[HN Gopher] Microsoft Azure Outage
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Microsoft Azure Outage
        
       Author : maxaigner
       Score  : 280 points
       Date   : 2023-01-25 07:46 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | nosebear wrote:
       | I'm hearing from four different friends from four different
       | companies in Germany that they can't really work right now.
        
         | steve1977 wrote:
         | If they were relying on Outlook and Teams to be productive,
         | they probably couldn't really work before either.
        
           | hnarn wrote:
           | What a naive comment. As if the only truly important jobs
           | exist in engineering and require nothing but git and a book
           | on C.
        
             | choeger wrote:
             | Yeah, what BS. Everyone knows that if you have a book on C,
             | you can always quickly implement git yourself.
        
             | OscarDC wrote:
             | I interpreted this comment as more of a jab at how
             | inefficient are outlook and teams themselves as
             | applications.
             | 
             | I don't know if it's the right interpretation to have, but
             | I kind of agreed with it, considering huge issues I had
             | with teams (curiously some of them are only there for linux
             | users, weird when considering the fact that I only use
             | teams' web page) - not saying I could do better though!
        
             | vikramkr wrote:
             | I'm unsure what being in engineering has to do with using
             | outlook and teams?
        
       | generalizations wrote:
       | Anyone else remember the bad Windows Defender virus signature
       | they put out on Friday the 13th a couple weeks ago? Microsoft is
       | not having a good start to their year.
        
       | oars wrote:
       | LinkedIn seems to be struggling as well. Lots of latency, page
       | loads are taking 10-20 seconds for me.
        
       | NKosmatos wrote:
       | What's the point of having a status page if it doesn't indicate
       | the issues? https://status.azure.com/en-us/status
       | 
       | Azure, Teams, Outlook are almost down from Greece and Germany,
       | and their status page shows that everything is fine :-)
        
         | maushu wrote:
         | The point is PR. Never trust a status page if it's not directly
         | connected to the monitoring system.
        
           | wrldos wrote:
           | They never attach it to the monitoring because monitoring
           | systems usually generate a lot of false positives which
           | affect their published SLA.
        
             | polack wrote:
             | Then they should have a "?" status that can be triggered by
             | automated systems that acknowledge that it looks to be an
             | issue but that they are manually investigating.
             | 
             | If it's a false positive they just resolve it without it
             | affecting SLA and if it's a real problem then us customers
             | wouldn't have to debug our own stack for 2 hours before
             | Microsoft informs us that they are the problem.
             | 
             | EDIT: Wonder how many man-years of extra debugging work
             | their non-working status page have caused the customers.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | steveBK123 wrote:
             | Which impacts economics because some customers surely got
             | deals guaranteeing some amount of credits based on
             | up/downtime as reported by the status page.
             | 
             | And so updates to the status page become political and
             | locked behind senior management approvals.. like AWS.
        
             | mirekrusin wrote:
             | Yeah, that's why SLA reports never include <30m downtimes,
             | convenient truth bending.
        
             | jhoechtl wrote:
             | They never attach it to the monitoring because monitoring
             | systems usually generate a lot of correct positives which
             | affect their published SLA.
             | 
             | Works equally well. See the point?
        
             | mdip wrote:
             | Which means if one were to require monitoring and status
             | pages to be connected, one of two things happen (for each
             | monitored component):
             | 
             | (1) The monitoring system would be altered to ignore tests
             | that return false positives (at the expense of missing the
             | alert when it represents an outage).
             | 
             | (2) Fixing the monitoring. It wasn't working for the
             | sysadmins/operators, anyway, since it had so many false
             | positives that their "mental model" was essentially based
             | on (1), anyway.
             | 
             | At least, where I've _forced the issue_ of doing _just
             | this_ , that's exactly what happened. At the end of the
             | day, especially since SLAs took a hit and that affected
             | bonus payouts, monitoring got a _lot_ better -- as did
             | overall team function when we truly realized how bad things
             | were -- we stopped doing workarounds and started fixing
             | problems at a more fundamental level which led to SLAs that
             | were both accurate and excellent.
             | 
             | It helped bring attention to a hidden problem which
             | resulted in time being allocated to fix tests that dropped
             | constant false-positives and to evaluate each for whether
             | or not it should exist in the first place.
        
         | SkyPuncher wrote:
         | We've concluded that status pages are a complete joke.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | berkut wrote:
         | status.office.com had been down for 15 mins, but it's back up
         | now...
        
         | funnymony wrote:
         | Its public relations page.
        
         | edf13 wrote:
         | It's updated now - updates for service outages at this level
         | generally need signoff form someone higher up the chain
        
           | steve1977 wrote:
           | Maybe they couldn't update the status page due to the network
           | outage.
           | 
           | I'm joking, but...
        
           | 867-5309 wrote:
           | or, they could be automated and transparent
        
             | nikau wrote:
             | Then some group scrapes the uptime of their competitors
             | page and reports that "competitor is x times more reliable
             | than transparent co"
        
           | alkonaut wrote:
           | But shouldn't the individual service dots be automatically
           | turning another color than green? I mean it's an _automated_
           | service status page, right? Whether there is a human message
           | at the top and that can take some time I understand.
        
             | luckylion wrote:
             | No, it's not automated. I'm sure the underlying tech is
             | automated, but once companies grow beyond a certain size,
             | it needs a human to say "show this status change to the
             | world" because there are lots of things depending on it
             | (e.g. SLAs, but also bonuses, I assume), so they don't want
             | a potential bug in the status system to influence that.
             | 
             | It's weird how slow they are with manual sign-off though.
        
               | adql wrote:
               | I haven't seen any SLA deal that says the status page
               | must show 99.9% uptime...
        
               | cm2187 wrote:
               | No but if msft's own status page shows downtime more than
               | 0.01% of the time msft will struggle to argue they
               | haven't breached their SLA, so financial consequences to
               | the company.
        
               | alkonaut wrote:
               | But I don't want the page connected to their bonuses or
               | SLA's I just want to know whether they are having any
               | issues anywhere. And I need to know within a minute of my
               | own service not working so I'm not chasing the wrong
               | thing. This can't be an unreasonable thing to ask for?
        
               | luckylion wrote:
               | I agree. I'm already annoyed at Hetzner with their 5
               | minute lag in reporting network outages where I'm
               | regularly noticing them, investigating, checking status
               | and then only after a few minutes see them updating and
               | saying "it's us".
               | 
               | If you work with Microsoft, you might as well spend a few
               | bucks extra and have an external monitoring system
               | monitor Microsoft's systems so you get real-time third-
               | party confirmation when your monitoring alerts you of
               | issues concerning your system. It's the price you pay for
               | scale, I guess. More money involved = more lawyers
               | involved = more accountants involved = more MBAs involved
               | = more corporate bullshit.
        
             | copperroof wrote:
             | An automated one would be red 100% the time.
        
           | saghm wrote:
           | Someone has to "approve" the status pages showing what's
           | actually happening? From a customer perspective, it seems far
           | worse to have status pages fail to reflect actual outages
           | than to have them accidentally report an outage when there
           | isn't one because no one really cares about what the status
           | page says if they're not having issues. It's hard to see how
           | the goal here could be anything other than trying to add
           | plausible deniability for what would otherwise be obvious
           | deception.
        
