{"slug": "azure", "name": "Azure", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 1, "commenters": 16, "warners": 11, "score": -7.782, "rising": -0.33, "first": "2025-11-05", "latest": "2026-10-30", "why": "Azure was always my go-to for regulated applications in the cloud.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 3, "compare": 1, "warn": 11}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0], "listed": false, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Azure was always my go-to for regulated applications in the cloud.", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Azure"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 785204256, "item_id": 49075266, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075266", "by": "frognumber", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Azure was always my go-to for regulated applications in the cloud.", "excerpt": "At least for regulated applications I worked on, no one cared. The provider needs to comply with specific rules, have specific certifications, and sign specific agreements. You check the boxes, and you're good to go. Microsoft does that better than anyone. OpenAI and Anthropic don't do that at all. Google does that rarely and poorly. AWS is not bad, but not as good as Microsoft. Azure was always my go-to for regulate", "context": "works on regulated applications", "use_case": "regulated cloud applications", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 6/27"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 802158851, "item_id": 50134928, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50134928", "by": "rf15", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question", "excerpt": "In our european company (insurance/gov space) we use Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint as side products of Office, largely to get the official editing tools for the documents our clients provide. Depending on who you are in our company, you are using either Mac or Windows, although we are slowly shifting to OpenSUSE. Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question, and OneDrive is only used in the context of Teams/Share", "context": "European insurance/gov company", "use_case": "hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 793962993, "item_id": 49622687, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622687", "by": "anticodon", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "To me it looked absurd.", "excerpt": "I worked in a EU company that was developing a product competing with one of Microsoft offerings. All the code was hosted on GitHub, we used Azure for hosting and all the internal communications were in Microsoft Teams. To me it looked absurd. But I was almost the smallest cog in the corporate structure, so I never asked what were the reasons for all these decisions.", "context": "worked at an EU company building a product competing with Microsoft's", "use_case": "hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Navier\u2013Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"}, {"id": 791664784, "item_id": 49479049, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479049", "by": "disgruntledphd2", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "now I use Azure and I hate that so much more", "excerpt": "> That\u2019s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs. I used to hate the AWS docs, now I use Azure and I hate that so much more. At least AWS had loads of (bad) docs that you could string together to figure out how to do something. With Azure, there's just no docs (except for bad videos), and they literally tell you (at the top of every page) that you can do this with AI (I know I can do it with AI", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud platform documentation", "switched_from": "AWS", "story": "I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again"}, {"id": 789494113, "item_id": 49343382, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343382", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Azure has less than 99% uptime", "excerpt": "Seems reasonably clear to me? Potentially bringing in more customers who use OpenRouter for trying out all the models with rapid switching, enticing them to use Sol. And anyone being routed on price will immediately be switched to OpenAI's servers instead. It also seems to be providing a vastly better user experience - Azure has less than 99% uptime (Azure USA only has 87% uptime), latency of 20 - 30 seconds, and a m", "context": "", "use_case": "hosting GPT models", "switched_from": "", "story": "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"}]}], "who": [{"by": "harshalizee", "context": "works in an MS-stack company as a dotnet developer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50133349", "date": "2026-10-17"}, {"by": "frognumber", "context": "works on regulated applications", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075266", "date": "2026-07-27"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["cloud hosting", "hosting", "work hosting", "cloud platform documentation", "hosting gpt models", "regulated cloud applications"], "compared": [{"slug": "aws", "name": "AWS", "co": 9, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "github", "name": "GitHub", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "microsoft-teams", "name": "Microsoft Teams", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "net", "name": ".NET", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "hetzner-cloud", "name": "Hetzner Cloud", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "google-cloud", "name": "Google Cloud", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 758844464, "item_id": 47427779, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427779", "by": "anonymsft318", "date": "2026-03-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud", "excerpt": "As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this. We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it. We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now", "context": "Microsoft employee for over a decade", "use_case": "cloud", "switched_from": "", "story": "Federal Cyber Experts Called Microsoft's Cloud \"A Pile of Shit\", yet Approved