Genuine question: is your comment satire? If not, that's hilarious, I find myself on the completely opposite end of the spectrum. To each their own!

Seriously, I absolutely can't stand the azure ui. I don't think the AWS console is great, but it is definitely better than the Azure one to me.

At least the Azure one lets you see all your resources, so you can verify you don't have something you're paying for unexpectedly.

That would be good if I could acquire resources in the first place. Even Oracle Cloud makes more sense (if you've ever heard of it)

Oracle Cloud was (and possibly still is) deleting random accounts (it was all over their subreddit at the time).

I wouldn't have believed it, but while testing out a server for a business, they deleted my account, and didn't reply when I emailed support about it.

Oracle did not even accept my credit card (the same I pay AWS and Scaleways with). So I missed that part of the experience.

That would have been nice, AWS kept sending me bills for $0.00, and after multiple tickets over a couple years, I finally deleted my entire account due to how pathetic their support was (they never figured out which service was active, and I couldn't find a way to figure it out using their UI).

AWS is actually great once you spend few dozen hours in the service. If you are using the service for the first time GCP feels a lot smoother but then you begin to see corner cases and everything and GCP just breaks in those. Azure is bad the first time and gets worse over time.

My experience too, I could never find anything even if I know it's there, and I was told by my boss to use it. I stand there for a half hour, credit card in hand, then go to AWS where the equivalent can be located by mortals. It's like they don't want anyone's business.

This comment reads like rage bait (I am not saying your opinion is "invalid" or you're lying). I've never meant anyone who likes the Azure portal lol, even people who live inside of the Azure ecosystem hour by hour.

The Azure portal has some nice ideas - in theory, being able to divide stuff into "resource groups" works a lot better than the AWS approach of "divide resources that should be isolated from each other into separate sub-accounts".

In practise, even the good ideas are implemented poorly.

I know we're talking about AWS and Azure here, but had to add that fwiw, the M365 admin interface(s) are so bad it practically feels like a prank. In other words, it's as though someone is purposely making them as chaotic as possible to what end I can't even guess.

Can anybody name a Microsoft interface with good UX? (Yes, the grandparent liked the Azure homepage, but that was also disputed by several others)

Does Microsoft Mouse count?

Not familiar with the product. The MS name alone would make me biased. Is it really good or even better in some way? Or did you just slightly ironically mean they did not manage to make it worse than competing products?

It was really good. I think Microsoft had numerous great mice, atypically for Microsoft: https://vswitchzero.com/2018/03/09/unboxing-a-22-year-old-mi...

A great thing about mice is that they are fungible and don't change without the user's consent, unlike software, so you can keep buying and using the same mouse forever.

The average mouse of the time was blocky and uncomfortable.

I like Microsoft Loop's UX

Add Intune to the list of bad MS dashboards…

I think it was the InTune interface I was in the other day that had the same link underneath 4 different sections of the dashboard, which I noticed when I had all 4 of them expanded at once? That got a good laugh out of me.

"Here...don't miss this settings page! Seriously! Look!"

I’m having a really hard time believing you are serious. The one time I tried out azure for a few days the portal was absolutely painful. Every click would take 5-10 seconds for a response. Sometimes basic settings change actions would take 2+ minutes of watching an Ajax spinner. How can anyone enjoy working like that???

Sure, the UI is sluggish, but at least you don't have to move through three different "services" to find the routing table that your VM is using.

AWS UIs are generally snappy and smartly designed individually, but they are horrendously organized at the general level. AWS is built as if you are exploring a relational DB containing your resources, instead of a deployment tree.

Your VM doesn't have a NIC in AWS, it has a foreign key to your entire VPC's NIC table, which lives in the VPC service, not the EC2 service. And then your NIC doesn't have an associated subnet, it has a foreign key to the subnet. And then when you get to the subnet table, you look up the routing tables table, and finally in the routing tables table, you'll find the settings for the routing table. This all works through following links, but the constant context switching and tabs upon tabs that AWS UI requires are extremely unpleasant for me at least to use. I'll take Azure's sluggish UI that organizes all of this in one-two pages instead of four any day.

AWS pages are built by different teams, and it shows. We're all supposed to use IAC though, right?

