[HN Gopher] Decisions that eroded trust in Azure - by a former A...
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Decisions that eroded trust in Azure - by a former Azure Core
engineer
Author : axelriet
Score : 140 points
Date : 2026-04-02 16:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (isolveproblems.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (isolveproblems.substack.com)
| axelriet wrote:
| A former Azure Core engineer's 6-part account of the technical
| and leadership decisions that eroded trust in Azure.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I downvoted this comment for sounding like a summarizing LLM,
| not adding anything substantial beyond the title of the post,
| before realizing you were the poster and author.
| ninininino wrote:
| What's your assessment of AWS and GCP? Do you think it's likely
| they suffer from some of the same issues (eg the manual access
| of what should be highly secure, private systems, the
| instability, the lack of security)?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Why do you speak about yourself in the third person?
|
| Also, after this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341022
|
| You continued to work at Microsoft and now there is this
| takedown?
|
| I'm no friend of MS (to put it very mildly) but it seems to me
| your story is a bit inconsistent as well as the 7 year break
| between postings.
| pRusya wrote:
| It's a nice read. Thank you for sharing this.
|
| > Microsoft, meanwhile, conducted major layoffs--approximately
| 15,000 roles across waves in May and July 2025 --most likely to
| compensate for the immediate losses to CoreWeave ahead of the
| next earnings calls.
|
| This is what people should know when seeing massive layoffs due
| to AI.
| Bjartr wrote:
| What a fascinating view into how the sausage is made
| nope1000 wrote:
| > The direct corollary is that any successful compromise of the
| host can give an attacker access to the complete memory of every
| VM running on that node. Keeping the host secure is therefore
| critical.
|
| > In that context, hosting a web service that is directly
| reachable from any guest VM and running it on the secure host
| side created a significantly larger attack surface than I
| expected.
|
| That is quite scary
| xorcist wrote:
| Scary is the understatement of the day. I can't imagine the
| environment where someone think that architecture is a good
| idea.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| "For fiscal 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned total pay of
| $96.5 million, up 22% from a year earlier." -CNBC.com
|
| and
|
| "I also see I have 2 instances of Outlook, and neither of those
| are working." -Artemis II astronaut
| tantalor wrote:
| > 2 instances of Outlook
|
| That's 2 too many.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| They should have used the third outlook they didn't know
| about... Outlook, Outlook (new), and the well-hidden Outlook
| (classic) that actually works.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| That outlook was part of the ablative outlook armor thats
| suppose to burn off on reentry
| gnabgib wrote:
| Title: _How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars_
| vintagedave wrote:
| What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements.
| Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a
| whistleblower or an ex employee with a grudge? The appearance is
| the first. Is it? They've put their name to some clear and
| worrying statements.
|
| > _On January 7, 2025... I sent a more concise executive summary
| to the CEO. ... When those communications produced no
| acknowledgment, I took the customary step of writing to the Board
| through the corporate secretary._
|
| Why is that customary? I have not come across it, and though I
| have seen situations of some concern in the past, I previously
| had little experience with US corporate norms. What is normal
| here for such a level of concern?
|
| More, why is this public not a court case for wrongful
| termination?
|
| Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in
| this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external
| experience?
| bigbuppo wrote:
| The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in
| their obligations to the company, that's where you need to
| raise a stink so they can fix it.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| In my experience Azure is full of consistency issues and race
| conditions. It's enough of an issue that I was talking about
| new OpenAI models becoming available via Bedrock on AWS and how
| convenient that was since I wouldn't have to deal with Azure
| and my colleague in enterprise architecture went on an
| unprompted rant about these exact issues. It's not the first
| time something like this has happened and I've experienced
| these issues first hand, so yes. I'd say reliability is a
| critical issue for Azure and it hasn't gotten better each time
| I've gone back to check.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Yes it is that unreliable. Even when given free credits, I
| would rather pay for the offerings from Amazon/Google.
| lokar wrote:
| He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference?
| pRusya wrote:
| Azure is when you have a different version of the same
| product/api in each region.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| What an epic takedown.
|
| Microsoft should have promoted this guy instead of laying him
| off.
|
| Did Microsoft really lose OpenAI as a customer?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Any complex system - and these cloud systems must be immensely
| complex - accumulate cruft and bloat and bugs until the entire
| thing starts to look like an old hotel that hasn't been renovated
| in 30 years.
