Microsoft decided to give Azure a whirl from a customer's perspective, and didn't like what it saw.
We all know Microsoft’s history of “eating its own dog food,” a term used to describe the company deploying its own software internally for daily use well before the rest of the market gets it, so that they have to live with it and act as their own debuggers.
The most recent example was the news that Microsoft was running its Bing search service on top of Windows Server 2012, even though Server 2012 was still in the Release Candidate stage. That showed quite a bit of confidence in the code, because when outages of services like Bing get reported, people often clobber Microsoft for putting its search engine on anything less than final code.
RELATED: Microsoft eats its own dog food, runs Bing on Server 2012
But occasionally they misfire. As The Register reports from a Microsoft cloud event in London last week, Microsoft got a bit of a surprise when it tried out Azure from the customer perspective.
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .Net developer group, spoke at the event about an app building exercise he and some other executives conducted about a year ago, just a few weeks after being given charge of the organization. Microsoft took all 65 top leaders in the group to a hotel and spent all day building on Azure, Guthrie said, the Register reports. (In my not-quite-MBA opinion, the fact that you have 65 top leaders is the first sign you have a problem.)
People split into teams, bought a credit card for each team, and were told to sign up for a new account on Azure and build an app.
“It was an eye-opening experience. About a third of the people weren’t able to actually sign up successfully, which was kind of embarrassing. We had billing problems, the SMS channel didn’t always work, the documentation was hard, it was hard to install stuff,” Guthrie said, according to The Register.
This forced the team back to the drawing board to make some changes in Azure, such as changing from a stateless plain virtual machine to something more like Amazon’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
The new Azure supports durable VMs alongside the stateless model. It has new admin tools, command line tools, an HTML interface, virtual networking to connect Azure to on-premise networks and other enhancements.
The Register goes into the nitty gritty of the upgrade. It’s good that Microsoft fixed it, but they left it hanging way too long, and didn’t communicate that the changes were coming. GigaOm beat them up last year for the quality of the service as compared to other vendors. Maybe that’s why Azure has struggled.
But at least they did address the problem, so let’s see if those fixes change anything. If you previously tried Azure and found it unworkable, take a second look and let us know what it’s like now.
