A lot of Microsoft products have had years-long complaints finally resolved in the post-Azure world.
It seems while some of the features implemented pre-Azure were supported, but not fully working as intended because they were sets of features that weren't necessarily in use by Microsoft themselves. But they became an issue as Microsoft was now interested in it working properly after they started using that capability, or parts of the Azure infrastructure depended on it, or some big money customers "'how about'ed" these features. I'm talking minor but important aspects of larger products, or Interoperability.
Windows Server had a lot of life breathed into it post Azure. I'm too lazy to find specific incidents, or recall the past annoyances as a sysadmin of years past (PTSD?), but they absolutely dogfood and we are all better off about it. What they can never dogfood however is the pricing.
I'm k-12 education sector (almost 200,000 staff and students to our district) and we get what I would imagine one of the sweetest of discounts, and if we were to move all of our operations to Azure, our TCO actually increases to maintain the same level of service and availability.
That being said, the performance hits aren't that terrible, but it's the little things that add up quickly at scale.
Of course, as public funded k-12, it's sometimes a decision that gets made when having to decide on buying new things for the data centre (capital cost) vs. subscribing it to Azure (operational cost). The money for both piles comes from the same vault but there destination pile is loaded with implicit reasoning excuses. For example if we spend $200,000 a year on a service as a subscription, it's easier to get money for that versus requesting $400,000 on something that would last us 3 or 4 years.
It takes great leadership at the IT level to liaison this impact to the business movers and shakers, and sometimes that's not there.
Yeah reading that comment felt like the twilight zone. Microsoft is foremost a software company and they host everything on Azure. Amazon's software services offering is a speck of dust in comparison. Amazon cannot dogfood AWS more than Microsoft dogfoods Azure.
Microsoft mostly gives different groups autonomy in what tools to use, where to host etc.
Most groups in Microsoft use the Microsoft stack as it's best supported and already compliant and works pretty well - so most groups use teams, office, Azure etc.
Groups are free to use other tech and may for example use zoom+slack (some groups do) or GSuite. This is also true for technology (e.g. a team can use yarn and flow instead of npm and TypeScript). It's just very rare they do.
I engage frequently with the Canada Education team and office 365 national reps and they are wonderful and the way Microsoft uses their own stuff to interact with their customers is a true blessing. Teach by showing instead of telling.
I think the point is that the scale of requirement intake that came into AWS from the website is orders of magnitude more than whatever level of dogfooding that Azure might undergo from internal solutions. Not that they don’t dogfood at all, only that the massive amount of engineers moving one of the most complex websites in world’s history into AWS, and AWS taking them in as real input into the product, made AWS a lot better than the old AWS.
It seems while some of the features implemented pre-Azure were supported, but not fully working as intended because they were sets of features that weren't necessarily in use by Microsoft themselves. But they became an issue as Microsoft was now interested in it working properly after they started using that capability, or parts of the Azure infrastructure depended on it, or some big money customers "'how about'ed" these features. I'm talking minor but important aspects of larger products, or Interoperability.
Windows Server had a lot of life breathed into it post Azure. I'm too lazy to find specific incidents, or recall the past annoyances as a sysadmin of years past (PTSD?), but they absolutely dogfood and we are all better off about it. What they can never dogfood however is the pricing.
I'm k-12 education sector (almost 200,000 staff and students to our district) and we get what I would imagine one of the sweetest of discounts, and if we were to move all of our operations to Azure, our TCO actually increases to maintain the same level of service and availability.
That being said, the performance hits aren't that terrible, but it's the little things that add up quickly at scale.
Of course, as public funded k-12, it's sometimes a decision that gets made when having to decide on buying new things for the data centre (capital cost) vs. subscribing it to Azure (operational cost). The money for both piles comes from the same vault but there destination pile is loaded with implicit reasoning excuses. For example if we spend $200,000 a year on a service as a subscription, it's easier to get money for that versus requesting $400,000 on something that would last us 3 or 4 years.
It takes great leadership at the IT level to liaison this impact to the business movers and shakers, and sometimes that's not there.