             | vineyardmike wrote:
             | > it seems far worse to have status pages fail to reflect
             | actual outages than to have them accidentally report an
             | outage when there isn't one
             | 
             | Thats not the goal.
             | 
             | > It's hard to see how the goal here could be anything
             | other than trying to add plausible deniability for what
             | would otherwise be obvious deception
             | 
             | Thats the goal. The "status page" is considered the source
             | of truth for most of the big contracts. If status-page=OK
             | then your contract with them isn't violated. So changing
             | the status page is a big deal, with real financial
             | implications. The status page isn't a view into the SRE's
             | tickets, its a declaration that the service isn't being
             | provided.
        
               | mattclarkdotnet wrote:
               | Utter rubbish. Major contracts have account managers and
               | it all gets hashed out 1-1.
        
               | squeaky-clean wrote:
               | Don't know why this was downvoted. We've definitely been
               | able to provide proof of an outage when the status page
               | showed otherwise and get a refund in the form of server
               | credits by contacting them directly. For all 3 big
               | vendors, AWS, Azure, GCP
        
               | RajT88 wrote:
               | Agree here as well. It's usually not that hard to provide
               | based on the many, many metrics Azure resources emit that
               | their SLA was breached.
               | 
               | What might be happening is that there is fine print you
               | have to read and be in compliance with in order to be
               | eligible for the SLA.
               | 
               | For example, look at all the conditions which have to be
               | met for a breach of VM SLA in Azure:
               | 
               | https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
               | us/support/legal/sla/virtual-...
               | 
               | Hidden in the SLA details is typically hints on how you
               | can become more resilient in the cloud. So it pays to
               | read the SLA details and really deeply understand what
               | they are telling you.
        
             | oefrha wrote:
             | Exec approval for showing major outages on status dashboard
             | is pretty much standard practice across large companies.
             | The main differentiator is whether it's approved within
             | five minutes or two hours.
        
             | remus wrote:
             | > it seems far worse to have status pages fail to reflect
             | actual outages than to have them accidentally report an
             | outage when there isn't one because no one really cares
             | about what the status page says if they're not having
             | issues.
             | 
             | I disagree. What if you're having issues and the status
             | page is incorrectly reporting an incident? It would be easy
             | to waste a load of time waiting for the status page to sort
             | itself out, only to find out you've still got an issue.
        
             | UK-AL wrote:
             | You can't approve a fact.
        
               | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
               | well.... if that fact can be delayed by just a tiny
               | bit... that's enough
        
               | hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
               | As others noted, the so-called "status" pages of big
               | service providers don't serve to reflect reality but to
               | shape it. For actual status you need to consult
               | independent monitoring services.
        
         | VyseofArcadia wrote:
         | When anything on that page turns not-green, there are news
         | stories about it. Not positive ones. So exec approval is
         | needed, because the decision to flip something on that page is
         | ultimately the decision to cause stories negative to MS to be
         | published. The exec has to weigh whether pissing off the
         | customers (by failing to acknowledge reality) is worth the bad
         | press and SLA fallout.
        
           | PenguinCoder wrote:
           | Which means it's not a status page any more. Defeating the
           | supposed purpose.
        
             | cutemonster wrote:
             | "SLA refund page"?
        
           | ctvo wrote:
           | It has nothing to do with press. This is negative press
           | already, and journalist can use this to write their stories
           | without waiting for the official light to go from green to
           | yellow.
           | 
           | It's about contractual obligations and SLAs. Things are not
           | officially down in most agreements until MSFT acknowledges
           | they're down. Refunds issued because your blob storage failed
           | to meet 99.9999 uptime to your largest customers are directly
           | tied to these statuses.
        
             | Enginerrrd wrote:
             | I'm not going out of my way to be hyperbolic or anything
             | here, but that sounds suspiciously like "fraud" to me.
        
               | ctvo wrote:
               | I don't think they're committing fraud.
               | 
               | I think it's an important enough page that it can't be
               | automated. It needs a manual approval from a human, for
               | the very basics, like even if the status reporting system
               | is operating correctly, because of various downstream
               | effects.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Yuioup wrote:
         | That's what happens when you don't have an independent party
         | that keeps tabs on this.
        
         | belter wrote:
         | We have been here before...HN is the only status page that
         | matters.
        
       | kornish wrote:
       | Ah - so that's why GitHub Actions are unreliable right now.
        
         | Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
         | Glad it wasn't just me. I was waiting over 10 minutes for a
         | hosted runner.
        
           | quickthrower2 wrote:
           | Such a late 2010s / 2020s problem :-(
        
       | saikatsg wrote:
       | > We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing
       | telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps. You can
       | find additional information on our status page at
       | https://msft.it/6011eAYPc or on SHD under MO502273.
        
         | latchkey wrote:
         | It is often very difficult to test networking changes in
         | production. For example, firewall rules. What sort of tools do
         | people use for this?
        
         | ricardobayes wrote:
         | I'm so surprised by MS's strategy for using random domains and
         | TLD's, this certainly don't make it easy for phishing
         | avoidance.
        
           | joecool1029 wrote:
           | .it ccTLD is especially bad. Almost all of the generated SEO
           | spam links to malicious ad networks I get on search pages are
           | usually .it domains, all written in machine english, not
           | italian. Thanks for reminding me and discovering -site:.it
           | works in search queries to filter it out.
        
           | Tepix wrote:
           | Makes sense to use a different domain if everything is down
           | because it could also effect DNS for the main domain.
        
             | wiradikusuma wrote:
             | I think what the OP saying is, if you have multiple random
             | domains, how would people know which ones are legit (or
             | not)? Say I have mixxxrosoft.com, how would you know this
             | is one of MS' official domains?
        
           | tenplusfive wrote:
           | Luckily Microsoft also provides a service for that: Safelinks
           | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
           | us/microsoft-365/security/off...
           | 
           | Also a personal favorite of mine: http://microsft.com (not
           | entirely sure if its just to prevent typosquatting or if this
           | is actually used in some products)
        
             | luckylion wrote:
             | I don't know whether it's a typo but
             | https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/contact-
             | us-91f63b4... lists "EOC: criskgro@microsft.com (For CEE
             | and MEA)" under the Microsoft Credit Services. It feels
             | like a typo, but who knows. If they don't have anything in
             | place to catch this type of error, it's probably a good
             | idea to register every domain someone could accidentally
             | type.
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | microsft.com was used specifically for telemetry to bypass
             | web proxy blocks for *.microsoft.com put in by
             | administrators of secure networks.
             | 
             | I know this because I was one of those admins trying to
             | plug the leaks.
             | 
             | Windows 10 + Office uses 200+ domains just for Microsoft
             | stuff, of which something like 120 are for telemetry.
        
               | zerohp wrote:
               | Yet people continue to defend Microsoft's telemetry
               | practices. The OS won't let you opt out without it
               | fighting you and they'll even fight you for blocking it
               | on the network.
               | 
               | Windows is spyware.
        
