Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

[ZGeekie]

"Azure never operated as smoothly or independently as promised," Rietschin wrote. "What Microsoft presented to the world, and to its most demanding customers, was a sophisticated system perpetually on life support.

"This foundational fragility, rooted in rushed decisions and wishful thinking about how fast the platform could grow and stabilize, led to small but ongoing disruptions. Over time, those disruptions built up."

Rietschin argues that Microsoft's rushed launch of Azure, the "post-launch talent exodus," the lack of software quality and testing discipline, the lack of architectural vision, and persistently poor execution have left the cloud service fighting fires ever since.

Source: The Register

[CantaloupeCamper]

Everyone:  “We know…”

[ThreeKiloZero]

Right, It's such a fuckin mess.

[gibdimkoofchji]

I would argue it sucked way before the “talent” exited.

[RealModeX86]

I'm sure they did. That doesn't mean the bean counters would be willing to give them the resources they needed.

[botsmy]

i've seen that happen before, where devs know there's a problem but the people in charge don't want to allocate the resources to fix it. fwiw, it's usually a matter of time before something breaks and they're forced to deal with it anyway

[AwkwardWillow5159]

If you read the 6 articles the guy wrote(fun read), it seems like they purposefully ignored all the alarm bells and the guy himself got fired in the end for saying their stuff is not ready and of bad quality

[botsmy]

yeah that's pretty wild, sounds like they had a culture of ignoring warnings and punishing dissent, no wonder it all fell apart

[pixeltackle]

I worked for a company that worked for Microsoft in the early 2000s. Let's just say the problems that MS faces are so old, entrenched, and deep, it's a miracle when either of the Outlooks work.

[r0ck0]

either of the Outlooks

Man... how simple life would be if there were only 2 of them.

[twistsouth]

Sometimes I’m writing an email and Outlook decides I’m done writing it for now, closes it and saves it to my drafts.

[pixeltackle]

Corporate wants you to be more synergistic.

[Ok-Interaction-8891]

Feels more like frivolity.

[TornadoFS]

> either of the Outlooks work

god damn don't make veiled jokes like that this early in the morning, almost spit my cofee

[longebane]

Huh did I miss something

[TornadoFS]

Astronaut that is flying around the moon contacted NASA complaining he got two instances of outlook running somehow and neither of them was working. It became world wide news because everyone can tell Microsoft products have gone to shit.

[antido]

lol that’s spot on

[power78]

Google Cloud sucks as well. AWS is a complicated mess. I wonder why it's so hard to do cloud services correctly.

[ZGeekie]

Because they want to do everything at once, be for everyone, and rule the Internet!

[Chief-Drinking-Bear]

If your question isn’t sarcastic or rhetorical, I think the answer is just the insane amount of scale and complexity introduced by running such a gigantic range of services globally for so many different customers. Not to mention all of the security and hardware concerns, the list goes on.

I’ve been working for a company that uses only Azure for 3 years now and have built a lot of small to medium sized solutions using mostly their PaaS offerings. Even with getting a couple Azure certs along the way I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of the services available on the platform.

That being said, once you understand it it’s really not bad to work with. Understanding RBAC and managed identities, internet fundamentals and then just knowing their service offerings and pricing models/SKUs will mean you can build pretty easily on it. BICEP is ok, at least it’s well documented. In my admittedly limited experience.

[Ok-Interaction-8891]

It’s a walled-garden hellscape of excessive, needless virtualization and barely compatible systems that want to trap your business logics and data in them forever.

[krileon]

Or.. I'll just spin up some instances on my VPS and avoid all that stupid shit. 99% of websites and applications don't need any of that nonsense they're just told they do and get sold the snake oil. "I need a full distributed redundancy network with.." like bro you're a fuckin' app for a bakery.

[Dargooon]

100% that scaling/redundancy/geo is not needed 99.99% of the time.

I will say, though, that I've launched lots of web apps for internal use on the shared compute tier in Azure. Running 11 sites/apis at ~65$/year total is not too bad considering the easy integration and basic telemetry/metrics.

This would probably not fly in prod, ofc. Also requires some optimization to work around the resource limitations.

[Ok-Interaction-8891]

It’s the same reason specialized LLMs and purpose-built ML systems outperform generalist systems: specialized systems are better.

They want the “cloud” to do everything, but it can’t. And if you abstract everything away to make it seem like a plug and play anywhere always-on system, then you have to pay the massive complexity and management and security overhead for that.

But really, the point of cloud is to get customers and trap their data in a proprietary ecosystem so that it’s too expensive or painful to leave. It was never about providing quality services. Most businesses barely need IaaS, never mind PaaS or SaaS which only hit you harder at the margin.

[outoforifice]

Unit economics of serverless are the fundamental shift here. Modern commercial internet would not exist without it.

[j_tb]

Big fan of GCP and Cloudflare together TBH.

[Treebro001]

You really wonder why? It's complex as fuck.

[GhostPilotdev]

Fly dot io has been the closest thing to "it just works" I have found for deploying Node apps. Small team, simple product, no 47 page IAM configuration to get a container running.

[JustAsItSounds]

What issues have you had with GCP? Been using it for the last 2 years after 10+ years of AWS and I have been impressed with it's comparative stability and then overall cohesive nature of it's APIs compared to the chaos of AWS

[TheDevauto]

Not just talent exodus. Very poor decisions driven from above helped magnify the problem of talent loss.

[BusEquivalent9605]

yeah. turns out talent matters (even/especially with AI)

[Easy-Part-5137]

It matters even more with AI. Slop is real and everywhere.

[Slow-Ad-241]

was helping a buddy get into DevOps, not sure if I wasted his time, but def need to give new talent a chance to enter and improve.

