Comment by macNchz
3 days ago
I’ve created a bunch of fresh Azure accounts over the past few years and each time I’ve found myself sitting there dumbfounded anew at how garbage the experience is.
There has been weird broken jank at just about every step of the process at one point or another. Like, I’m a serious person trying to set something up for a production workload, and multiple times along the way to just having a working account that I can log into with billing configured, I’ll get baffling error messages like [ServiceKeyDepartureException: Insufficient validation expectancy. Sfhtjitgfxswinbvgtt-33-664322888], and the whole thing will simply not work until several hours later. Who knows why!?
I evaluated some Azure + Copilot Studio functionality for a project recently, which required more engagement with their whole 365 ecosystem than I’d had in a long time and it had many of the same problems but worse. Just unbelievably low quality software for the price and how popular it is. Every step of the way I hit some stupid issue. The people using this stuff are clearly not the people buying it.
I've joked that on some services, when you're clicking buttons, you're actually opening tickets that a human needs to action.
That scenario is an example. You complete an action on a web page and nothing works. You make no further changes and hours later it works perfectly. Your human wasn't fast enough that day.
That's the "digital escort" process mentioned in the very long OP. Understandably, the US government got mad when they found out that cheap Chinese tech support staff were being used for direct intervention on "secure" VMs.
That's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to.
And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be accessed by anyone who doesnt have a TS clearance and physically go into a SCIF.
source: I work in a team very closely related the team who designed digital escort.
9 replies →
> I've joked that on some services, when you're clicking buttons, you're actually opening tickets that a human needs to action.
I just experienced one startup where the buttons just happen to only work during business hours on the US west coast.
Infrastructure-as-a-ServiceNow Ticket
> when you're clicking buttons, you're actually opening tickets that a human needs to action
I had one public cloud vendor sales literally admit this was the case with their platform. But they were now selling "the new one" which is supposed to be better.
It was, a lot. But only compared to the old one.