               | ridgered4 wrote:
               | And I imagine they add new domains with updates all the
               | time.
               | 
               | At home I was trying to avoid random reboots from updates
               | in a full proof way in a Windows VM that ran long
               | processing tasks. I determined the only reasonable course
               | of action was to remove all internet access. Stamping out
               | the massive list of changing domains (and hard coded ip
               | addresses?) would just be to much work that I know I
               | would never keep up with.
               | 
               | A white list might work.
               | 
               | I mused that you could have a constantly updating Windows
               | machine and monitor all of its connections, adding them
               | to a block list on an external firewall but in addition
               | to being complex to setup I bet it wouldn't even catch
               | everything.
        
           | noinsight wrote:
           | If you implement an allowlisting proxy, the number of
           | required domains for M365 / Azure is something like 120 [1].
           | Google basically requires three, tunnel.cloudproxy.app,
           | *.google.com and *.googleapis.com. Amazon requires
           | *.aws.amazon.com, *.amazonaws.com, *.awsstatic.com, *.api.aws
           | and *.aws.dev.
           | 
           | Microsoft has some great domain planning.
           | 
           | [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
           | us/microsoft-365/enterprise/u...
        
             | ricardobayes wrote:
             | My point is MS uses a lot of unrelated domains that are
             | very different from the main brand, even the one above
             | looks dodgy (msft[.]it) From your list,
             | microsoftonline-p[.]com is an official domain, but it looks
             | like a typosquat. I think it's quite far from "great domain
             | planning".
        
               | adql wrote:
               | > I think it's quite far from "great domain planning".
               | 
               | The poster saying they have 120 of them would imply that
               | being sarcasm
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | They appear to be being sarcastic. I don't think anyone
               | would be seriously saying 120 is better than 3 or 6
               | domains.
        
       | skc wrote:
       | Had a few dropped calls in Teams over here this morning (South
       | Africa), otherwise our devops stuff is currently fine.
        
       | ruffrey wrote:
       | In the azure portal, it shows a "Routine Unplanned outage" - ??
        
         | rossdavidh wrote:
         | Well points for honesty, at least. :)
        
         | Eleison23 wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | ugh123 wrote:
         | I guess thats the 0.0001% of outage for an advertised 99.9999%
         | uptime
        
         | funnymony wrote:
         | At least they have a sense of humor
        
       | asim wrote:
       | Cloud is the new power grid. When it goes down, we lose power to
       | everything. Will we learn from the grid and decentralise some of
       | the compute and cloud services?
        
       | mensetmanusman wrote:
       | Hope the Leopard tanks aren't running azure...
        
       | adql wrote:
       | Office359 strikes again
        
         | Yuioup wrote:
         | You mean Office364
        
           | DoctorDabadedoo wrote:
           | Everyone deserves a break between Christmas and New Years,
           | even the folks at MS! /s
        
           | wrldos wrote:
           | 0<Office<365
        
       | alkonaut wrote:
       | Wouldn't it be quite simple to set up an unofficial status page
       | that just pings some relevant services and if they have a
       | disastrous outage at least, it shows it?
       | 
       | Because I think it's clear that their status page is useless and
       | "manual".
        
       | markuman123 wrote:
       | russia? shut down a service and halt the productivity of most
       | companies in the west...because most companies moved to azure ad
       | and teams.
        
         | deathanatos wrote:
         | > _russia?_
         | 
         | Oh please. Azure is plenty capable of taking themselves offline
         | on their own.
        
         | swarnie wrote:
         | I'm not sure Russia is as capable as you've all spent the last
         | few decades making out....
        
       | dx034 wrote:
       | Shows that all these availability zones and regions don't really
       | help if an outage can knock out a whole cloud provider. And
       | that's not specific to Microsoft. The only way to really ensure
       | uptime is to use two providers. Sadly, that's basically only
       | possible with on-prem/colocation where traffic is cheap.
        
         | sofixa wrote:
         | It's mostly Azure though that is badly designed to such an
         | extent that multiple times there have been global outages. In
         | general Azure availability, security (the only major cloud
         | provider with not one but _multiple_ cross-tenant security
         | exploits) and usability are pretty terrible so it shouldn 't be
         | used for anything but saying "this is how it should not be
         | done".
         | 
         | GCP had a similar thing once, where a BGP update knocked out
         | their Asian regions.
         | 
         | AWS have never had a global outage. (And no, that time S3 in
         | us-east-1 was down wasn't a global outage, the only customer
         | code/workloads that were impacted was code interacting with S3
         | that didn't specify the region and had to rely on us-east-1 to
         | determine it, and it didn't work anymore)
        
           | wereallterrrist wrote:
           | Someday someone will write a book about how AD, AAD, etc,
           | exert the control they do at MS and go as unchecked (or at
           | the time) as they do. AD's inability to execute made Azure a
           | significantly less pleasant platform until they finally fixed
           | accounts a couple of years back to properly do OAuth 2.0 with
           | ARM.
           | 
           | Maybe the book is just "AD brings in the money" but wow, they
           | sure bring it _down_ as well. Global outages like that always
           | stink of AD.
        
           | Andys wrote:
           | To be fair, AWS once had a global Route53 outage, which was
           | effectively a global outage for anyone using AWS for DNS.
        
             | snorkel wrote:
             | That outage was limited to Route 53 DNS record editing and
             | not DNS lookups.
        
             | eurg wrote:
             | Do you have a link to an article about that? My google-fu
             | is weak, and this sounds interesting - that should not
             | happen to DNS - at all - and from the outside Route53 looks
             | quite well managed. So what the heck did they do?
        
               | codalan wrote:
               | It was back in 2019.
               | 
               | https://twitter.com/AWSSupport/status/1186735657387003904
               | 
               | I forget the details. I do remember half of our internal
               | tools not working at the time due to DNS issues, though.
               | Good times.
        
       | klaude wrote:
       | Anyone having problems with Azure too?
        
         | ensocode wrote:
         | yes here. storage, db, apis - its not permanent but still
         | persisting. It can be monitored at the azure status page as
         | well https://status.azure.com/status
        
       | sli wrote:
       | Every Azure product I've had to use has been lousy in every
       | possible way. Azure DevOps at my last employer was a nightmare
       | and nobody in the company liked it, not even the managers who
       | decided on it.
        
         | BLKNSLVR wrote:
         | I've been learning / using DevOps for the past four months and
         | find it "quite good", and have previously used Jira, although
         | not in great detail.
         | 
         | I'm making the effort to learn it in increasing detail as it's
         | the company-wide chosen system. I'm interested to know what
         | made / makes it a nightmare for anyone else.
         | 
         | (And I'm no fan of Microsoft as a whole)
        
       | stephencoyner wrote:
       | I did notice chatgpt was down earlier, but it could have been
       | heavy usage caused
        
       | kgdinesh wrote:
       | At work, we all got kicked out of a teams meeting an hour back
       | and sending/receiving e-mails on Outlook seems to be slow.
       | 
       | Location: Chennai, India
        
         | midasz wrote:
         | This is going to be the most productive day ever
        
       | dustedcodes wrote:
       | Azure is the most developer hostile cloud environment. I have
       | zero sympathy for people being affected by this because if you
       | voluntarily use Azure then this is what you deserve. Sorry for
       | being so miserable, but Azure has given me soooo much grief over
       | the last 10 years that I'm just completely done with this
       | shitshow of a platform.
        
