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by lokar 46 days ago
Does anyone expect azure quality to improve? Has it improved at all in the last 3 years? Does leadership at MS think it needs to improve?

I doubt it

3 comments

No and at this point tying yourself to azure is a strategic passive and anyone making such decisions should be held responsible for any service outage or degradation.
This is certainly... an opinion.

AWS's us-east-1 famously takes down either a bunch of companies with it, or causes global outages on the regular.

AWS has a terrible, terrible user interface partly because it is partitioned by service and region on purpose to decrease the "blast radius" of a failure, which is a design decision made totally pointless by having a bunch of their most critical services in one region, which also happens to be their most flaky.

Nobody is winning any UX prize there. Azure, AWS, GCP... they are all terrible. Back then GCP for instance used to only work reliably on chromo-based browsers. Azure has that horrible overlay UI that abuses extended real estate that just doesn't work.

But azure wins most prizes for being terrible becuase, among other things, https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize.... It's not the worst provider maybe because oracle is somehow still kicking around.

Its just a bad product. Just like windows, OneDrive, teams and basically everything Microsoft has pumped out in the past decade.

Microsoft is in the top 5 most valuable companies in the world. It's got azure that is a huge cloud provider. And yet it was utterly unable to present its answer in the AI race. Not even a bad model with a half baked harness. Nothing. And meanwhile they are trying to port NTFS to low powered FPGAs because insanity. Just let that sink in.

Check out hetzner ui (regardless if you like their services, i know some ppl have opions or experiences lol) BUT, their cloud ux/ui is fantasties for a cloud company!
I worked extensively with Hetzner and I love them! But it think they are in a different class than these other providers, mainly in terms of global presence so I didn't include them and wouldn't for instance recommend them to my current employer. But indeed the Hetzner console is great. The robot not so much, but it's serviceable.
I don’t see how you could care (a lot) about both the UI and reliability.
One is caused by the other. Amazons engineers decided to split the interface in a “user hostile” manner with the stated purpose of increasing reliability… which didn’t materialise. The clunky UI did.

Or maybe you can provide a better explanation for why users had to “hunt” through hundreds(!) of product-region combinations to find that last lingering service they were getting billed $0.01 a month for?

This just doesn’t happen in GCP or Azure. You get a single pane of glass.

One of the things I find about AWS is that every service UI feels different. It's like every service was designed by a totally different team.

For all its flaws at least Azure has consistent UI.

> It's like every service was designed by a totally different team.

Yes, by design.

Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.

In practice, everything depends on IAM, S3, VPC, and EC2 directly or indirectly, so this doesn't help anywhere near as much as one would think.

Azure and GCP have a split control plane where there's a global register of resources, but the back-end implementations are split by team.

That way the users don't see Conway's Law manifest in the browser urls... as much. (You still do if you pay attention! In Azure the "provider type" is in the path instead of the host name.)

You need to understand history for this. It's because of the famous "Bezos API mandate memo" https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/. It was 2002, nobody was doing anything close to that.

You could argue now that that's no excuse anymore given it's one of the most valuable companies in the world, but that would dismiss the fact they have other priorities than a complete UI overhaul for consistency, and that rewrites are very dangerous, for instance people are already used to the UX pitfalls in the console, it's the devil they know, and changing that will be upsetting to the vast majority of users.

So there you have it. You know what you are getting into, AWS is a behemoth and it's 2026. Don't use the console like it's 2010. Use IaC for any nontrivial work, otherwise you only have yourself to blame.

I mean, if you care about the reliability of your own service you would not be using the AWS UI at all. Use the api, via automation.
MS incentivizes feature quantity, and the leadership are employees like any other. Product improvements are not on the table unless the company starts promoting people based on it. Doesn't look this will start happening any time soon.
Don’t worry I’m sure there’s a few products without copilot integration still. They’ll get to them before too long.