A couple of years back, I was working at Mojang (makers of Minecraft).
We got purchased by Microsoft, which of course meant we had to at least try to migrate away from AWS to Azure. On the surface, it made sense: our AWS bill was pretty steep, iirc into the 6 figures monthly, we could have Azure for free*.
Fast forward about a year, and an uncountable amount of hours spent by both my team, and Azure solutions specialists, kindly lent to us by the Azure org itself, we all agreed the six figure bill to one of corporate daddy's largest competitors would have to stay!
I've written off Azure as a viable cloud provider since then. I've always thought I would have to revaluate that stance sooner or later. Wouldn't be the first time I was wrong!
You've got me curious: what was the single biggest barrier to migration, if you're able to disclose it? I'm guessing it was something proprietary to AWS, like how they handle serverless or something that couldn't translate over directly, but I'm always eager to learn why a migration from X to Y didn't work.
Your story reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Hotmail in the '90s and they tried migrating from FreeBSD & Solaris onto Windows NT/IIS. Having the world's largest email service running on the Windows stack would have been a huge endorsement. It took years until they were successful.
is it because there are features that AWS provides to you that are not available in GCP, or just the fact that setting up exact replicas of processes is hard for migrations like these?
I believe any Azure user might be able to compile their 100 reasons to not use Azure, and the same will be true for most big pieces of software.
Even as someone that had minimal exposure to other clouds, I could easily see how Azure user experience lags due to the lack of proper care.
The amount of pages with a filter bar that will not work properly until you remember to click the load more should clearly be zero at this point, this is an objectively bad pattern that existed for years and should be "easy" to fix. But the issue will probably never be prioritized.
The fact is that unless tackling those issues are part of the organization core values or that they are clearly hitting their revenue stream, they won't be fixed. Publicity and visibility of those issues will always be crucial for the community of users.
I work in both AWS and Azure and let me tell you, one thing I absolutely love about Azure is their portal. It’s like AWS 2.0 where all the cloud cruft is abstracted away and all that is left is the knobs you actually need to turn, and how they relate to one another.
I love me some AWS, but my god every time I have to dive into an unfamiliar environment and try and reverse engineer how everything connects - I need a drink afterwards.
Vastly underrated cloud if you’re a small company and don’t operate containers is Cloudflare. I know they get criticized for other reasons but their DX is actually really great if you’re tired of the big 3 (4?)
IME even a small company runs into something you need an actual server for, and then you're suddenly spread across two clouds because Cloudflare is serverless or nothing.
It’s a JavaScript/node-like environment only right now no? I love it for my svelte site but it’s a massive limitation to be locked in based on language and request-response based constraints right now.
You need at the very least containers and persistent volumes to be interesting to me at least.
I really wanted to like Azure because of how well it integrated with the rest of my tools, but I kept getting hit with VM availability limitations and UX quirks. I've never had issues getting machines in AWS, or feeling like my actions were taking effect.
I've also waffled several times on the Azure FaaS offering. I am now firmly and irrevocably at "Don't use it. Run away. Quickly.". The experience around Azure Functions is just too weird to get comfortable with. Getting at logs or other binary artifacts is a gigantic pain in the ass. Running a self-contained .NET build on a blank windows/linux VM is so easy it doesn't make sense to get in bed with all this extra complexity.
Ugh, yes. Lack if availability of resources in whichever region i happen to need them.
Also, things that break automation, like calling back to say your sql server is up and running when in fact it’s not ready for another 20 minutes. I am half sure the terraform time_sleep was written specifically to counter azure problems.
Most of my complaints of Azure come down to the UI. So many head scratching moments and if you don't have a 4k monitor lot's of scrolling of menus inside of menus
How do you find the price difference? Whenever I've done comparisons, they have always worked out significantly more expensive than AWS, and AWS is already pretty damn expensive for anything that requires a decent amount of compute.
Last I tried to use Azure; it did not even offer domain registration. This was many years after launch - and not too long ago.
Not sure if this was an Australia/Oceania limitation - or just an ongoing product limitation.
My requirements weren’t complex. I needed to manage my domains (not AD), spin up virtual machines, and associate the two.
I also found the UI, overall; tedious. Finding the right offering under their ambiguously named services was difficult. And this comes from an AWS user.
I wanted to like Azure, but for very least reasons above; it’s not the product for me.
Did you want domain registration, or just DNS management? Those are two very different services. They offer the latter but not the former. So while you (generally) have to buy domains elsewhere, you can then manage them entirely within Azure after doing so.
