I have a bridge to sell you if you think everyone on the Azure team is sub-moron. Infra security is a hard problem to solve, GCP and AWS don't quite have a perfect track record either, perhaps AWS stands out as a better option but it's hard to argue about it.
I don't think the blame lies with the intelligence of the Azure team. I would argue that there exists structural flaws in the business incentives which deprioritize 'users' from 'customers', along with the stark lack of consequences for security failures.
That's a problem across all of tech, I know a startup that recently had a security incident, lost over 40K USD and none of the heads have rolled they haven't completely revamped their security posture or anything like that.
It’s about incentives. My company spends about 400k/month USD in both Azure and AWS (different workloads). When I ask my AWS team for help, I usually get actionable info, a separate standalone call (if the request warrants it), and a follow up from my TAM and Account Exec. Every request to my Azure team has basically been “here are some YouTube/MS Knowledge links” + let me know if you figure it out. Roughly the same spend on both platforms, and wildly different levels of helpfulness (and yes, we have an Azure EA).
Are the people on my Azure team smart? Probably. Are they incentivized to actually help me solve a problem? No. They’re obviously incentivized to increased my license spend.
Unless you're paying millions a month, they don't care. It can take weeks to get AWS SES (Simple Email Service) "approved for production" on a small account, and that's after dozens of emails to prove you're not a spammer. For an enterprise I was working with, I asked and 5 minutes later it was approved. No questions.
I'm sure there are absolutely brilliant people working at Azure. I think the overall system is very badly architected and I don't know what it would take to salvage it. Infra security is a lot easier to do when you have a system that has mostly solved it already, and I'm not saying GCP and AWS are perfect, but "security is mostly solved" is a decent description of their systems, I think. Of course it could all fall over tomorrow, but I'd guess that's a lot more true of Azure.
Security may be solved, but IAM is still a nightmare on both GCP and AWS. Nobody understands what all those privileges / actions / conditions / etc. do. Maybe LLMs pretend to.
They implemented NVRAM in the UEFI and then didn't decipher what the NV means in it so it is not persisted. Their stupid virtualization can't handle not 1MB-aligned disk image.
It didn't help that azure (especially in the beginning) was a cobbled-together mess of ancient Microsoft tech stacks that were never intended to talk to each other.
I have a bridge to sell you if you think everyone on the Azure team is sub-moron. Infra security is a hard problem to solve, GCP and AWS don't quite have a perfect track record either, perhaps AWS stands out as a better option but it's hard to argue about it.
I don't think the blame lies with the intelligence of the Azure team. I would argue that there exists structural flaws in the business incentives which deprioritize 'users' from 'customers', along with the stark lack of consequences for security failures.
That's a problem across all of tech, I know a startup that recently had a security incident, lost over 40K USD and none of the heads have rolled they haven't completely revamped their security posture or anything like that.
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It’s about incentives. My company spends about 400k/month USD in both Azure and AWS (different workloads). When I ask my AWS team for help, I usually get actionable info, a separate standalone call (if the request warrants it), and a follow up from my TAM and Account Exec. Every request to my Azure team has basically been “here are some YouTube/MS Knowledge links” + let me know if you figure it out. Roughly the same spend on both platforms, and wildly different levels of helpfulness (and yes, we have an Azure EA).
Are the people on my Azure team smart? Probably. Are they incentivized to actually help me solve a problem? No. They’re obviously incentivized to increased my license spend.
Unless you're paying millions a month, they don't care. It can take weeks to get AWS SES (Simple Email Service) "approved for production" on a small account, and that's after dozens of emails to prove you're not a spammer. For an enterprise I was working with, I asked and 5 minutes later it was approved. No questions.
1 reply →
I'm sure there are absolutely brilliant people working at Azure. I think the overall system is very badly architected and I don't know what it would take to salvage it. Infra security is a lot easier to do when you have a system that has mostly solved it already, and I'm not saying GCP and AWS are perfect, but "security is mostly solved" is a decent description of their systems, I think. Of course it could all fall over tomorrow, but I'd guess that's a lot more true of Azure.
Security may be solved, but IAM is still a nightmare on both GCP and AWS. Nobody understands what all those privileges / actions / conditions / etc. do. Maybe LLMs pretend to.
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They implemented NVRAM in the UEFI and then didn't decipher what the NV means in it so it is not persisted. Their stupid virtualization can't handle not 1MB-aligned disk image.
Plenty of morons there
It didn't help that azure (especially in the beginning) was a cobbled-together mess of ancient Microsoft tech stacks that were never intended to talk to each other.