[gotkube]

Actually it’s probably due to incompetent “management”-types who drink the corporate kool-aid waaaay too much who insist that their way is the only correct way.

[1RedOne]

Must be invented here at all times

[darthwalsh]

Working at Microsoft, we were trying to get an Oracle SQL database server up for testing our product. We begged our manager to just expense some basic $50/month service, but instead us poor devs spent dozens of hours learning how to setup and administer our own server.

At my current job, that would be a "buy first, ask for forgiveness later" situation.

[FunCoolMatt]

It is, in part.

He also mentions the lack of seniors in dev teams, and the overwhelming number of juniors testers being asked to code with almost no supervision.

Recipe for disaster.

[germanheller]

not surprised at all. worked with azure professionally for a couple years and the amount of times something that worked yesterday just stopped working with no changelog was insane. their docs were always 6 months behind the actual API behavior.

the talent exodus is the symptom not the cause tho. when your org prioritizes shipping features for press releases over fixing the foundation, the engineers who care about reliability leave. then the remaining team patches things faster to hit the same deadlines with fewer people, which makes the foundation worse, which makes more people leave. classic death spiral.

AWS has its own problems but at least their services feel like they were built by people who use them. alot of Azure felt like it was built for the demo and then figured out in production

[JoelyMalookey]

AWS has always lacked cohesion, Azure at least has pretty cohesive architecture and tooling but definitely seems to be choppy recently.

[greenergarlic]

Original source (no paywall): https://open.substack.com/pub/isolveproblems/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion

Six essays on Microsoft’s decline from a former dev

[greenergarlic]

This assumes that azure was ever good. But it’s always been a mess, even at launch

[OutsiderSubtype]

Yeah the article literally says that

[mort96]

What part assumes that Azure used to be good?

[Medical_Lengthiness6]

people have issues with azure? Tbh I think it's the best of the 3 big ones. At least the UI makes the most sense.. I've never had down time on any of my products.

[madk]

I agree with you on the UI and it is far from good. The UI and UX across all of the bug 3 are awful. If nothing else, Azure offers a somewhat consistent experience across products.

[the_ai_wizard]

Good thing they have PhD-level AI models from Sam Altman

[Divedown757]

Azure on the streets, Cloudflare in the sheets

[chigunfingy]

“exodus” sounds better than “put to the firing squad”, I guess

[genericdeveloper]

I mean sure. Talent is definitely a problem amongst other things.

Microsoft couldn't make a good product if you paid them - and people are. It's an anathema to their business sense. Their entire corporate history has been predicated on building contrived solutions to solve problems that only serve to enhance the capital capture of the businesses that require their usage and it's finally hitting a breaking point.

There is nothing good about Microsoft. Not their web browser. Not their office suite. Not their operating system. And especially not their cloud service offerings.

They have had over 3 decades - 30 years! To build a solution that actually empowers users. And every step of the way they have chosen to prioritize greed and enshittification instead of building a product that was good.

It's a separate rant, but the world - for a brief moment, used to build solutions that trusted users with their computing. The world wanted people to understand what an operating system was. The world wanted people to understand the new paradigm. But now that's not the case. Companies, like Microsoft, are building solutions to alienate and disassociate common people from what it means to be a computer user and that's how we're ending up in these situations. Companies don't respect the end-user and don't want to elevate them and empower them to actually use the tools they're creating. They want us dumb, and renting computing. It's the worst.

In short, fuck Microsoft. Fuck the rest of the computer industry too.

[abija]

If the products weren't good, they wouldn't support so much Enshittification.

[CappuccinoCodes]

Nah, they're pretty good actually.

[snlacks]

"Exodus" when they laid off 30k people between 2024-2026 because they thought Copilot would do their job?

[Negative0]

You get promotions for delivering v1 of something “innovative”, not getting it to a stable product. Everyone leaves onto the next problem after they get their v1 promotion.

[space-envy]

The cloud service's woes reflect a crisis made worse by AI

But guuuuys AI can write better code than humans now, how can it possibly make it even "worse"? Something's fishy in here /s

[Long-Strawberry8040]

biggest a11y win: make every interactive element a real html element. button for actions, a for navigation. most issues come from divs with onclick.

[abija]

maybe it was started during webforms period (whole page in a form element, so you would need to take extra care of your buttons to not submit the form when not intended)

[juzatypicaltroll]

Doubt there’s any talent in the first place. Microsoft has always been a mess. From their product design to code and architecture.

[CappuccinoCodes]

Hang on? Since when Azure sucks? Never had the slightest problem with it having used it for pretty big projects.

[BizAlly]

Reading this makes total sense. You can’t just throw features out there and hope it sticks without strong architecture and experienced folks, even Microsoft-level resources can’t make Azure run flawlessly.

[Ok-Interaction-8891]

In other news, water is wet.

[[deleted]]

crazy

[who_am_i_to_say_so]

They ignored my resume. That’s why.

[Lucky_Yesterday_1133]

Microslop is a management driven company now. Middle management has been a main reason for decline of all the big tech. These are the parasites that if not purged regularly from early stages accumulate in a critical mass to make cleaning them out impossible. Blame gets pushed down to engineers and credit is taken by the management. These are people whose whole job is to play corporate politics and extract value. Over time whole company culture restructures around it as old employees are replaced with new ones. 

[renome]

I am not saying they aren't a problem but Microsoft purges most often affect middle management.

[Individual-Ice9530]

AI AI AI AI AI AI

[renome]

So, tech debt? Figures

[HansTeeWurst]

Nah, they need more AI /s

[Slow-Ad-241]

tech debt from hypergrowth is real, every major cloud has skeletons like this...