A former Azure core engineer writes about Microsoft's engineering decisions and Azure's problems, and why they hurt the company.
HN commenters cite it as an insider explanation for Azure's poor quality and Microsoft's troubles, including GitHub's reliability problems, with some agreeing with its conclusions.
Nobody is winning any UX prize there. Azure, AWS, GCP... they are all terrible. Back then GCP for instance used to only work reliably on chromo-based browsers. Azure has that horrible overlay UI that abuses extended real estate that just doesn't work.
But azure wins most prizes for being terrible becuase, among other things, https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion. It's not the worst provider maybe because oracle is somehow still kicking around.
Its just a bad product. Just like windows, OneDrive, teams and basically everything Microsoft has pumped out in the past decade.
Microsoft is in the top 5 most valuable companies in the world. It's got azure that is a huge cloud provider. And yet it was utterly unable to present its answer in the AI race. Not even a bad model with a half baked harness. Nothing. And meanwhile they are trying to port NTFS to low powered FPGAs because insanity. Just let that sink in.
Even if you don’t view the US as a strategic risk, it is wise to have a plan to not be in Microsoft’s ecosystem.
Microsoft has all but abandoned their self hosted products in favour of cloud, and their cloud services are a security risk.
Microsoft’s cloud was described as a “pile of shit” but it achieved FedRAMP ATO only because so many agencies were already using their services.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-cybersecurity-government
Entra ID is full of disastrous design-level bugs like this one.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bug/
Microsoft has deep rooted cultural problems that make the company structurally incapable of fixing their platform.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
I think this is especially problematic (from Part 4 at https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion-2f5):
"The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something."
Once you reach this stage, the only escape is to first cover everything with tests and then meticulously fix bugs, without shipping any new features. This can take a long time, and cannot happen without the full support from the management who do not fully understand the problem nor are incentivized to understand it.
>Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess?
There have been some writings and posts here about Microsoft. Here is one from last spring, from a guy that was long time Windows core developer and moved to Azure group. It's well worth reading, what he writes about challenges they have had and most likely still have if not even worse now.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
and the related HN thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
And from what I've understood old chaps like Dave Cutler are involved much less than they were for a very long time.
Similarly, I've often wondered if this is the root cause of why GitHub has become fragile of late. All of a sudden you have operations on billions of tiny files that are amplified by AI usage. And object graphs are so fragmented by nature that it's hard to e.g. prefetch a page into memory and ensure that common git operations mainly touch that page's set of objects.
And if https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion is to be believed even in the slightest, any unoptimized paths in Azure's filesystem abstractions could cause usage spikes to have massive splash radius.
At no point during the reading I got sense that he's suggesting something radical. Where specifically is he pointing out rewrite?
"The practical strategy I suggested was incremental improvement... This strategy goes a long way toward modernizing a running system with minimal disruption and offers gradual, consistent improvements. It uses small, reliable components that can be easily tested separately and solidified before integration into the main platform at scale." [1]
[1] https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion-841