I have a bridge to sell you if you think everyone on the Azure team is sub-moron. Infra security is a hard problem to solve, GCP and AWS don't quite have a perfect track record either, perhaps AWS stands out as a better option but it's hard to argue about it.

▲

seemaze 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think the blame lies with the intelligence of the Azure team. I would argue that there exists structural flaws in the business incentives which deprioritize 'users' from 'customers', along with the stark lack of consequences for security failures.

▲

minraws 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a problem across all of tech, I know a startup that recently had a security incident, lost over 40K USD and none of the heads have rolled they haven't completely revamped their security posture or anything like that.

▲

hibikir 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While there are incentive problems across all levels, The political quagmires that make it impossible to move at any reasonable speed, and that lead to counterproductive ideas getting large budgets are in my experience very common at the highest sizes. It's true that on the other edge of the spectrum, small startups make poor choices, but many of said startups will fail due to said choices. So by the time you have a viable company making good money, the really badly aligned companies are gone.

So when I look throughout my long employment career for best security and organizational practices, all the highlights are still relatively, relatively undersized companies, with headcounts in the 3-4 figures. It's as they grow, and start to be multi-headed behemoths, that they decay again, as what is good for the responsable mid-level exec, for the business unit, and for the company as a whole start to have nothing to do with each other. That's when you can smell the decay in the hallways. A few large companies manage to stave off this rot a little more than others, but it's inevitable. Then nothing important can be done in a timely fashion.

	▲	minraws 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> but many of said startups will fail due to said choices. So by the time you have a viable company making good money, the really badly aligned companies are gone. I wish that was the case, but that isn't how startups fail generally, sure very bad user facing breaches could cause something like that, but lots of platforms with too much jank have somehow survived all of these cyber vulnerabilities before, and will probably keep at it. For a majority startups it's about connections and relationships rather than competence. Very few even consider building actually useful products to be a priority after the initial work of building it.

▲

DANmode 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Places where it’s less of a problem are places I’m spending my money.

and anyone else’s money I’m asked to spend…

▲

JoBrad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s about incentives. My company spends about 400k/month USD in both Azure and AWS (different workloads). When I ask my AWS team for help, I usually get actionable info, a separate standalone call (if the request warrants it), and a follow up from my TAM and Account Exec. Every request to my Azure team has basically been “here are some YouTube/MS Knowledge links” + let me know if you figure it out. Roughly the same spend on both platforms, and wildly different levels of helpfulness (and yes, we have an Azure EA).

Are the people on my Azure team smart? Probably. Are they incentivized to actually help me solve a problem? No. They’re obviously incentivized to increased my license spend.

▲

lukeschlather 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm sure there are absolutely brilliant people working at Azure. I think the overall system is very badly architected and I don't know what it would take to salvage it. Infra security is a lot easier to do when you have a system that has mostly solved it already, and I'm not saying GCP and AWS are perfect, but "security is mostly solved" is a decent description of their systems, I think. Of course it could all fall over tomorrow, but I'd guess that's a lot more true of Azure.

▲

InsidiousWombat 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They implemented NVRAM in the UEFI and then didn't decipher what the NV means in it so it is not persisted. Their stupid virtualization can't handle not 1MB-aligned disk image.

Plenty of morons there

▲

fooqux 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It didn't help that azure (especially in the beginning) was a cobbled-together mess of ancient Microsoft tech stacks that were never intended to talk to each other.