         | zufallsheld wrote:
         | > I have zero sympathy for people being affected by this
         | because if you voluntarily use Azure then this is what you
         | deserve
         | 
         | I guess many developers do not use Azure voluntarily but are
         | forced to by their companies (or customers).
        
           | antihero wrote:
           | And the companies are forced to due to huge contracts with
           | Microsoft
        
             | ngrilly wrote:
             | Nothing is forcing companies to sign an Azure contract with
             | Microsoft, and go with AWS or GCP instead. Perhaps they are
             | just doing something right. But I didn't use Azure myself.
             | I'd be curious to know what's good or bad about it compared
             | to GCP and AWS.
        
               | RajT88 wrote:
               | On the ground, the chatter I've heard from cloud
               | customers and techies who have worked for various cloud
               | companies:
               | 
               | - If you need scale, you pick AWS or Azure (GCP doesn't
               | have the same scale, and is catching up)
               | 
               | - If you are a retailer, you don't pick AWS, because
               | you're a competitor and they'll use whatever nasty (but
               | legal) tricks to eat your lunch money
               | 
               | - Windows stack workloads seem to run better on the AWS
               | virtualization stack
               | 
               | - Linux stack workloads seem to run better on the Azure
               | virtualization stack
               | 
               | - GCP has great integrations/automation/api, AWS is
               | pretty good too
               | 
               | - AWS has great support
               | 
               | - GCP has terrible support
               | 
               | - Azure is somewhere in between the two above in terms of
               | support
               | 
               | It depends what is important to you.
               | 
               | Bonus chatter: Oracle Exadata is an unmatched force to be
               | reckoned with, but OCI as a whole doesn't have their shit
               | together.
        
               | l-p wrote:
               | > I'd be curious to know what's good or bad about it
               | compared to GCP and AWS.
               | 
               | Documentation lies, support lies, metrics lie, bugs
               | everywhere, and when something breaks the status page is
               | always all green and support tries to convince you it's
               | your fault anyway. They're only here to prevent you from
               | enforcing the SLA. The distrust is pervasive. I stopped
               | suspecting my code, if something breaks outside of a
               | planned maintenance it is _always_ Azure.
               | 
               | My latest support ticket: Azure App Service internal DNS
               | server broke and there is no way to bypass it short of
               | hardcoding IPs in /etc/hosts. Support told me that if I
               | wanted App Service to work reliably I had to implement
               | their DNS server myself. To rephrase, my PaaS provider
               | told me to spend time and money to implement the very
               | platform I was paying them for, and it just so happened
               | to be absolutely impossible because of an unannounced BC
               | break a few months prior (which is another lengthy and
               | frustrating story).
               | 
               | This morning I had a VM cut out of the network and 10% of
               | my App Service traffic just disappeared. No explanation,
               | no incident report, nothing.
               | 
               | These days I'm working with AWS, and it just works. If
               | something isn't working you know it's your fault and that
               | the answer is in the documentation. I'm not spending days
               | on workarounds, I'm actually implementing as planned. I
               | have no words to describe the relief I'm feeling.
        
               | tialaramex wrote:
               | For a development team, here's an example of something
               | good about Azure: Microsoft gives us dev accounts with
               | monthly Azure credits (e.g. $100) and you _cannot spend
               | more_ when those credits run out because there is no
               | credit card etc. behind that account to charge the
               | excess.
               | 
               | Azure just like other cloud services (I've used AWS but
               | as I understand it GCP is the same) doesn't believe in
               | timely billing. You can and will receive charges against
               | an account for services that were turned off yesterday,
               | the day before, even last week, as gradually billing
               | catches up to reality. This means that there is no way to
               | _actually_ cap a budget. If you decide  "Once this costs
               | $100 I'm turning it off" you are not capping your expense
               | at $100, after you turn it off charges keep arriving,
               | I've seen a week later and I wouldn't be surprised if it
               | can be longer. Should they do that? Well, even if they
               | shouldn't, good luck making them stop.
               | 
               | But with the "free" Azure credits that have no money
               | behind them, when it drops dead _Microsoft_ eats all the
               | residual charges that will be discovered days or weeks
               | later, because there is no other party for them to bill.
               | 
               | I work for a University, I suspect that if you paid full
               | price for these services it makes no economic sense, a
               | $100 Azure credit that cost $100 is a bad deal, but the
               | University gets an _enormous_ discount, for obvious
               | reasons, and if the other cloud vendors don 't want to
               | offer actual billing it does feel like they deserve the
               | consequences.
        
               | dachryn wrote:
               | GCP gives me an invoice every first of the month,
               | automatically.
               | 
               | It also offers budget caps, but indeed, those are more a
               | warning and not a hard shutdown. That's annoying. Same at
               | microsoft by the way, except indeed that developer credit
               | as a failsafe.
               | 
               | Google gives 100k free credits to universities and
               | startups by the way (and even to individual departmens if
               | you are a big university). You just have to apply and let
               | them bring in trainers and you have to actually use a
               | percentage, otherwise they take it away the next year.
        
               | voytec wrote:
               | > For a development team, here's an example of something
               | good about Azure: Microsoft gives us dev accounts with
               | monthly Azure credits (e.g. $100)
               | 
               | First analogy I thought of were stories about drug
               | dealers giving away free samples to schoolchildren to
               | hook them up before asking for money.
        
               | tialaramex wrote:
               | Sure, it's obvious why they do this. Unlike drug dealers
               | (who don't actually give school kids free crack, that
               | makes no economic sense) it does make sense for Microsoft
               | to ensure every kid who knows how to do rudimentary word
               | processing knows Word, etc.
               | 
               | Nobody is under any illusion that Microsoft just really
               | likes universities for some reason. But on the other
               | hand, we did need lots of this stuff and it's very cheap,
               | budgets are tight and it's not as though hand-rolling
               | even more stuff would be cheaper - we do hand roll some
               | things where it makes sense.
               | 
               | For example, periodically senior people say "Why do we
               | spend $$$$ on a supercomputer? Surely we could rent one
               | from the cloud?" and we (well, not me, different group
               | same department) go OK, we will cost that for you. And
               | they get Azure, Google, etc. to quote them for what they
               | need a supercomputer to do, and then they present this,
               | "The Cloud providers can do that for $$$$$". Ah, that's
               | _more_ money. No thanks, we will continue to run our own
               | supercomputer.
               | 
               | It's not even close. Cloud supercomputer is great if you
               | need the supercomputer for six weeks to do a special
               | project and then you're done with it, the Cloud provider
               | saves you a lot of money. But the University needs
               | supercomputers all the time, so the numbers do not work.
        
               | danjac wrote:
               | This is why I absolutely avoid using Azure, AWS or GCP
               | for my own side projects. On the company account, sure,
               | it's your money. But I'm not going to risk my savings
               | because I misconfigured a lambda or something.
        
