Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

axelriet

A former Azure Core engineer’s 6-part account of the technical and leadership decisions that eroded trust in Azure.

pRusya

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

What a fascinating view into how the sausage is made

nope1000

> 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

schlauerfox

"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

gnabgib

Title: How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

vintagedave

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?

brcmthrowaway

What an epic takedown. Microsoft should have promoted this guy instead of laying him off. Did Microsoft really lose OpenAI as a customer?

andrewstuart

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

This is an insanely blunt look into some serious issues with microsoft.

ludwigvan

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

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.

lokar

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

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

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. It didn’t get any better.

OldOneEye

Some previous colleague of mine has to work with Azure on their day to day, and everything explained in this article makes a lot of sense when I get to hear about their massive rantings of the platform. 12 years ago I had to choose whether to specialize myself in AWS, GCP or Azure, and from my very brief foray with Azure I could see it was an absolute mess of broken, slow and click-ops methodology. This article confirms my suspicions at that time, and my colleague experience.

abtinf

So this is why GitHub is having so many problem…

ok123456

New trollaxor dropped.

_pdp_

The personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator. The second thing is that this series of blog posts (whether true or not, but still believable) provides a good introduction to vibe coders. These are people who have not written a single line of code themselves and have not worked on any system at scale, yet believe that coding is somehow magically "solved" due to LLMs. Writing the actual code itself (fully or partially) maybe yes. But understanding the complexity of the system and working with organisational structures that support it is a completely different ball game.

arccy

from part 2: > Worse, early prototypes already pulled in nearly a thousand third-party Rust crates, many of which were transitive dependencies and largely unvetted, posing potential supply-chain risks. Rust really going for the node ecosystem's crown in package number bloat