Meh, as a developer who lived through the 2000-2010 era Microsoft, it’s easy to come up with a laundry list of reasons to hate on Azure.
But I tried Azure for my most recent startup because I was offended by AWS, and GCP did not have enough adoption among my customers, and Azure worked - fine.
What do you really need out of a cloud?
I want them to rent me VMs, for them to not go down, and to make it easy to do standard stuff like an object store, run containers, run databases, etc.
That’s how clouds try to lock you in, by making you use a custom tool that is different for the sake of being different.
If you use standard tools you don’t have this problem.
Containers running on VMs is standard.
A mesh of microservices that depend on cloud queues and managed services is not.
One argument against standard containers is saving dev time. You can still save dev time by using standard open source software. How many different ways are there to implement a queue or a load balancer?
If you really need access to some proprietary technology then by all means use the cloud that offers it. Eg if your customer demands GPT4.5, then go with Azure.
But if you need something standard, don’t get caught in the trap.
I am an older guy that was building kubernetes clusters before eks, aks, gke. So I used terraform to build shit out to make it happen. Azure was 5x the code just to be different. You can try to blame terraform but if you used MS custom tooling it was no different.
What about the way Terraform is a 3rd class citizen on Azure? And there are multiple ever-changing ways of doing everything, major parameters aren't supported, etc. It just makes it more difficult to deal with.
> I will just say that Azure seems to want to do shit different for the sake of being different.
That's Microsoft's MO in a nutshell in my experience, and I say this as a recent(~5yrs ago) convert to Linux who built a career on Windows endpoints, servers, ADDS, Exchange, SCCM, you name it. It's how they achieve lock-in to their ecosystem, and it's incredibly frustrating to see how they've just layered that method of operation over and over again, decade after decade, rather than fix anything.
Conversely, doing things "the same way" as AWS would mean copying their first-generation public cloud design flaws.
The overall UX of AWS is absolutely crazy. It's easy to "lose" a resource... in there... somewhere... in one of the many portals, in some region, costing you money! Meanwhile, Azure shows you a single pane of glass across all resource types in all regions. It's also fairly trivial to query across all subscriptions (equivalent to AWS accounts).
Similarly, AWS insists on peppering their UI with random-looking internal identifiers. These are meaningless and not sortable in any useful way.
Azure in comparison allows users to specify grouping by "english" resource group names and then resources within them also have user-specified names. The only random identifiers are the Subscription GUIDs, but even those have user-assignable display name aliases.
The unified Portal and scripting experience of Azure Resource Manager is a true "second generation" public cloud, and is much closer to the experience of using Kubernetes, which is also a "second gen" system developed out of Borg. E.g.: In K8s you also get a single-pane-of glass, human-named namespaces (=resource groups), human-named workloads, etc...
It's like this in a lot of subreddits dedicated to a particular product. The regulars are die-hard $product fans, and respond to perceived negativity just as you'd expect.
The great thing about Azure is not the security it's the reports about how you are secure. The later is legally required the former is only visible experts.
Story time!
A couple of years back, I was working at Mojang (makers of Minecraft).
We got purchased by Microsoft, which of course meant we had to at least try to migrate away from AWS to Azure. On the surface, it made sense: our AWS bill was pretty steep, iirc into the 6 figures monthly, we could have Azure for free*.
Fast forward about a year, and an uncountable amount of hours spent by both my team, and Azure solutions specialists, kindly lent to us by the Azure org itself, we all agreed the six figure bill to one of corporate daddy's largest competitors would have to stay!
I've written off Azure as a viable cloud provider since then. I've always thought I would have to revaluate that stance sooner or later. Wouldn't be the first time I was wrong!
You've got me curious: what was the single biggest barrier to migration, if you're able to disclose it? I'm guessing it was something proprietary to AWS, like how they handle serverless or something that couldn't translate over directly, but I'm always eager to learn why a migration from X to Y didn't work.
Your story reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Hotmail in the '90s and they tried migrating from FreeBSD & Solaris onto Windows NT/IIS. Having the world's largest email service running on the Windows stack would have been a huge endorsement. It took years until they were successful.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ms-moving-hotmail-to-win2000-s...
https://jimbojones.livejournal.com/23143.html
Ha, I worked on that project. That drove a lot of good requirements into Windows that set us up for web based services (eventually)
> Windows that set us up for web based services (eventually)
...and then .NET and SQL Server started shipping for Linux.
Current Mojang employee here, we moved fully onto Azure as of a few years ago AFAIK.
Some more game-oriented technologies of course have helped in the years since though.