               | InsomniacL wrote:
               | > I work for a University, I suspect that if you paid
               | full price for these services it makes no economic sense,
               | a $100 Azure credit that cost $100 is a bad deal
               | 
               | For Cloud to make economic sense, you need to treat it
               | very differently from traditional infrastructure. For
               | example, simply shutting down our Dev environment outside
               | of business hours saves means we're not paying for the
               | compute the majority of the time.
        
             | red-iron-pine wrote:
             | Literally the whole reason my last org got into Azure.
             | 
             | Lots of MSSQL and PowerBI licenses, lots of other Windows
             | env features. Great deals to bundle those in w/ Azure
             | deployments.
             | 
             | Great pricing too -- for the first 3 years. But at 4
             | years...
        
           | adql wrote:
           | We're migrating on Teams because of that kind of reasoning.
           | 
           | It's utter shit of a service. Even worse if you need to write
           | integrations for it
        
             | cutemonster wrote:
             | What will you use instead? What don't you like about teams
             | (or wiring integrations)
        
               | dekerta wrote:
               | Our work switched from Slack to Teams after an
               | acquisition, and I can confidently say that Teams is just
               | complete garbage compared to Slack.
               | 
               | - The interface is laggy
               | 
               | - Scrolling back in long messages is buggy, it often
               | skips around and loses its place
               | 
               | - No built in "whiteboarding" tools in screen sharing
               | 
               | - Teams will often keep ringing on my phone for up to a
               | minute after I picked up a call on my laptop
               | 
               | - Sometimes I can't click reactions on messages. I click
               | the emoji and nothing happens
               | 
               | Overall, it's just poorly made software. It feels like
               | something that was made by a couple of interns in their
               | spare time, not a keystone product from a multi-billion
               | dollar company
        
               | HideousKojima wrote:
               | Also for several weeks recently my phone was getting
               | messages several minutes before they showed up on my
               | laptop, and 3 or 4 of my coworkers (all remote and in
               | various parts of the US) confirmed they were having the
               | same issue.
        
           | Alupis wrote:
           | Governments - local, state and federal, pretty much are
           | captive Microsoft customers, and are eye-balls deep in
           | Microsoft 365 + Azure services.
        
         | paganel wrote:
         | From what I can understand choosing Azure is almost always a
         | top-down decision, especially when it comes to government
         | entities/agencies (I live in Europe). MS has a hell of a sales
         | network.
        
           | Stranger43 wrote:
           | It's usually a cost decision and AWS don't really care about
           | anything smaller then say the US government enough to even
           | attempt to engage in competitive bidding proposals so if a
           | company/organization put out an RFP MS usually finds a way to
           | look cheaper then AWS.
           | 
           | Add to that that AWS dont really engage in the normal
           | business to business sales process but simple gives you a
           | price list and tells you "thats what it costs" pretty much
           | straight up and it's no surprise a lot of traditional
           | enterprises with huge existing Microsoft bills end up with
           | the vendor they know, understand and think they can control.
           | 
           | It's not that there is anything really wrong with AWS their
           | support is good their products work but it's a messy platform
           | where you really need to pay attention and might even engage
           | with consultant to fully understand what your paying for and
           | how optimization decisions is affecting your ROI as
           | everything is priced individually in AWS where as Azure does
           | a bit more bundling into packages.
        
           | shp0ngle wrote:
           | As I wrote above. Azure has much better compliance story,
           | especially in smaller countries.
        
         | dx034 wrote:
         | Office 365 is also affected. And I find Outlook to be one of
         | the better alternatives for business email.
        
         | dachryn wrote:
         | as if developers have a choice.
         | 
         | Microsoft just has found how to sell Azure: scare compliance
         | teams that AWS and GCP are horrible, especially in EU and
         | banking. Use their office monopoly to give huge discounts if
         | you buy as a bundle, and be awesome on comparison charts. They
         | check all the boxes of services they offer. For an exec, it
         | doesn't count how well those services are executed, thats a
         | developer problem that a system integrator will solve.
        
         | 8fingerlouie wrote:
         | It doesn't really matter, at least if you're in the EU.
         | 
         | While Google, Amazon and others were busy complaining about
         | GDPR, Microsoft was busy working on being compliant, with the
         | result that today they're pretty much the only legal/compliant
         | solution in most of the EU.
         | 
         | The more regulated the industry (health, finance, etc), the
         | more you can be certain that it's running on Azure if it's EU
         | based and running in the cloud.
        
         | llama052 wrote:
         | This place I work at has actively fought against using Azure,
         | but we use them because it's advantageous to the business. (or
         | it's perceived to be).
         | 
         | We have actively pushed for AWS or even GCP but it's futile
         | when it doesn't align with business. I'd imagine a lot of
         | developers are facing the same company issues.
         | 
         | Azure is a chore compared to AWS.
        
         | wereallterrrist wrote:
         | The irony is the amount of money they have thrown at "Dev
         | Advocates" who don't do a god damn thing to advocate for how
         | developers use their platform. Frankly that's because folks
         | that care burn out. I still remember the time a high-up rail-
         | roaded me and lied repeatedly to a VP about the design of a
         | product as I desperately tried to save them from the 5+ years
         | of having to educate users on two different ways to do [basic
         | ops]. Those basic cloud objects of course have major
         | differences in functionality and ecosystem viability depending
         | on what you choose, but this isn't really explained up front
         | either, you find out by building a solution for months and then
         | finding out you have to backtrack and start over the Azure
         | integration. Maybe again.
         | 
         | All to say, I agree wholeheartedly with every word.
        
         | xtracto wrote:
         | I know Azure generally sucks... If you think you cannot go
         | lower, you should try Oracle Cloud. That is a total piece of
         | dung of a Cloud Service.
         | 
         | I tried it a couple of _years_ ago. After finishing the trial,
         | I removed all instances and disks, supposedly completely
         | blanking the account. And also supposedly _deleted_ the
         | account.
         | 
         | To this day, I still keep receiving some kind of invoice for
         | about $2 USD that they say I owe. And when I login into the
         | "oracle cloud account" nothing works because my account seems
         | to be half-deleted. (like I get _error screens_ when accessing
         | several of their piece of shit panels).
         | 
         | To make things worse, suddenly I started receiving emails from
         | some of their sales team _in Portuguese_ , I guess that my last
         | name sounds kind of Portuguese so someone say, yeah, you write
         | to him.
         | 
         | And while using their system I was not really impressed. Their
         | cost structure was weirder than AWS (and that's saying
         | something) and to mount a volume in an instance you had to do
         | some funky commands.
         | 
         | I would _NEVER_ trust business technology to that sort of
         | system.
        
         | shp0ngle wrote:
         | One word: compliance.
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | Works for me (not right now, but in general).
        
           | dustedcodes wrote:
           | Of course, there's always someone who will say that -.-
           | 
           | Did Windows ME and Windows Vista also work really great for
           | you?
        
