My Poor Experience With Azure (or why I'm sticking with AWS)
To be fair, all of the clouds are poor for what they consider &quot;unimportant&quot; users, such as free-tier, low-use, non-prod, etc... They all target big enterprise, because that&#x27;s where the profit is.<p>However, unlike AWS, Azure is poor at &quot;big enterprise&quot; as well, which is rather shocking for Microsoft. Their strength has always been that they &quot;know&quot; enterprise and tick all the right checkboxes to make their big fleets of systems work.<p>Not in Azure!<p>Several people have pointed out that they suggest rewriting applications to be compatible with their bugs instead of <i>simply fixing the bugs</i>.<p>I call it the &quot;you&quot; problem. The marketing, documentation, and <i>support staff</i> will all use that word like it means something.<p>I&#x27;m an external consultant for an enterprise org with over 15,000 staff, 300 of which are in IT, not counting several hundred external IT contractors, vendors, service providers, etc...<p>If I call Azure support to report a bug, they will cheerfully say:<p>&quot;Please use X instead of Y in <i>your</i> app, then it will work.&quot;<p>To which I want to find a polite way to say: &quot;What the fuck are <i>you</i> talking about? What do you mean &#x27;your&#x27; app!? I got this thing dumped in my lap! It&#x27;s a lift and shift of 10-year-old abandonware! Your <i>marketing</i> assured some <i>other</i> manager here that it would &#x27;just&#x27; work! I&#x27;m a subcontractor to a contractor with a contract to move this thing to Azure that took 6 months to draft and 3 months to sign, with Microsoft reps involved at every step! There&#x27;s no going back now. Make. <i>Your</i>. Shit. Work.&quot;<p>For people that downvote random salty anger with no substance, here&#x27;s one random example:<p>Azure SQL has literally zero support for database-level locale or time zone options.<p>None.<p>Zero. Zip. Nada.<p>It&#x27;s permanently set to use US English and UTC time zone. There is no recourse. There&#x27;s no setting. There is no way to fix this.<p>The Azure SQL Database Migration compatibility verification tool will <i>not warn you</i> if you use &#x27;legacy&#x27; functions like GETDATE(), which assume that the server time zone is set correctly.<p>The documentation mentions this in passing once, on a page you will only ever see if googling this in a panic at 4:55pm on a Friday <i>after</i> a week of live usage in production... which is when users will finally notice that &quot;sometimes&quot; dates appear to be wrong.<p>So now your data has had local and UTC datetimes <i>blended together</i>, essentially shredding your data. Too late for rollback. No global setting to fix, no vendor support to update the code, and nobody picked this up in UAT because a few hours of offset is <i>just small enough</i> not to be detected in most cases unless the user happens to enter a record at just the right time (before 10am in our case).<p>I called Azure Support and they told me that yes, it&#x27;s <i>broken by design.</i> Azure SQL is designed for use in our future space colonies, where the time zone is UTC, not for the legacy planet-dwellers that failed to &quot;move on&quot;.<p>This was an unmitigated disaster for us, and a lot of sleepless nights for me.<p>What does AWS do with their RDS for SQL offering? Do <i>they</i> support time zones?<p>Of course they do: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;AmazonRDS&#x2F;latest&#x2F;UserGuide&#x2F;CHAP_SQLServer.html#SQLServer.Concepts.General.TimeZone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;AmazonRDS&#x2F;latest&#x2F;UserGuide&#x2F;CHAP_...</a><p>That&#x27;s because their programmers are not... well... err... there&#x27;s just no polite way to say what I think of Azure SQL&#x27;s development team right now.<p>Let me put it this way: Microsoft&#x27;s sales reps have convinced my customers to lift and shift <i>hundreds</i> of individual <i>legacy</i> databases to Azure SQL, and of those I&#x27;m betting 90% are quietly shredding their date-related data, causing random glitchy problems.<p>This is just one example of <i>many</i> like this. It&#x27;s not that every cloud does it worse. Without exception, what Azure does is always clown shoes compared to what everyone else does, and it&#x27;s not even possible to convince them to fix it, because they always turn around and say: &quot;No sir, <i>you</i> are wrong, it is designed to be broken!&quot;