| acedTrex wrote:
| This is an insanely blunt look into some serious issues with
| microsoft.
| ludwigvan wrote:
| I had the misfortune of having to use Azure back in 2018 and was
| appalled at the lack of quality, slowness. I was in GitHub
| forums, helping other customers suffering from lack of basic
| functionality, incredible prices with abysmal performance. This
| article explains a lot honestly.
|
| Google's Cloud feels like the best engineered one, though lack of
| proper human support is worrying there compared to AWS.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with a
| grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is trying
| to be made, if there is any.
|
| From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big
| systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that
| things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal
| in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly
| Sev2 is hardly notable for anyone actually working on the
| foundational infra. There are certainly problems in Azure, but
| it's huge and rough edges are to be expected. It mostly marches
| on. IMO maturity is realizing this and working within the system
| to improve it rather than trying to lay out all the dirty laundry
| to an Internet audience that will undoubtedly lap it up and
| happily cry Microslop.
|
| Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks
| to national security and sending letters to the board, really?
| Azure is still chugging along apparently despite everything being
| mentioned. People come in all the time crying that everything is
| broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly
| ever true.
| sabedevops wrote:
| He might sound like he has a grudge but you sound like you're
| personally invested. Shill?
| kraemahz wrote:
| AWS and Google Cloud are both huge and are significantly better
| in UX/DX. My only experience with Azure was that it barely
| worked, provided very little in the way of information about
| why it didn't. I _only_ have negative impressions of Azure
| whereas at least GC and AWS I can say my experiences are mixed.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > People come in all the time crying that everything is broken
| and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever
| true.
|
| Or... you've just normalised the deviation.
|
| One of the few reliable barometers of an organisation (or their
| products) is the wtf/day exclaimed by _new_ hires.
|
| After about three or four weeks everyone adapts, learns what
| they can and can't criticise without fallout, and settles into
| the mud to wallow with everyone else that has become accustomed
| to the filth.
|
| As an Azure user I can tell you that it's blindingly obvious
| even from the outside that the engineering quality is rock
| bottom. Throwing features over the fence as fast as possible to
| catch up to AWS was clearly the only priority for over a decade
| and has resulted in a giant ball of mud that now they can't
| change because published APIs and offered products must
| continue to have support for years. Those rushed decisions have
| painted Azure into a corner.
|
| You may puff your chest out, and even take legitimate pride in
| building the second largest public cloud in the world, but
| please don't fool yourself that the quality of this edifice is
| anything other than rickety and falling apart at the seams.
|
| Remind me: can I use IPv6 safely yet? Does it still break
| Postgres in _other_ networks? Can azcopy actually move files
| yet, like every other bulk copy tool ever made by man? Can I
| upgrade a VM in-place to a new SKU without deleting and
| recreating it to work around your internal Hyper-V cluster API
| limitations? Premium SSDv2 disks for boot disks... when? Etc...
|
| You may list excuses for these quality gaps, but these kinds of
| things just weren't an issue anywhere else I've worked as far
| back as twenty years ago! Heck, I built a natively "all IPv6"
| VMware ESXi cluster over a decade ago!
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with
| a grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is
| trying to be made, if there is any
|
| I guessed that from the title on the main hn page. Glad to see
| it confirmed.
| lokar wrote:
| This reads pretty bad, and I believe it was. I worked on (and was
| at least partly responsible for) systems that do the same thing
| he described. It took constant force of will, fighting,
| escalation, etc to hold the line and maintain some basic level of
| stability and engineering practice.
|
| And I've worked other places that had problems similar to the
| core problems described, not quite as severe, and not at the same
| scale, but bad enough to doom them (IMO) to a death loop they
| won't recover from.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every
| day this would explain so much.
|
| The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held together.
| The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is
| constantly out of date or wrong. They offer such a huge volume of
| services it's nearly impossible to figure out what service you
| actually want/need without consultants, and when you finally get
| the services up who knows if they actually work as advertised.
|
| I'm honestly shocked anything manages to stay working at all.
| pavlov wrote:
| The first couple of paragraphs felt like a parody of a guy who
| goes to a diner and gets upset the waitress doesn't address him
| as Dr.
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(page generated 2026-04-02 23:00 UTC)