             | jug wrote:
             | Windows ME did in fact work mostly fine here too, lol.
             | Relatively speaking for Windows 9x performance, of course.
             | I only used it for a year, not because I couldn't stand it
             | but because such was the pace of major Windows updates back
             | then.
             | 
             | Windows Vista was honestly worse for me, not due to bugs
             | but for being two years ahead the curve of hardware, and
             | GPU vendors seemingly rolling their thumbs during betas and
             | once WDDM1 went live, they panicked and rolled out alpha
             | quality work. So many driver crashes compounded with the
             | heavy RAM requirements... Other than that, and with less of
             | an UAC nazi, I could see an OS that was similar to what
             | Windows 7 became if I squinted. Hardware had caught up,
             | drivers were mature, and on top Microsoft optimized its
             | performance.
             | 
             | In hindsight, WDDM should've been an update to Windows XP
             | that could be rolled out well in advance and let developers
             | focus on a single thing rather than new OS compatibility on
             | top, and deep changes like UAC.
             | 
             | 1 It was necessary work though:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model
        
             | Dalewyn wrote:
             | Windows ME was one of my favorite versions of Windows, not
             | being ironic about it either. Its infamy has more to do
             | with how Joe Average uses computers in general.
             | 
             | As for Vista, while I did not use it in its day I can tell
             | its problems were far more to do with crapass hardware
             | manufacturers and their crapass drivers. Vista with access
             | to 7's drivers and hardware runs just fine.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | wrldos wrote:
         | Migrating stuff off it now to AWS (not my stuff). Couldn't
         | agree more. Total shit show.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | Curious to hear about the specifics...
        
             | wrldos wrote:
             | Persistent problems between Azure VMs and virtual disks
             | causing unexpected reboots. Complete outages. And don't
             | even start me on ACI (for Windows). It doesn't even work.
             | 
             | In 7 years we had one AWS AZ outage and we didn't even
             | notice because our monitoring platform in there couldn't
             | reach the network (learned something!). But nothing broke.
             | Even the us-east-1 outages didn't affect us.
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | Were you using Standard HDD disks? They have a _really_
               | poor SLA, and are only usable for things like stateless
               | VM Scale Sets or otherwise redundant services.
               | 
               | We had to switch everything to SSD to get reliability
               | comparable to on-prem VMware.
        
               | wrldos wrote:
               | No entirely SSD. The problems stopped after a couple of
               | weeks suddenly.
        
               | pwarner wrote:
               | That sounds like what I've seen on Azure. Mystery weird
               | problems we see, but they don't. Often in the network
               | side. One time we were pretty sure they had a bad
               | interface in a LAG group. Massive packet loss between
               | hosts, but only on certain ephemeral source ports, about
               | 1/8 of them.... Support couldn't find any issues even
               | after a few days.
               | 
               | This was circa 2018 but AWS was so much more stable at
               | that time. Ok, US-E-1 AWS had issues from time to time
               | but they acked them and fixed them
        
               | wrldos wrote:
               | Yes the lack of them being able to see any problems was a
               | constant problem.
               | 
               | Our AWS reps are all over stuff when it goes down. I
               | regularly get to talk to actual real product managers and
               | engineers via our enterprise support if anything goes
               | wrong.
        
         | bdcp wrote:
         | That's just not true. If you know what your doing and using
         | most of microsoft's stack (.NET, etc) it's often quite a
         | breeze.
        
         | MuffinFlavored wrote:
         | > Sorry for being so miserable, but Azure has given me soooo
         | much grief over the last 10 years that I'm just completely done
         | with this shitshow of a platform.
         | 
         | And yet it continues to rake in billions + grow 20-40% month
         | over month (even if it is slowing)
        
           | maushu wrote:
           | Because it's not the developers that choose the platform and
           | Microsoft knows that.
        
             | dx034 wrote:
             | They know how important developers are, that's why they
             | bought Github. But developer experience is indeed one of
             | the minor points of consideration when choosing a cloud
             | vendor for large enterprise. Customer service, billing and
             | integration into existing infrastructure is much more
             | important.
        
               | Dalewyn wrote:
               | >They know how important developers are,
               | 
               | Developers developers developers!
        
             | ed_elliott_asc wrote:
             | I'd choose azure tbh - have used it because of work but am
             | happy to stick with it.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | madduci wrote:
         | Many companies use Active Directory. The new kid in the block
         | is Azure Active Directory (AAD), which is the evolution of the
         | self-hosted Windows Servers.
         | 
         | Since many companies rely on it, especially for role base
         | access to internal resources, you can't avoid it as a
         | developer/employee.
        
           | tialaramex wrote:
           | Azure Active Directory is _not_ Active Directory but on
           | Azure.
        
             | smileybarry wrote:
             | You're right, but that's not what they meant (and it's not
             | AAD's trajectory). Microsoft's been adding more and more
             | device management, policies, software rollout, etc. to AAD
             | to bring it up into equal standing with AD and then,
             | eventually, allow most deployments to use _just_ AAD,
             | instead of holding some bulky AD setup of on-prem  & cloud.
        
             | dachryn wrote:
             | the people buying these things obviously have no idea about
             | that. Migrating to Okta or something else neutral would
             | cost the same, but hey, that's a different name
        
               | spydum wrote:
               | not even remotely close. okta for an enterprise is big
               | dollars. most shops already have o365, so the AAD premium
               | tier licensing is already paid for. aad and okta
               | workforce are almost feature parity.
        
         | StreamBright wrote:
         | What about the people who work for companies use Azure and were
         | not involved in the decision?
        
           | dustedcodes wrote:
           | They all have little hair left on their heads and I feel
           | somewhat sorry for them.
        
             | liamkinne wrote:
             | I welcome your sympathy because Azure constantly makes my
             | life hell.
             | 
             | So many half baked features and legitimate bugs in their
             | platform that they either don't fix or take years to fix.
        
               | dustedcodes wrote:
               | This is why we call it the Triangle of Sadness:
               | Azure                  /     \             Azure       \
               | DevOps----- Teams
        
             | StreamBright wrote:
             | You can say that about 50% of the tools used by it people.
        
             | dx034 wrote:
             | I'm glad I work for a company that uses Office 365 instead
             | of the equivalent of Google or others. I really like Office
             | products, for all their faults they allow me to work more
             | productively than the alternatives. So I don't know why I
             | have less in my head just because I can work well with
             | Excel and Outlook.
        
         | hardware2win wrote:
         | Ive used gcp and ive been billed like 10% of minimal wage for
         | setting GCPs demo with like 7 very simple microservices (i dont
         | remember exactly) 4 times and every of them was running like 5
         | minutes after being deployed and then project was killed
         | 
         | Shit is expensive as hell
         | 
         | For the same money I could rent some weak linux box for a year
         | 
         | Or something decent for a month
         | 
         | Edit 10ms
         | 
         | https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo
        
           | ZeroCool2u wrote:
           | This is one of the single most comprehensively intense demo
           | projects I've ever seen. I did a multi day AWS Data Lab for
           | work once and it wasn't this comprehensive.
        