Edit: AWS -> Azure :)
> we moved fully onto AWS as of a few years ago
Did you mean Azure?
Yes, I do. Whoops!
It has since migrated to Azure. I suspect there was a gap in the technology that was since closed, as AWS certainly had a head start in general.
IMHO, you're gonna struggle if you move anywhere else from AWS. We're migrating to GCP and there are gaps all over the place.
is it because there are features that AWS provides to you that are not available in GCP, or just the fact that setting up exact replicas of processes is hard for migrations like these?
Out of curiosity, what are the biggest gaps you've hit in GCP?
This is the reason I try to avoid proprietary bullshit services. Use EC2, Postgres, and S3, and you’ll be fine in any cloud or even on bare metal.
> proprietary bullshit services
> S3
Hasn't this recently been an issue where Amazon arbitrarily changes the S3 contract and all software following it as a spec has to play catch-up?
I believe any Azure user might be able to compile their 100 reasons to not use Azure, and the same will be true for most big pieces of software.
Even as someone that had minimal exposure to other clouds, I could easily see how Azure user experience lags due to the lack of proper care.
The amount of pages with a filter bar that will not work properly until you remember to click the load more should clearly be zero at this point, this is an objectively bad pattern that existed for years and should be "easy" to fix. But the issue will probably never be prioritized.
The fact is that unless tackling those issues are part of the organization core values or that they are clearly hitting their revenue stream, they won't be fixed. Publicity and visibility of those issues will always be crucial for the community of users.
I work in both AWS and Azure and let me tell you, one thing I absolutely love about Azure is their portal. It’s like AWS 2.0 where all the cloud cruft is abstracted away and all that is left is the knobs you actually need to turn, and how they relate to one another.
I love me some AWS, but my god every time I have to dive into an unfamiliar environment and try and reverse engineer how everything connects - I need a drink afterwards.
Genuine question: is your comment satire? If not, that's hilarious, I find myself on the completely opposite end of the spectrum. To each their own!
Seriously, I absolutely can't stand the azure ui. I don't think the AWS console is great, but it is definitely better than the Azure one to me.
At least the Azure one lets you see all your resources, so you can verify you don't have something you're paying for unexpectedly.
Vastly underrated cloud if you’re a small company and don’t operate containers is Cloudflare. I know they get criticized for other reasons but their DX is actually really great if you’re tired of the big 3 (4?)
IME even a small company runs into something you need an actual server for, and then you're suddenly spread across two clouds because Cloudflare is serverless or nothing.
It’s a JavaScript/node-like environment only right now no? I love it for my svelte site but it’s a massive limitation to be locked in based on language and request-response based constraints right now.
You need at the very least containers and persistent volumes to be interesting to me at least.
JS, TS, Python, and Rust are first class options, plus generic wasm:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/languages/
> and Rust are first class options, plus generic wasm
Rust is still a wasm target. Not everything easily works. It doesn’t have all the Cloudflare sdk features js/ts has either.
Can't wait to be able to run containers there. [1]
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/container-platform-preview/
I really wanted to like Azure because of how well it integrated with the rest of my tools, but I kept getting hit with VM availability limitations and UX quirks. I've never had issues getting machines in AWS, or feeling like my actions were taking effect.
I've also waffled several times on the Azure FaaS offering. I am now firmly and irrevocably at "Don't use it. Run away. Quickly.". The experience around Azure Functions is just too weird to get comfortable with. Getting at logs or other binary artifacts is a gigantic pain in the ass. Running a self-contained .NET build on a blank windows/linux VM is so easy it doesn't make sense to get in bed with all this extra complexity.
Ugh, yes. Lack if availability of resources in whichever region i happen to need them.
Also, things that break automation, like calling back to say your sql server is up and running when in fact it’s not ready for another 20 minutes. I am half sure the terraform time_sleep was written specifically to counter azure problems.
Most of my complaints of Azure come down to the UI. So many head scratching moments and if you don't have a 4k monitor lot's of scrolling of menus inside of menus
How do you find the price difference? Whenever I've done comparisons, they have always worked out significantly more expensive than AWS, and AWS is already pretty damn expensive for anything that requires a decent amount of compute.
Don’t most developers have ultrawide 4/8k monitors these days though?
Are you an Azure UI dev?
Last I tried to use Azure; it did not even offer domain registration. This was many years after launch - and not too long ago.
Not sure if this was an Australia/Oceania limitation - or just an ongoing product limitation.
My requirements weren’t complex. I needed to manage my domains (not AD), spin up virtual machines, and associate the two.
I also found the UI, overall; tedious. Finding the right offering under their ambiguously named services was difficult. And this comes from an AWS user.
