By Barry Buck – A former Microsoft Azure engineer recently published a six-part essay series lamenting how Azure never lived up to its potential. Rushed to market in 2008, perpetually on life support, plagued by a talent exodus and architectural drift – his words, not mine.
Federal cybersecurity evaluators reportedly called Microsoft 365 Government Cloud “garbage”, although they apparently used a more colourful term.
Even OpenAI’s $11,9-billion compute deal with CoreWeave was framed as a vote of no confidence in Azure’s infrastructure.
I read this with genuine sympathy. And then I laughed. Because the man is making the classic engineer’s mistake: assuming that technical excellence is what wins markets.
I speak from experience. In the early Docker days, I sank three months into containerisation as an eager early adopter, desperate to escape Chef and Vagrant box purgatory. The mental model was elegant. The result was three months of nothing that worked and an uncomfortable conversation with the bosses about lost time.
I didn’t touch containers again until Claude Code did the smart stuff for me. So believe me: I understand the frustration of infrastructure that doesn’t deliver on its pitch.
But here’s where I part company with the Azure lament. AWS, Cloudflare, Azure – they’re all too much work for the price you pay. Ask anyone who’s tried to get a WebSocket app to behave behind AWS Route 53. Ask anyone who’s debugged a Kubernetes cluster at 2am and questioned every career choice that led them there.
The dirty secret of cloud infrastructure is that none of it is elegant. It’s all duct tape and prayer at scale. The only question is who sells the duct tape best.
And that’s where Microsoft is untouchable. The talent didn’t exodus because Microsoft neglected it. Microsoft put the talent exactly where it mattered to them: in marketing and sales.
Azure is easily the most widely-adopted cloud platform in enterprise. Not because engineers at hackathons reach for it first, but because Microsoft has the most savant-level sales machine in the history of software.
They don’t sell infrastructure. They sell inevitability. It’s less a cloud platform and more a Boiler Room operation – and I mean that as a compliment.
Whether Azure deserves to be number one on technical merit is completely irrelevant. It is number one. The talent was never in the server room. It was in the pitch meeting. And the customer signed.
Barry Buck is the chief technology officer of Saucecode and Roboteur architect
www.saucecode.tech