           | Yuioup wrote:
           | Dude, you blindly ran some random code on a metered cloud
           | service.
           | 
           | If somebody gives you keys to a Ferrari, don't blame the
           | manufacturer when you drive it off a cliff at 120
           | miles/hour...
        
             | hardware2win wrote:
             | Its not random code, it is GCPs demo code. And im just
             | saying that it is expensive for such a small usage
             | 
             | Ferrari analogy would be something like being billed 100usd
             | for 1min ride
        
           | dachryn wrote:
           | what you show there should cost like 300/month to run. Its
           | very transparent pricing, its just bad that the tutorial
           | doesn't mention that.
           | 
           | You do realize what you setup in that tutorial right? A
           | kubernetes cluster with 11 full scale microservices that are
           | dimensioned so they can serve the average medium size
           | business. For only a hobby this is huuuuuuugely
           | overdimensioned.
           | 
           | If you were to do the same on azure, it would cost more. If
           | you are comparing it to a cheap linux box, what the hell are
           | you using kubernetes clusters for then?
        
             | hardware2win wrote:
             | >what you show there should cost like 300/month to run
             | 
             | Ive ran it for 4 times miltiplied by 5minutes + time needed
             | for it to wake up
             | 
             | All im saying is that it is expensive for such a small
             | usage
        
             | cube00 wrote:
             | _> You do realize what you setup in that tutorial right?_
             | 
             | Sure, buyer beware but is it reasonable that a clearly
             | marked demo project is set up with services to that level
             | of resourcing?
             | 
             | Nobody is going to take a demo like that and start running
             | a business off it tomorrow.
        
           | hobo_mark wrote:
           | I have to wonder what you were doing, I've been continuously
           | hosting my own projects there for years and with the free
           | tier they cost pennies per month to run.
        
             | gerdesj wrote:
             | "and with the free tier they cost pennies per month"
             | 
             | Is it free or not?
        
               | hobo_mark wrote:
               | You pay for the resources you use above the free tier
               | limits. My bill for this month so far is 30 cents because
               | I deployed frequently and my docker artifact storage size
               | (with several years worth of deployments) dipped above
               | the limit. Then I added a periodic job to clear out
               | unused docker images older than one year and I'm running
               | for free again.
        
             | hardware2win wrote:
             | Ive linked the GCPs demo repo that Ive been messing with
        
         | Jochim wrote:
         | I quite like Microsoft/Azure from a development perspective. If
         | you're running .NET, Application Insights alone is nearly
         | enough to put it above the competition. I appreciate how it
         | integrates with AZD/Teams and the platform as a whole felt much
         | more cohesive than AWS.
         | 
         | The monthly $60-$100 developer credit was fantastic as well. It
         | avoided the usual fighting for approval/budget to test things
         | out.
        
           | bennyelv wrote:
           | Application insights is amazing - I didn't realise how
           | amazing until I had to try and achieve the same thing in the
           | JavaScript/Node ecosystem.
        
             | Jochim wrote:
             | Yeah, I'm currently missing it very much running .NET on
             | AWS. It's insane how much it gives you for "free".
             | CloudWatch feels like weak tea in comparison.
        
               | CWuestefeld wrote:
               | We moved from AWS to Azure for other reasons, but in
               | doing so we moved from X-Ray to AppInsights, and the
               | difference was amazing. We're big App Insights fans.
        
       | osivertsson wrote:
       | Many games that use Azure PlayFab are down as well due to this.
       | Both PlayFab services and PlayFab MPS game-server hosting are
       | currently broken.
       | 
       | https://status.playfab.com/
        
       | maxaigner wrote:
       | Reported issues with Teams, Microsoft 365, etc
        
         | saikatsg wrote:
         | Teams is working now for me. However, all my notification
         | preferences got reset!
        
       | danjc wrote:
       | Auth via Microsoft ID is degraded, our platform is blipping
       | (cache retries, message retries due to packet loss), access to
       | the Azure portal is degraded and the Azure status page isn't
       | loading consistently.
        
       | idk1 wrote:
       | Does this mean they need to rebrand, because it's not up 365 days
       | of the year? Maybe rebrand it to Microsoft 364.5?
        
         | ericpauley wrote:
         | I think the joke always went that they should rename it
         | Microsoft 360.
        
         | altairprime wrote:
         | There's 365.2425 days per year, so a six hour outage is just
         | about 0.2425 hours, which suggests that they remain able to
         | declare 365 when considering this specific outage only.
        
       | quickthrower2 wrote:
       | Did we finally exhaust IPv4? /jk
        
       | cube00 wrote:
       | _> The issue is causing impact in waves, peaking approximately
       | every 30 minutes._
       | 
       | Does anyone have any general ideas on what kind of outage
       | manifests itself like this? Devices retrying to authenticate
       | every 30 minutes and finding the service is down perhaps?
        
         | urbandw311er wrote:
         | Can sometimes be scaling/monitoring loops. i.e. cluster comes
         | up, provides some limited service, gets overloaded and drops
         | below required performance metric, gets killed by
         | monitoring/scaling system, repeat...
        
       | neversaydie wrote:
       | Seeing problems with Azure DevOps in Western Europe here, can't
       | open most pages/log in. Teams and Office appear to be working
       | fine.
        
         | brodo wrote:
         | Teams and Outlook not working fine here.
        
           | ntp85 wrote:
           | Same here in Germany. Even microsoft.com times out at the
           | moment.
        
       | LilBytes wrote:
       | Nothing is working for me, Oceania/Australia.
       | 
       | Including O365, Azure, Azure Devops.
        
       | jupiterblues- wrote:
       | Minecraft, Asure, Office 365, etc... MS cloud services have issue
        
       | reset-password wrote:
       | I have some Azure services that are not able to consistently make
       | outbound HTTP requests to my heartbeat monitoring service so I'm
       | getting alert after alert this morning. This is just the nudge I
       | needed, and I'll be moving the whole thing to Linode later this
       | afternoon.
        
       | kemals wrote:
       | ThousandEyes public outage map shows the scale of the Office365
       | outage: https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/
        
       | hobofan wrote:
       | Not sure if it's directly related, but GitHub is also
       | experiencing issues: https://www.githubstatus.com/
        
         | marvinblum wrote:
         | "We are investigating reports of issues with Actions. This
         | looks related to Azure networking issue which is impacting
         | multiple regions. We are seeing improvements and will continue
         | to monitor this."
        
         | ricc wrote:
         | GH has been a Microsoft company since 2018...
        
           | quickthrower2 wrote:
           | Good to see GH is eating the dog food
        
       | ChickeNES wrote:
       | Does the Internet Archive use Azure? archive.org is throwing 503s
        
         | voytec wrote:
         | Two weeks ago they were affected by the Elasticsearch
         | outage[1], too.
         | 
         | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34337518
        
       | ochrist wrote:
       | https://downdetector.dk/ indicates several MS products and
       | services are having problems. Here is the status from MS on
       | Twitter:
       | https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status/status/1618149579341369345
       | Edit: Added this link which apparently is the new status page and
       | seems to be updated: https://status.office365.com/
        
       | dsign wrote:
       | This makes you wonder if some centralization patterns, i.e. Azure
       | AD, are not a national security problem?
        