It"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130228", "title": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305025", "title": "Northflank Breached", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49621697", "title": "The Navier\u2013Stokes Millennium Prize Problem", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478091", "title": "I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337602", "title": "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179823", "title": "Cloudexit \u2013 assess your cloud exit readiness", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"warn": 3}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"warn": 2}, "2026-05": {"compare": 1}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 2}, "2026-09": {"warn": 1}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804901473, "item_id": 50306342, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306342", "by": "sergiotapia", "date": "2026-10-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use Azure for work", "excerpt": "So sad... Unfortunately I'm not longer using PaaS tools. Instead I use Azure for work and vps now for all my personal stuff. With AI it's easier than ever to lock a server down tight and mitigate this kind of exposure. I'm actually pretty pissed at this now. I have a throwaway appstore app that uses northflank for the backend, now I have to go in and rotate revenuecat secrets, apple secrets, ai secrets. For an app wi", "context": "", "use_case": "work hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Northflank Breached"}, {"id": 802158851, "item_id": 50134928, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50134928", "by": "rf15", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question", "excerpt": "In our european company (insurance/gov space) we use Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint as side products of Office, largely to get the official editing tools for the documents our clients provide. Depending on who you are in our company, you are using either Mac or Windows, although we are slowly shifting to OpenSUSE. Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question, and OneDrive is only used in the context of Teams/Share", "context": "European insurance/gov company", "use_case": "hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 802133591, "item_id": 50133349, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50133349", "by": "harshalizee", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.", "excerpt": "You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc. I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case. We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, ha", "context": "works in an MS-stack company as a dotnet developer", "use_case": "hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 793962993, "item_id": 49622687, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622687", "by": "anticodon", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "To me it looked absurd.", "excerpt": "I worked in a EU company that was developing a product competing with one of Microsoft offerings. All the code was hosted on GitHub, we used Azure for hosting and all the internal communications were in Microsoft Teams. To me it looked absurd. But I was almost the smallest cog in the corporate structure, so I never asked what were the reasons for all these decisions.", "context": "worked at an EU company building a product competing with Microsoft's", "use_case": "hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Navier\u2013Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"}, {"id": 791664784, "item_id": 49479049, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479049", "by": "disgruntledphd2", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "now I use Azure and I hate that so much more", "excerpt": "> That\u2019s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs. I used to hate the AWS docs, now I use Azure and I hate that so much more. At least AWS had loads of (bad) docs that you could string together to figure out how to do something. With Azure, there's just no docs (except for bad videos), and they literally tell you (at the top of every page) that you can do this with AI (I know I can do it with AI", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud platform documentation", "switched_from": "AWS", "story": "I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again"}, {"id": 789494113, "item_id": 49343382, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343382", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Azure has less than 99% uptime", "excerpt": "Seems reasonably clear to me? Potentially bringing in more customers who use OpenRouter for trying out all the models with rapid switching, enticing them to use Sol. And anyone being routed on price will immediately be switched to OpenAI's servers instead. It also seems to be providing a vastly better user experience - Azure has less than 99% uptime (Azure USA only has 87% uptime), latency of 20 - 30 seconds, and a m", "context": "", "use_case": "hosting GPT models", "switched_from": "", "story": "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"}, {"id": 786877186, "item_id": 49179824, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179824", "by": "bencehezso", "date": "2026-08-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use both AWS and Azure myself", "excerpt": "I started working on this about 3 years ago as a proof-of-concept. It's still in early stages - I'm building it without external funding, on and off in my spare time. The idea is to somehow measure vendor lock-in with cloud service providers. I'm not against cloud \u2014 I use both AWS and Azure myself \u2014 but relying entirely on US hyperscalers feels like a risk worth being able to quantify. Happy for any feedback!", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudexit \u2013 assess your cloud exit readiness"}, {"id": 785204256, "item_id": 49075266, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075266", "by": "frognumber", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Azure was always my go-to for regulated applications in the cloud.", "excerpt": "At least for regulated applications I worked on, no one