> They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something
Yet amazingly their interfaces and quality is incredibly horrible. Azure like most other things Microsoft makes feels like a half baked and over fitted platform with serious quality issues.
I completely disagree - I find the Azure interface, delightful to work with. And best of all, it's consistent, which can't be said for AWS' UI, which mostly looks very dated and differs from service to service.
Years ago the Azure UI was a bit slow (but still beautiful to look at), but those issues were solved long ago.
Having functionality splattered all through the god-awful, inexplicably horizontally-scrolling interface is not my idea of “delightful”. Parts of it are URL-stateful, other parts aren’t, and there’s no rhyme or reason for the difference.
AWS might look “dated”, but I can’t imagine the mindset that cares about that. If a console is how you’re evaluating your cloud provider you are several steps behind where you need to be. And, great news: in addition to having a really dire console, Azure’s APIs are just no good, particularly if you have to step into the shitshow that is Azure AD (and paying even more for Microsoft Graph, which should just be included) or IAM, and they don’t step to either AWS or GCP to a degree that I just won’t work for an Azure company again. Trying to get anything done in those environments makes me feel stupid and personally bad for having the temerity to try, between inscrutable errors where the Microsoft support is barely English-literate even when you’re paying for it and the aforementioned API barf, and that’s a bad way to live one’s life.
I haven't found functionality to be "splattered" at all. In general, you have a menu on the left for top-level functions, and a button-bar at the top for other things - the layout feels really consistent to me, with the only exception I've noticed being Function Apps.
> inexplicably horizontally-scrolling
At least from a culture with left-right written language, it makes perfect sense to me. Alternatives would be several layers of dialog boxes, or expanding vertically, but I like the Azure portal's way
> AWS might look “dated”, but I can’t imagine the mindset that cares about that
It just feels ugly to work with it. But the bigger issue is the inconsistency - some parts have small variations, others are completely different; it feels very fragmented.
> If a console is how you’re evaluating your cloud provider you are several steps behind where you need to be
Again I'm afraid I disagree. You can work with Azure from a console using cross-platform Powershell Core, or the cross-platform Azure CLI (my preference). There are a host of REST APIs too. I've worked with numerous different Azure services, and I really haven't had any issues here.
> Microsoft support is barely English-literate even when you’re paying for it
On the (free) Microsoft forums, yes, they are complete and utter shit, and I don't know why Microsoft even still hosts them. But I've found the paid-for support at Azure to be very good, and there certainly haven't been any English language issues.
I have had to personally re-document setting up a basic Azure AD connection 4 times in a 18 month period. Each time I go back to it, the UI has changed and key pieces of functionality are just 'elsewhere'.
The EC2 console is old and outdated, its been the same since I started with it like 7 years ago. They are rolling out a new dashboard right now, a complete overhaul.
The difference - I don't have to re-document the EC2 Console for internal training.
The AWS Cli is a simple tool that just keeps working and its documentation is pretty much all you need to look at.
The Powershell interface with AzureAD was absolutely opaque, no documentation, took hours to figure out how to configure claims and when I did, it didn't even work due to hidden limitations that the paid for support could not explain.
I think that your experiences have been quite different to others, certainly mine.
Thanks for replying, because I like knowing I'm not crazy!
A lot of Azure fans like to play "hide the ball" on whether Azure AD "counts" in a lot of ways because it functionally requires Office/Graph and that's not "really" Azure. (Never mind that it doesn't play nice with any IdP, you have to basically pass an act of Congress to let it defer in any meaningful way to Okta...)
We have built a desktop app to manage AWS, and we will be rollin gout some of the main Azure serverless pieces over the next few months. I think you might found our GUI much more user friendly than what is out there now. https://getcommandeer.com
Glad you could find a place to shove in a plug for a piece of software that, if we're being frank, doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd recommend to any user of a cloud environment. GUIs are failure modes for cloud operations. Using APIs first and last is the only way I've found to build a successful cloud team at any scale.
(And I have even less use for highly bloggable serverless stuff than I do baseline-working tools and systems. A "Dynamo tester" is less valuable in aggregate than, say, something that made Cloudmapper easier to deploy.)
You are being frank, I don't think we are. This tool is getting great usage to actually be able to view your cloud data such as S3 and Dynamo in a meaningful way. The testing suite is still in its infancy, but if you are doing serverless development, and want to test out your lambda firing, and see the console logs from a dynamo stream, or an s3 file getting created, it is a great way to do so. Lastly, our tools for IAC are starting to roll out, so it enables you to run your serverless, ansible, or terraform files against any account and region at the click of a button and see the results, rather than having to fiddle with the command line. API's are very important, but enabling your developers to actually see the cloud infrastructure is also equally important. Monolith systems are still popular because people can see the entire system. Serverless and event-driven systems are not easy in this regard, and we are solving the problem right now of great tools being out there, but just trying to get insight into your system is difficult.
The change over from the "old" Azure portal to the new one was a bit painful at the time - but that was a while ago now and the current one is, I think, pretty good .
If your screen isn't big enough the Azure portal scrolls in 4(!) directions, and even worse, it uses horizontal scrolling for navigating between related objects! It's completely impossible to use if your screen isn't huge and the window maximized.
I don’t really like the admin interfaces or CLIs of either AWS or Azure. I’ve had an easier time with Azure than AWS for my personal projects, but maybe that’s just from being used to the Microsoft way.
I’m not sure why they are so much harder to use than the smaller services like heroku or digital ocean. You’d think the big guys would have the best and easiest services, but they sure don’t.
Yet amazingly their interfaces and quality is incredibly horrible. Azure like most other things Microsoft makes feels like a half baked and over fitted platform with serious quality issues.