         | paganel wrote:
         | At this point most probably, yes. Especially as more and more
         | government entities/agencies are moving to the cloud, many of
         | them to Azure (because of MS). I live in Eastern Europe, but I
         | suspect that this migration is happening all around Europe and
         | North America.
        
         | ibejoeb wrote:
         | Azure AD is a nightmare. I don't know how many of you sign in
         | to multiple tenants in the console, but it generally involves
         | buying a new computer.
        
           | teh_klev wrote:
           | > I don't know how many of you sign in to multiple tenants in
           | the console, but it generally involves buying a new computer.
           | 
           | This made me laugh out loud. I'm working in a multi-tenant,
           | multi-subscription environment with Azure AD just now. MS
           | force you to use 2FA and I picked the wrong 2FA app.
           | 
           | Now it's completely and utterly comical trying to work out
           | which generated 2FA auth code I need to key in when auth'ing
           | in Visual Studio because there are absolutely no visual cues
           | as to which subscription it's trying to authenticate to. You
           | can't tell VS that "I'm only interested in auth'ing to this
           | particular subscription". Now it prompts me for almost every
           | subscription we use and it's a whack-a-mole experience. They
           | really need to fix the UI/UX in VS for this.
           | 
           | Of course when it comes to mandatory password change time I
           | have to go through this pain all over again.
        
             | cjcampbell wrote:
             | I'm setting up a system with multiple AAD B2C tenants, so I
             | get the joy of switching back and forth between the primary
             | tenant and the B2C tenants frequently (at least until I can
             | finish automating enough of the B2C provisioning bits).
             | 
             | I don't yet have enough context to fully evaluate against
             | cognito. It may end up being nice to have B2C as a first
             | class AAD tenant, but until I get far enough along to
             | realize those benefits, there will be a lot more cursing
             | under my breath about the need for another layer of
             | identity and the lack of control plane access through azure
             | resource manager APIs/tooling.
        
               | teh_klev wrote:
               | I have multiple chrome profiles for this. However,
               | despite switching from one subscription to another to
               | access each different AAD tenant across multiple chrome
               | profiles, it seems that Azure "remembers" the
               | subscription you last accessed, across profiles. It's as
               | if the last subscription you accessed is tagged to your
               | Azure user server side rather being a blob of client side
               | state. This is deeply annoying as well, especially when
               | your sessions expire...
        
           | herio wrote:
           | Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension. I couldn't live
           | without it.
        
             | ibejoeb wrote:
             | I use it, but since the azure portal uses the uri fragment,
             | it still requires constructing the correct url in the
             | correct container. One mistaken url will obliterate the
             | container, and restoring it requires delete
             | windowsazure.com, microsoftonline.com, portal.azure.com,
             | and another one that I can't remember right now.
             | 
             | You'd really have to try to make it so screwy.
             | 
             | It kind of a shame. Like most things, Azure was better when
             | it was smaller. I loved the first version of functions.
        
           | alar44 wrote:
           | Almost no one, probably.
        
           | gerdesj wrote:
           | It involves a lot of private browsing sessions which is
           | actually MS's recommendation!
           | 
           | What a PITA.
        
             | throwaheyy wrote:
             | Nah I just set up a 2nd browser profile, and they both stay
             | signed in. It's a breeze.
        
               | magicalhippo wrote:
               | Or Firefox containers?
        
           | Moissanite wrote:
           | YES. I have the dubious honor of needing to use at least 4
           | different Teams tenants over the course of a week and it is
           | enough to make me want to pitch my computer into the sea.
           | App, browser, private browser - doesn't seem to matter. When
           | I try to sign in, Microsoft will pick one of the tenants
           | seemingly at random, regardless of what URL I use, and try to
           | sign me in - of course, since there is usually no visual cue
           | as to which tenant I'm looking at, I just put in a password
           | and pray.
        
             | Godel_unicode wrote:
             | Use browser profiles, choose a different profile picture
             | for each, then use one profile per tenant. Done.
        
         | laacz wrote:
         | Critical infrastructure cannot be reliant on a cloud (or
         | internet availability, if possible). In most EU countries
         | that's a law.
        
           | deusex_ wrote:
           | Do you have any good resource summarizing these laws?
        
             | laacz wrote:
             | No, sorry. If you are adventorous enough, look at Latvia
             | with Google translate and search for "critical
             | infrastructure" at https://likumi.lv
        
       | hansamann wrote:
       | DuckDuckGo.com - no search results showing up at all... are they
       | on Azure?
        
         | atom058 wrote:
         | They get their search results from Bing
        
         | pred_ wrote:
         | Yes.                   $ dig +short duckduckgo.com | xargs
         | whois | grep Organization         Organization:   Microsoft
         | Corporation (MSFT)
        
       | alkonaut wrote:
       | It comes and goes. Teams and Azure DevOps some times works
       | perfectly for a few minutes, then responds with all 503's for a
       | few minutes.
        
       | spoils19 wrote:
       | It's good that Microsoft saved money via layoffs so that it
       | balances out when customers leave Azure. Very forward thinking
       | company.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | cryptonym wrote:
         | Leave to go where?
         | 
         | On-premise and being miserable having to wait months to get a
         | new server with poor automation, observability and worse
         | outages? To another major cloud provider with similar pricing
         | and outages?
         | 
         | Cloud helped mostly with automation and scaling but if your
         | system is that critical, you should consider a good CDN as load
         | balancer and multi-cloud (or at least multi-region) for actual
         | robustness.
        
           | jakewins wrote:
           | AWS and GCP both have ~100% uptime in _every_ region for VMs
           | this month. Meanwhile the _majority_ of Azure regions have
           | had various outages in the same period:
           | https://cloudharmony.com/status-of-compute
        
             | barbazoo wrote:
             | Wow I didn't expect the difference to be so obvious.
        
             | azfubar wrote:
             | Almost certainly due to Azure's broken policy where we have
             | critical change advisory's that block deployments for huge
             | periods of time towards the end of the year because of
             | Black Friday and then holidays. Every team has basically
             | been unable to deploy since the week before Thanksgiving
             | when a surprise CCOA was pushed out by leadership at the
             | behest of a certain big customer... then there was the
             | World Cup and the winter holidays. Nobody could really
             | deploy anything from a week before Thanksgiving until a
             | week after the New Years... almost two months worth of
             | batched changes and every team YOLO button pressing as soon
             | as they could in January.
             | 
             | And now layoffs so everyone is super unmotivated! Excellent
             | stuff going on right now from Microsoft senior leadership.
        
           | cm2187 wrote:
           | Where I worked, the internal approval processes and controls
           | over cloud resources are as lengthly as those for on premise
           | hardware. So that may be the case for small companies but I
           | don't think there is much of a difference in those large
           | bureaucracies.
        
       | braymundo wrote:
       | DuckDuckGo is also affected (blank search results).
        
       | hansamann wrote:
       | duckduckgo is not showing any results right now... are they on
       | Azure, too?
        
         | zidad wrote:
         | Most likely, because duckduckgo partially depends on Bing
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-25 23:02 UTC)