My second job is as a cybersecurity TA. One of the things we teach in the course is about cloud deployments. Because of Microsoft’s hold on education, we use Azure for this… Azure is the most Microsoft-like product.
The Surface
You might think, looking at something like GetDeploying, that Azure isn’t that different from the other offering. Similar offerings, and similar pricing1. So what’s the difference? The interface.
People complained about how Windows 9X and NT were nothing but menus. You had to go to one menu, then to another, then to another, to find the option you needed. Azure is that, taken up a notch. It’ll also let you select invalid options.
You Can’t Do That!
When making a new VM. Most providers won’t let you pick an invalid size. Be it because it’s not available in that region. Or because it’s not available in your plan. DigitalOcean, for example, will grey out the $4 option in invalid regions.
Azure, on the other hand, does no such thing. If you want to pick a VM size that’s not available, go right ahead. Only when you get to the end of the long, multi-tabbed creation forum and hit review. Then, it will it complain. However, it won’t tell you the reason it’s invalid. Just that one section is invalid.
Can’t Sit Still
Microsoft also can’t sit still with Azure. I don’t mean in the sense of introducing new features or new offerings. No, I mean in that they can’t stop moving things around.
It feels like every semester, they’ll move something. A button goes to a different tab, or into its own dropdown, or gets renamed. Sometimes it’s just a few things, sometimes it’s a fair number of things. This makes it hard to have student guides and other documents. Yeah, it helps get the students thinking, but…
Light At The End of The Tunnel
The good news is, we are almost done with using Azure. A lot of our stuff is moving to containerized labs in AWS, instead of an Azure VM that won’t power on sometimes2. But you know the saying about light at the end of the tunnel…
It’s just the lamp of a quickly approaching train.