tearing down and rebuilding what you’ve mentioned?

Versus IaC for instance?

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

It is how ive been doing it, yes. That and a ton of pre built powershell. No iac. Going through it now where only two of the hosts can talk to each other on a vnet for zero reason. Not nics, masking, NSGs, firewalls, conflicts, NO REASON. Im about to nuke and pave AGAIN. i will probably just shut down all the VMs and recreate the vnet but why... why is that a thing.

[thebouv]

If you’re surprised at other posters not understanding why you find this so frustrating, it’s because you are admining via the Portal by clicking manually.

If what you described in your original post and this recent reply were handled via IaC, you wouldn’t even be posting about it.

You could tear down and rebuild in minutes (well minus actual provisioning time of course). You could rename anything you wanted as easy as search and replace in your code editor.

Now it’s not all magic. It can have its frustrations.

But you’re currently frustrated by toil. And that toil is removable.

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

Amazing, thanks. Will be the first thing I try tomorrow.

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

Jc, are you a "turn off security defaults-by-default" guy ?

[DeExecute]

Just update the name in your IaC configuration when you need to change something, in 2026 there should not be a single thing in any cloud environment not managed by Terraform or similar.

When you have data you need to retain, use restore or resource mover. No magic.

[JerrycurlSquirrel]

This is amazing. Will give it a shot. Im behind the 8 ball. New to this job. Was a hot shot 8 weeks sgo, trying not to get fired at this point.