In all seriousness, even in the face of IAC, the one thing Azure can do that AWS can't [at the time this happened to me], is have a global view of everything that's running right now and costing me money. It was years back, it was a $5 bill, but the principle of it had me livid. I did my best to tear down everything after my evaluation, yet something was squirreled away costing money.

So yeah, absolutely, sluggish UI all the way (I also find the Amazon storefront profoundly ugly and disorganized).

For a view of everything that’s costing you money, you can just look at your detailed billing data. That’s been available for at least 13 years.

You using terraform state to look at route table entries?

ENIs are under ec2 in the console, not VPC, on API/CLI they're all under ec2 together with all networking.

If you click an instance and go to its networking tab you get a list of ENI IDs that are clickable links to the resource, same for vpc and subnet. If you click subnet you can just click the route table tab, so if you're on an instances networking tab the route table is 2 clicks away.

But rather than doing this you could use reachability analyzer that allows you to check routing tables and security groups for a source and destination IP/resource and port on same or different VPCs connected with peering or TGW and it will tell you if you're missing routes or SG rules in either direction. I created a slackbot that allowed our devs to input src/dst IP/domain and port an that used this API to do the check for them, saved a lot of time troubleshooting.

I had an absolutely horrendous time working in Azure a few years ago (as a network engineer), we did have quite a complex setup with custom route tables and Azure Firewall though and VPN connectivity between Azure and AWS, but stuff like their VPN gateway taking 40+ minutes to change instance size on, wtf? I've filed 2-3 bugs to AWS in the almost 10 years I've worked with it, all for newly created APIs/services, they were all fixed within a week or two. I filed 8+ bugs to Azure in the first month using them, none of them were fixed as they had workarounds instead. And their documentation is absolutely useless, I could never trust that I understood what I read correctly, I always had to verify that it worked that way by testing it.

I think OP is trying to differentiate between Azure APIs, which are unbelievably slow and horrible, and the UI design itself - the layout, the font, how one screen will flow to another screen, what links to what, how it would be laid out in a tool like Figma.

Azure's APIs are atrociously slow. Azure's UI design is pretty nice. There's not much the UI designers can do about their API colleagues.

God, you never tried Oracle Cloud. It's not an UI, it's an escape room. I would pay to switch to Azure.

And most links can't be opened in a new window, you ant right click on them and middle click don't work!!

My god, I've been sending feedback about this shit for 3 or so years. You can't open any-fucking-thing in a new tab. The funny thing is, it used to work and they fucked that up.

I don't understand how dumb you must be to design a web site that way. It's like a brewery that sells their beer in plastic shopping bags and thinks that's good.

> I’m having a really hard time believing you are serious

and

> The one time I tried out azure for a few days the portal was absolutely painful.

conflict with each other. Here's what you sound like:

"I don't believe you because I have very little experience in something and it doesn't comport with that."

must be a paid troll, no self respecting intelligent engineer would find the Azure portal good. it’s horrible ux, really convoluted and complicated, very unintuitive, horizontal scroll is a joke when the web scrolls vertically, tiny fonts making everything hard to read and screens overloaded with so much shit and yet they managed to not put on the screen the main thing that developers would care about. it’s a complete joke

Major pain point in Azure -- Azure resources in the portal do NOT show:

* WHEN the resource was created * nor WHO created the resource

IMHO this is unforgiveable, but on second though, it is probably intentional rather than any sort of oversight.

it is hit and miss nowadays. definitely better than it was, though. somethign that should be common engineering criteria, i agree.

Yeah I don’t get this thread at all. I’ve used both fairly extensively and while Azure’s dashboard is still a pain in the ass, it’s better than AWS by a mile usability wise. Not to mention, Microsoft clearly puts time and money into their documentation, while AWS docs have always sucked.

>> Microsoft clearly puts time and money into their documentation

I am quite surprised to hear someone say this. MS documentation has a horrible reputation that is well-deserved and and in my direct experience the docs for Azure are much like any other MS docs (incomplete, out-of-date and poorly organized -- usually all three at once)

Not my experience at all, of all the major tech companies MS consistently has the best docs, especially dev docs for c#, .net, angular/ts, etc

this has been consistent with my experience. the top down hierarchical approach in azure is unmatched in aws to this day. an aws accountnis a loose connection of resources across regions. if youre in an unfamilar account, youll spend some time really figuring out where everything lives first.