alt Hacker Newsif the service is so shitty, why are people paying so much fucking money for it?
is microsoft committing an accounting fraud?
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I worked at a startup that was using Azure. The reason was simple enough - it had been founded by finance people who were used to Excel, so Windows+Office was the non-negotiable first bit of IT they purchased. That created a sales channel Microsoft used to offer generous startup credits. The free money created a structural lack of discipline around spending. Once the startup credits ran out, the company became faced with a huge bill and difficulty motivating people to conserve funds.
At the start I didn't have any strong opinion on what cloud provider to use. I did want to do IT the "old fashioned way" - rent a big ass bare metal or cloud VM, issue UNIX user accounts on it and let people do dev/test/ad hoc servers on that. Very easy to control spending that way, very easy to quickly see what's using the resources and impose limits, link programs to people, etc. I was overruled as obviously old fashioned and not getting with the cloud programme. They ended up bleeding a million dollars a month and the company wasn't even running a SaaS!
I ended up with a very low opinion of Azure. Basic things like TCP connections between VMs would mysteriously hang. We got MS to investigate, they made a token effort and basically just admitted defeat. I raged that this was absurd as working TCP is table stakes for literally any datacenter since the 1980s, but - sad to say - at this time Azure's bad behavior was enabled by a widespread culture of CV farming in which "enterprise" devs were all obsessed with getting cloud tech onto their LinkedIn. Any time we hit bugs or stupidities in the way Azure worked I was told the problem was clearly with the software I'd written, which couldn't be "cloud native", as if it was it'd obviously work fine in Azure!
With attitudes like that completely endemic outside of the tech sector, of course Microsoft learned not to prioritize quality.
We did eventually diversify a bit. We needed to benchmark our server software reliably and that was impossible in Azure because it was so overloaded and full of noisy neighbours, so we rented bare metal servers in OVH to do that. It worked OK.
Because Azure customers are companies that still, in 2026 only use Windows. Anyone else uses something else. Turns out, companies like that don't tend to have the best engineering teams. So moving an entire cloud infrastructure from Azure to say AWS, probably is either really expensive, really risky or too disruptive to do for the type of engineering team that Azure customers have. I would expect MS to bleed from this slowly for a long time until they actually fix it. I seriously doubt they ever will but stranger things have happened.
The US government’s experts called Azure “a pile of shit”; they got overruled.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
CFOs love it because Microsoft does bundle pricing with office. Plus they love to give large credits to bootstrap lock-in.
most the upper management of companies who use them have dont have the technical competence to see it. (eg: banks, supermarket chains, manufacturing companies)
once they are in, no one likes to admit they made a mistake.
It’s more of a hostage situation.
Because the alternatives are also in similar state.
AWS or GCP are all pretty crap. You use any of them, any you'll hit just enough rough edges. The whole industry is just grinding out slop, quality is not important anywhere.
I work with AWS on a daily basis, and I'm not really impressed. (Also nor did GCP impress me on the short encounter I had with it)
Corporate inertia. Sibling comment uses the term "hostage situation" which I admit is pretty apt.
Microsoft is an approved vendor in every large enterprise. That they have been approved for desktop productivity, Sharepoint, email and on-prem systems does not enter the picture. That would be too nuanced.
Dealing with a Large Enterprise[tm] is an exercise in frustration. A particular client had to be deployed to Azure because their estimate was that getting a new cloud vendor approved for production deployments would be a gargantuan 18-to-24 month org-wide and politically fraught process.
If you are a large corp and have to move workloads to the cloud (because let's be honest: maintaining your own data centres and hardware procurement pipelines is a serious drag) then you go with whatever vendor your organisation has approved. And if the only pre-approved vendor with a cloud offering is Microsoft, you use Azure.