One thing that strikes me about the author's experience is how unusable Azure appears to be in all this. Like, this hits somewhat close to me as I also run a couple web projects, also written in Rust, on a serverless architecture, and frankly couldn't imagine wanting to spend the time to run them any other way. AWS Lambda for compute, and Dynamo for DB, have a perpetual free tier and it's been running practically without me touching it for years.

The AWS Rust SDK also seemed very mature to me when I was using it ... compare to:

>the only option for a database instance with a free plan was [...] serverless Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

>the MSSQL connection required TLS and this hadn’t been implemented in the sqlx connector I chose to use for my Rust-based functions. I wasted two weeks implementing TLS support in sqlx

That is insane. Not to mention the later bit with sudden, unexplained availability and the only hint that it might to be related to a _future_ deprecation? Like, imagine if this were a critical service for you. Professional malpractice on Microsoft's part.

This isn't really the main point of the article, and I did find the stuff on self-hosting interesting, but it does seem like this could have been avoided if Azure had lived up to its peers.

There's not enough information to come to a conclusion as to what the 503s originated from. There is enough information for manufactured outrage, of course.

I don't see why one would want to run in-the-clear over the Azure network for SQL connections.

The author was doing hobby projects. Granted, hobby projects should run on any platform, but Azure seems to have less of that free tier you can get elsewhere.