cared. The provider needs to comply with specific rules, have specific certifications, and sign specific agreements. You check the boxes, and you're good to go. Microsoft does that better than anyone. OpenAI and Anthropic don't do that at all. Google does that rarely and poorly. AWS is not bad, but not as good as Microsoft. Azure was always my go-to for regulate", "context": "works on regulated applications", "use_case": "regulated cloud applications", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 6/27"}, {"id": 784449867, "item_id": 49028116, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028116", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-07-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Azure is a complete dumpster fire of a cloud, on average", "excerpt": "Microsoft is a big place. I recommend focusing on the parts they do well rather than getting tribal. All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026: Windows Server SQL Server .NET/C#/F#/Nuget Visual Studio [code] SSMS AAD/EntraID Defender DirectX Excel I agree that Teams still kind of sucks and that Azure is a complete dumpster fire of a cloud, on average. But that doesn't mean we should throw the p", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask: Why does everything Microsoft create lately feel fragile and half-baked?"}, {"id": 772729905, "item_id": 48295619, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295619", "by": "desireco42", "date": "2026-05-27", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Azure (MS) even though it looks crazy complex, once you get used to it, you can find things.", "excerpt": "I love direction and features Claudflare is taking, they are really impressive. And since I use their service on several projects, I can say I am overall very happy with service. Only thing, they are going strongly in AWS territory and not in any good way. Finding what I need and what I use has become harder as times go by. By contast, Azure (MS) even though it looks crazy complex, once you get used to it, you can fi", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud platform", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Flagship"}, {"id": 762482224, "item_id": 47655139, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655139", "by": "supliminal", "date": "2026-04-05", "stance": "warn", "quote": "We got burned by Azure as I\u2019m sure many other enterprises have", "excerpt": "There\u2019s a poster on here who keeps posting and re-posting about their dinner with a Microsoft executive and how they were told Microsoft is all-in on enterprise. Waiting for that copy-paste to make its way over here. Microsoft keeps footgunning things so hard I think even enterprise might be reluctant to go with them moving forward [0]. I don\u2019t have Netcraft numbers in front of me but I doubt things have notably impr", "context": "enterprise", "use_case": "cloud hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold"}, {"id": 761960976, "item_id": 47622561, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622561", "by": "kshri24", "date": "2026-04-02", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Decided never to use Azure in any product after that horrible experience.", "excerpt": "The only time I used Azure was for setting up Microsoft as a provider for authentication. Put me through a never-ending loop of asking for a Government of India issued document that was already submitted. Human support was non-existent. Decided never to use Azure in any product after that horrible experience. If you cannot even get auth right I shudder to think what the rest of the product will be like to deal with s", "context": "", "use_case": "authentication provider", "switched_from": "", "story": "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure \u2013 by a former Azure Core engineer"}, {"id": 739664048, "item_id": 46229003, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46229003", "by": "sofixa", "date": "2025-12-11", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Azure is not a serious cloud provider and anyone picking it is at best not paying attention, at worst negligent at their job", "excerpt": "> I love how people think Azure is somehow worse than AWS when the latter isn't even a single portal, it's many, each of which shows just one product in one region Yep, which means that even an entire AWS region being down has no impact on anything else. Unlike Azure where a single DC in Texas being out meant no auth for anyone, anywhere in the world. And aren't Azure and O365 infamous for having a convoluted web or ", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration"}, {"id": 737502371, "item_id": 46093898, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46093898", "by": "aristofun", "date": "2025-11-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "overpriced or overengineered. Often both (looking at you, aws, gcs, azure).", "excerpt": "Hetzner Because others are overpriced or overengineered. Often both (looking at you, aws, gcs, azure).", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Which cloud provider do you like best and why?"}, {"id": 735531281, "item_id": 45970705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970705", "by": "yrro", "date": "2025-11-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "At least they're not as bad as Azure... :)", "excerpt": "I love Hetzner. That said their IPv6 support is poor. A server gets a /64 only, if you want a /56 (allowing 256 container networks) then you have to pay \u20ac15. As for virtual networks: they only support IPv4! At least they're not as bad as Azure... :)", "context": "", "use_case": "IPv6 support", "switched_from": "", "story": "A day at Hetzner Online in the Falkenstein data center"}, {"id": 733153780, "item_id": 45822111, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822111", "by": "jwr", "date": "2025-11-05", "stance": "warn", "quote": "setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible", "excerpt": "This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as \"cloud servers\" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun", "context": "runs own servers for many years, runs a business", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars"}]}