I wanted to like Azure, but for very least reasons above; it’s not the product for me.
Did you want domain registration, or just DNS management? Those are two very different services. They offer the latter but not the former. So while you (generally) have to buy domains elsewhere, you can then manage them entirely within Azure after doing so.
Meh, as a developer who lived through the 2000-2010 era Microsoft, it’s easy to come up with a laundry list of reasons to hate on Azure.
But I tried Azure for my most recent startup because I was offended by AWS, and GCP did not have enough adoption among my customers, and Azure worked - fine.
What do you really need out of a cloud?
I want them to rent me VMs, for them to not go down, and to make it easy to do standard stuff like an object store, run containers, run databases, etc.
Azure was as good or better than AWS
I have used all the platforms personally and professionally. GCP, AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud.
I will just say that Azure seems to want to do shit different for the sake of being different.
It is really annoying to write infrastructure as code for aws/gcp then go to do the same for azure and realize how dumb some of their stuff is.
Just my personal experience.
That’s how clouds try to lock you in, by making you use a custom tool that is different for the sake of being different.
If you use standard tools you don’t have this problem.
Containers running on VMs is standard.
A mesh of microservices that depend on cloud queues and managed services is not.
One argument against standard containers is saving dev time. You can still save dev time by using standard open source software. How many different ways are there to implement a queue or a load balancer?
If you really need access to some proprietary technology then by all means use the cloud that offers it. Eg if your customer demands GPT4.5, then go with Azure.
But if you need something standard, don’t get caught in the trap.
I am an older guy that was building kubernetes clusters before eks, aks, gke. So I used terraform to build shit out to make it happen. Azure was 5x the code just to be different. You can try to blame terraform but if you used MS custom tooling it was no different.
What about the way Terraform is a 3rd class citizen on Azure? And there are multiple ever-changing ways of doing everything, major parameters aren't supported, etc. It just makes it more difficult to deal with.
Also, Azure APIs are incredibly slow.
It’s Bicep
> I will just say that Azure seems to want to do shit different for the sake of being different.
That's Microsoft's MO in a nutshell in my experience, and I say this as a recent(~5yrs ago) convert to Linux who built a career on Windows endpoints, servers, ADDS, Exchange, SCCM, you name it. It's how they achieve lock-in to their ecosystem, and it's incredibly frustrating to see how they've just layered that method of operation over and over again, decade after decade, rather than fix anything.
Fixing things is hard. Papering thing over with free Azure credits and marketing? This is the way.
Conversely, doing things "the same way" as AWS would mean copying their first-generation public cloud design flaws.
The overall UX of AWS is absolutely crazy. It's easy to "lose" a resource... in there... somewhere... in one of the many portals, in some region, costing you money! Meanwhile, Azure shows you a single pane of glass across all resource types in all regions. It's also fairly trivial to query across all subscriptions (equivalent to AWS accounts).
Similarly, AWS insists on peppering their UI with random-looking internal identifiers. These are meaningless and not sortable in any useful way.
Azure in comparison allows users to specify grouping by "english" resource group names and then resources within them also have user-specified names. The only random identifiers are the Subscription GUIDs, but even those have user-assignable display name aliases.
The unified Portal and scripting experience of Azure Resource Manager is a true "second generation" public cloud, and is much closer to the experience of using Kubernetes, which is also a "second gen" system developed out of Borg. E.g.: In K8s you also get a single-pane-of glass, human-named namespaces (=resource groups), human-named workloads, etc...
this killed me. i dont think AWS does everything well... but Azure went hard on being different just to be different..
like region names...
The UX not being designed by business majors.
> What do you really need out of a cloud?
I need a cloud to be reliable and secure. I've used Azure extensively and it's neither. I'll take GCP or AWS over Azure any day.
Why were you offended by AWS?
I got into a fight with them kind of like Trump and Zelensky just did. Not a technical reason.
Sometimes in business the deal falls through
I was on the receiving end and didn’t appreciate it.
Its hard to believe people got paid to build that hot garbage fire.
Related to this, I find the Azure Subreddit terrible. Each critical question is punished with downvotes.
It's like this in a lot of subreddits dedicated to a particular product. The regulars are die-hard $product fans, and respond to perceived negativity just as you'd expect.
Azure ≈ Klout
I can’t believe the DoD even considered to pick them for JEDI
"Azure’s Security Vulnerabilities Are Out of Control" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...
The great thing about Azure is not the security it's the reports about how you are secure. The later is legally required the former is only visible experts.
(2022)
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